Starting on October 19 mid-afternoon, streetcar service on King Street east of Church was blocked by a sinkhole caused by a broken watermain. Streetcar service was diverted from King to Queen, and the 501B Queen bus was shifted south to King.
The sinkhole repairs completed a few days ago, and effective October 25, the diversions are only in effect until 7pm while water main repairs continue. While this arrangement does improve evening service, it perpetuates the operational problems caused by the total lack of transit signal priority and traffic management at key intersections.
Updated Oct 27 at 11:15pm: The modified routes will not be in operation over the weekend, but will resume on Monday morning, October 30 according to the @ttchelps X account.
A separate problem occurs at the transition back to “normal” service in the evening. The buses revert to normal or run back to the garage, but it takes some time for the congestion to abate and normal streetcar service to resume. This puts a large gap between the two services.
Diversion Announcement This diversion announcement linked below has disappeared from the TTC site. As the TTC updates their info, I will amend this article.
In summary, here are the normal (now evening only) and modified (daytime) routes through the affected area:
- 501B bus: Bathurst to Broadview/Gerrard
- Normal: Via Queen, Bay, King/Richmond (EB/WB), Church to Queen
- Diverted: Via Queen, Bay, King to Queen at the Don River (Both ways)
- 501D streetcar: Neville to York & Wellington
- Normal: Via Queen, Church, Wellington/York/King loop
- Diverted: No route change, but many Queen cars never get to York street and are short turned further east including to Distillery Loop during the most congested periods.
- 503 streetcar: Spadina to Bingham
- Normal: Via King, Queen, Kingston Rd
- Diverted: Via King, Church, Queen, Kingston Rd
- 504 streetcar:
- Normal: From King West to Distillery Loop via King, Sumach and Cherry
- Diverted:
- Streetcars short turn at Church via Church, Richmond, Victoria, Adelaide, Church
- Bus shuttle to Distillery looping downtown via Bay, Adelaide, Yonge to King
This arrangement has extremely severe effects on transit and traffic in general notably at locations where streetcars must turn. There is no Transit Signal Priority (TSP), no Traffic Warden (aka “Agent”), and no attempt to manage the conflicts between turning streetcars, other traffic and high pedestrian volumes at affected intersections. Concurrent work on Adelaide Street diverts traffic to Yonge Street and adds to congestion on streets used for the bus diversion.
Travel times of half an hour and more between Spadina and Church are common.
The situation makes total mockery of the City’s recent Congestion Management Plan by showing how they are utterly unprepared and unwilling to respond to an event that requires major reallocation of road space and time among various types of users, and active management in place of passive acceptance of chaos.
A fundamental part of traffic planning is to determine intersection capacity. This is not rocket science. If there are “N” green phases per hour, and in practice it is only possible for at best one streetcar to turn per cycle, this sets an upper bound on capacity. In fact, one per cycle is amazingly optimistic and could only likely be achieved with both TSP signalling (a “white bar” transit only phase) and a Traffic Agent to ensure the TSP was respected.
Service frequencies on the streetcar routes, and the equivalent cars/hour are:
- 501D Queen/Neville service: 10′ / 6 cars/hour
- 503 Kingston Rd Bingham service: 10′ / 6 cars/hour
- 504 King Church service: 4′ / 15 cars/hour
This translates to the following demands by turning cars/hour:
- King/Church
- Eastbound left: 35
- Southbound right: 25
- Queen/Church:
- Westbound left: 20
- Northbound right: 20
- Church/Richmond:
- Northbound left: 15
A typical traffic signal cycle time is 80 seconds, or 45 times per hour. It is self-evident that attempting to turn 35 cars/hour would be a challenge. This is compounded by the fact that many cars will stop to serve passengers before turning and will almost certainly lose one cycle for that purpose.
Another source of delay is that the electric switches for turns do not always work requiring operators to manually set their route where some cars turn and others go straight through. This can also affect TSP signals where they do exist because the switch electronics “tell” the signals that a transit phase is needed.
This is a crisis-level example of why TSP should be installed everywhere that streetcars might need it, not just for standard scheduled movements (e.g. eastbound at Queen and Broadview, turns at King & Sumach). It is precisely during events where operations go off kilter that the best possible priority is needed. If the facilities were sitting there, they would benefit occasional diversions and short turns, as well as major service interruptions like this one.
The City’s plan is utterly silent on this need, and that must change. For its part, the TTC must insist on improved TSP for streetcar and bus routes. This is not a panacea, but an important contribution to transit reliability and credibility.
Steve Munro 
Re: 501 Queen to Neville Park
Around 1:00 pm, October 27th.
Just walked about 1 1/2 hours home from Yonge and Queen as there were no 501 Queen streetcars running eastbound from Church St. The first 501 streetcar finally arrived as I got to Woodbine Ave., but I continued to walk the extra 15 minutes home rather than paying a fare.
About an hour earlier, I saw a massive bottleneck of streetcars on Church St and King and no traffic wardens, TTC staff or police providing traffic management.
Steve: There were no 501 Queen cars eastbound from King & York between 12:33 and 1:51. Thanks to congestion downtown, the 501s turned back from the Church/Victoria loop, or went to Distillery Loop via King. Di the TTC tell anybody this was happening? Of course not.
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I fear for crosstown (when it finally gets going). I presume it will have TSP on all crossings, but seeing the number of holdups at lights along St. Clair, is it going to serve a reliable 5 minute service? Kitchener does it. The traffic lights (or left turning cars) don’t hold up their vehicles. They even have crossing gates at critical crossings.
Steve: There is an as-yet unanswered question about just how much “transit priority” Line 5 is going to get.
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On Wednesday when they decided to stop sending 501 cars downtown for the entire afternoon they didn’t announce it anywhere.
Had they decided to not make the 501 useless by short turning all service at Distillery, using Victoria to loop would have lessened some of the problems.
No more than two routes would have shared any single segment of track on Church, the non-functioning switch at King would not have been a problem, there’d be fewer massive cars occupying space on Church, and the big one people would have been able to use the 501 to head downtown or out.
But what do I know?
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Do also note that of the 80 seconds per signal cycle, 60 seconds are dedicated to the east-west streets with Church getting the remaining 20 seconds. That is not enough time to clear the north-south traffic queues on Church even when they aren’t trying to make turns on to Richmond and Adelaide.
Steve: Yes, that’s another important factor. My purpose in showing the counts was to illustrate how all of the locations where streetcars would stop and turn would be totally overloaded, but especially at King. This should have been foreseen, or at the very least quickly recognized, but nothing was done. When I hear the City talk about how they react to changing conditions, I don’t believe a word, and the King Street mess has strongly reinforced my opinion.
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I am fortunate to have flexibility now in this work from home era to leave the office early, around 2:00 p.m., and start homing from King and University going east. The congestion is bad even then, but by 4:00 it is so bad that walking to Church Street you will pass multiple vehicles on the way. The intersections are regularly blocked at both Bay and Yonge and delivery and utility vehicles are parked everywhere up and down that stretch causing constant delays from merging and changing lanes.
Is there also some issue or rule in place with two streetcars turning simultaneously? I have noticed if there is a streetcar turning off Church to go west on King, the streetcar going east on King will not use that opportunity to turn north on Church, but it will wait until the other one is completely “out of the way”. But I though they wouldn’t get in each other’s way. Is it some kind of safety issue that you might hit a pedestrian hidden from view?
Steve: No, this is another of the TTC’s “safety” protocols where streetcars are not supposed to pass on special work arising from a derailment some years ago. Rather than address the issue with track quality (and King/Church has its problems), they have a blanket order of no passing. So many aspects of the streetcar system have papered over problems, and it makes me worry for what we cannot see in the subway.
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This line is going to be completely grade-separated all the way from the Mississauga border to near the Scarborough border and then run in the middle of the road for Scarborough. This line is already at least 4 years behind and at least 6 billion dollars above budget and burying it would have only costed a few hundred million dollars more. What we have in Scarborough is never used on-surface stations being ripped apart and rebuilt, building underground would have been cheaper and faster. Had the entire Eglinton LRT line been grade-separated, it would have provided great relief to the Yonge-Bloor station as a large portion of the Scarborough crowd could have transferred at the Yonge-Eglinton station instead but given that it will be as slow as a streetcar in Scarborough, most people would continue to take the Bloor-Danforth subway and continue to transfer at the Yonge-Bloor station as before. I won’t be taking the Eglinton LRT line unless and until the Scarborough portion is grade-separated and because it’s not, I personally don’t care whether this line opens 4 years late or 5 years late or if it does not open at all; I won’t be taking it unless and until the Scarborough portion is grade-separated.
Steve: It’s not going underground. The line is already built.
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You asked the rhetorical question – did the TTC tell anybody? Of course not.
They can’t even get PLANNED service advisories out correctly – Saturday Line 1 St George to St Andrew was tweeted out correctly and not 2 hours later they put it out again as SPADINA to St. George. I jumped on both TTC accounts – @ttchelps and @ttcnotices asking which is correct (already knowing the answer) Can you believe it took over half an hour for them to go oops – it was an error?
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