Not long ago, traffic and transit service on King Street were tied in knots thanks to a sinkhole that undermined the track east of Jarvis Street.
Starting Monday, December 4 and running to Sunday, December 10, the diversions are back, albeit in a slightly modified form for water main repairs.
Updated December 4, 2023 at 12:05 pm: The TTC (@TTCNotices on X) advises that there is a hydro cable installation today that runs until 5pm. After that time, the 501D Queen East service will run to Distillery Loop.
Updated December 4, 2023 at 11:20 am: The notice in the “Updates” section of the TTC’s site has been changed to show a December 10 end date. Meanwhile, as of this morning, the 501D Queen East cars are still running to York & Wellington, not to the Distillery Loop as shown on the map below. I suspect this will change as the day wears on and congestion builds up on King Street.
Updated December 3, 2023 at 8:15 pm: In the best TTC tradition there are conflicting notices on their website. Under “Service Changes” this diversion is to end on December 10, but under “Updates” it will only run to December 7. I will attempt to find out which of these is correct, and post an update here.
Apologies for the soft images. This is the condition in which they were published by the TTC on its Service Changes page. Also note that as of December 3, this information is not included on the omnibus Streetcar Service Changes page. Click on any image to open the gallery.
The changes are:
- 501D Queen East streetcars will only come as far west as Distillery Loop via King.
- 501B Queen buses which normally run east from downtown via King, Church and Queen to Broadview will instead remain on King Street
- 503 Kingston Road streetcars will divert from King via Queen between the Don River and Church Street.
- 504 King streetcars will loop via Church, Richmond, Victoria and Adelaide.
- 504 King buses will operate from York Street to the Distillery district looping downtown via Church, Wellington and York, and at the Distillery District via Mill, Parliament and Front.
- 508 Lake Shore streetcars which normally operate on King will divert via Church and Queen to their normal loop at Parliament, Dundas and Broadview.
In other news, Broadview Avenue has opened between Danforth and Pretoria following completion of track and paving work, but transit service has not yet returned to Broadview Station as work on Erindale and in the station is not yet completed. This is expected to change soon, but the TTC has not announced any details.
The intersection of Bay and Adelaide will completely close to traffic between 7am Monday, December 11 and 7am Saturday, December 16 for track installation. Service diversions have not been announced.
There is no word on whether any special effort will be made to unsnarl the intersection of King and Church with the many additional turning transit vehicles. King is already a total mess thanks to the lack of traffic management at University, among other intersections, and the added turns at Church will only compound this. In the following week, with Adelaide completely closed at Bay, traffic on King is likely to be even worse.
Steve Munro 
I would note the loop tracks on Springhurst are finished though haven’t seen any streetcars down in the yard yet. Also: the Dufferin Street South Bridge is open again .
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The wardens would help, but ultimately the issue is total vehicular demand. If the City can’t or won’t take measures to limit private non-commercial and non-resident vehicles from entering downtown, have rideshare apps geofence inside University/Wellington/Sherbourne/Dundas, and won’t urge employers (including City and ABCs) to nudge those who drive downtown either to transit or WFH until at least Adelaide is fully open, we are resigning ourselves to weeks of gridlock and anger towards transit operators.
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When they installed the new tracks at Springhurst and Dufferin, they didn’t put in any track connections for a future trackwork between the loop and the Exhibition Loop. Seems like they are assuming it will not happen.
Of course, IF they do, they’ll have to dig up the Dufferin Loop again. Maybe in 25 years?
Steve: Thanks to Metrolinx Ontario Line work interfering with the connection, work on that is on hold.
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These streetcar diversions really are death by a thousand cuts for people’s perception of the transit network.
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I assume this is an emergency repair because the timing is poor. The Distillery Christmas Market is in full swing and many people get to/ from it by the 504 streetcar.
Steve: Yes, I would think this is an urgent repair. At least there will be a King bus going to the Distillery from King and Yonge, assuming traffic is actually moving.
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Where is the mayor in all this? Why is Chow not championing making King Street work efficiently for transit? Or is there work behind the scenes and a big announcement brewing?
Steve: This is something that requires a few serious interventions. The first is getting the traffic wardens/cops to actually do their jobs and manage traffic. Second is the very necessary recognition that downtown is “full” and some of the traffic can just get stuffed. To that end, real priority is needed including from traffic signals and particularly anywhere that transit diversions involve turns that would not normally occur. But Transportation Services seems more worried about general traffic and assumes that transit will get a spillover benefit. However, when you have a situation such as we see regularly where north-south streets like University fill up the capacity of King Street with turning traffic, the model is broken.
Things should improve somewhat when the work on Adelaide finally completes, but we have to remember that this should have been done before Queen Street closed. Metrolinx dragged their feet on the timing thinking that buses would do just fine, and they also cocked up the tender for the road and utility relocation work to the point that the City took it over.
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The optimist in me thinks that the Bay and Adelaide closure means this week’s diversions HAVE to be finished on schedule, or else the transit situation in the area will go from hard to untenable during the overlap. But the realist in me knows that service can always get worse. Based on whatever info you have, will the Dec 4 – 10 diversion end on time? Ish?
Steve: I don’t know. I only saw the notice today, and just now looked on another page the TTC uses for notices, and found one saying that the diversion runs only to December 7. I will attempt to find out which is correct and update the article accordingly.
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J. MacMillan writes,
First order of business for Olivia should be telling the Chief of Police to track down that officious officer who ticketed the streetcar driver some while ago for “blocking” the King St. intersection (being inside the old “hatchmarked” areas from how many mayors ago?!?) You know, ‘cuz the operator can just trundle off the tracks into the adjoining lane to avoid the cars next to him/her illegally proceeding straight through and cutting back over to continuously block the streetcar’s passage.
THEN, tell the Chief to instruct said Bigshot to have *200* tickets issued to *non-transit* vehicles by the end of their shift. Just so there’s a clear understanding drilled in about how a transit corridor is supposed to work….
Then, add another 4 or 5 cops for the next 4 or 5 days (dozen-donut bonus for highest number netted?) – until drivers figure out they can’t cheat and traffic cops figure out that transit vehicles have *more* right to the road than (mostly) single-occupant vehicles.
Oh, and when drivers whine to their Councillors, they can be told to get stuffed!
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What a mess, someone else said this is like death by a thousand cuts. And I fear that this combined with the homeless problem on vehicles plus the overcrowding plus the abysmal on time performance, will just keep driving more people to alternatives. Look at the huge increase in ebikes, escooters and the sheer number of stupid rideshare drivers who don’t have a clue about how to drive, don’t follow the rules of the road, and are still carrying a foreign driver’s licence. Could we end up in a situation in a few years where we have all this new transit infrastructure and no passengers to ride it? At what point do people start moving out of the downtown because it becomes impossible to get around? We already built a bus terminal that’s useless at rush hour, simply because of gridlock.
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