The City of Toronto will completely close the intersection of Bay & Adelaide from 7am Monday, December 11 to 7am on Saturday December 16 to all vehicles. Bay and Adelaide Streets will be open only for local traffic in the immediate area of the closure. This continues the work of (re-)installing streetcar track on Adelaide for the eastbound 501 Queen streetcar diversion around Ontario Line contruction.
Updated: Work at Bay and Adelaide actually completed on the afternoon of Friday, December 15 and the intersection reopened earlier than planned.
This will require diversion of the 19 Bay and 501B Queen bus routes.
The 19 Bay bus will divert via Dundas, Church and King both ways.
The 501B Queen bus which normally operates on Bay from King to Queen will use York Street for north/westbound trips and University Avenue for south/eastbound trips. Buses will operate both ways via King Street, and there will be no westbound service on Richmond Street
[Apologies for the soft images. They are from a City construction notice, and I used what is available.]
End of the King East Diversions
As the map for 501B Queen above shows, service is supposed to resume the normal routes east of Church with the completion of water main and Hydro work on the coming weekend which has a December 10 end date. This means that:
- 501B Queen buses return to Queen Street east of Church
- 503 Kingston Road streetcars return to King Street between the Don River and Church
- 504 King streetcar service to Distillery Loop resumes
Updated December 11, 2023 at 4:15 pm
Another diversion has been added to the list. The 505 Dundas cars will divert both ways via Parliament and Gerrard. A 505 shuttle bus will run from Jarvis to Jones.
This diversion is required for track repairs, and will last until Thursday, December 21, 2023.
Updated: This diversion ended on Tuesday, December 19.
Steve Munro 
Any reason why the 19 Bay bus goes all the way to Church for its diversion, why not to Yonge?
Steve: As I observed in response to this question on “X”, turns are banned at Yonge/Dundas and would be very difficult through the clouds of pedestrians.
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The TTC, chronically in need of funding, should introduce and sell a game they could call ‘Diversion’…where, with the roll of the dice, different illogical and baffling routings can be plotted on an interactive board displaying possible (and impossible) routes to ‘get you there’, within a time limit of five hours.
The game will add an especially challenging aspect for the last three of those five hours having to avoid ‘tap-ons’ which would mean added fares. This means remaining behind faregates and doing ever more complicated ‘special trips’ for the encumbered plebe to win.
Oh what great fun for the Season!
Of course, no-one will buy it, save for the TTC themselves.
Steve: You have left out the part where the TTC licences production to an unknown two-bit company that cannot market it, and this then “proves” that it was a bad idea in the first place.
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The Star published an article (Dec 8, 2023) where four people travelled the King corridor by bicycle, foot, car and streetcar. The streetcar took twice as long as walking. Congestion appeared to be the cause despite the area having restricted car movement. How could this be allowed to happen?
Then there is the Adelaide detour being ready almost a year after Queen street has been shut down to streetcar traffic. Then Queen should not have been shut down until the detour was available!
Steve: You may have seen Brian Doucet’s thread on X where he tried to replicate the Star’s journey, but the City (finally!) had Traffic Wardens out actually managing flow, and the streetcar took 11 minutes.
Yes, actual enforcement works, and it should have been there months ago. And, yes, the Adelaide Street work should have been finished before Queen Street closed. Blame that on Metrolinx foot-dragging.
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Sorry I’m a day late with this, meant to post yesterday. Further to Steve’s reply to Gordon above:
I caught the snippet by Google’s algorithm feeding me stories. I’ve got to say that CITY now has the edge over CP24 on this kind of reporting.
Not only does Chow have this right (the proof will be in time), but all of us are left to wonder: ‘Why couldn’t this have happened before?’
Better late than never one supposes.
Steve: A lot of the focus recently at City Hall has been on housing, but transit is getting some attention too. The real question will be whether Mayor Chow will be able to wrest the City’s bureaucracy away from their Ford-Tory era of favouring cars over transit in almost all cases.
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Steve writes:
Absolutely agreed. Even though CITYNews and some others like TorStar are avidly providing a platform for Chow (and rightly so)…oh Lord…the skepticism runs deep on this.
As Chow rightly points out, and this has been known and discussed since the King inception, the province holds the cards on a number of aspects, not least modifying the HTA to allow more comprehensive transit signalling that’s allowed in K-W by virtue of federal legislation (Railway Safety Act et al).
And *Cameras* to fine the owners of vehicles, if not drivers.
Chow might be ramping up to the challenge…she certainly [is] the spark, if not the fire yet.
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A lot of us will be happy to. We’ll see it when we believe it. I was at John Street this Friday at 6:52pm, having just missed a train of three westbound streetcars. The next westbound streetcar, crawling between Yonge and University, took more than 10 minutes to arrive. I don’t know how much more, because I ended up taking the Queen car.
King car used to be my default because it’s a convenient transfer from the subway and because it did run fairly reliably. Not in the past couple of weeks…
Steve: One big problem is that thanks to years of laissez-faire attitudes to the King Street “priority” scheme, motorists will revert to their standard behaviour the moment Traffic Wardens vanish. With Bay & Adelaide completely closed for the coming week, enforcement will be even more important. Every day. Not just occasionally for the cameras.
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Steve,
Have you gone for a ride on the 65 Parliament bus lately? I have, in the early afternoon and also at rush hour, and each time the bus is packed. We are in there like sardines. I go from Castle Frank subway station to Dundas St East and vice versa. I notice 65s going in the opposite direction that are equally full up.
Maybe the 65 is carrying people, like me, who would otherwise take the 505 streetcar to/from Broadview to get on/off the subway? Wondering why there aren’t (a) more buses on the route or (b) why they arrive nearly 15 minutes apart. Do you have any thoughts about this? Anything to be done?
I read your newsletters regularly. I have referred several TTC-riding friends to them: you are a must-read.
Best wishes,
Mary Anne
Steve: I ride the 94 Wellesley more often than the 65 Parliament, but know what a mess both of them can be. There is a generic problem on the TTC with small routes that should, in theory, have easy to manage, reliable service but do not because nobody is “minding the store” and bunching is common. I am planning an article about this in the new year. We’re about to be swamped by the budget debates, and I have a few other things in the pipeline.
I have been trying to get loading data from the TTC without success for several years now. Another “little” project.
For the record, the midday scheduled headway on 65 Parliament is 13 minutes, and the PM peak is 9 minutes. Evenings and weekends, it’s 15 minutes all the time on the schedule, but what actually operates is wildly different.
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I have used the 65 only sporadically since the pandemic, but before that I rode at least once a week in the evening and one thing in particular I noticed was the route appeared to jump from two to three buses for the PM peak and then go back to two buses for the late evening.
From watching the live route maps available online that third bus seemed to always be way off the mean headway, and then when it suddenly it would vanish for the evening, often seeming to go out of service northbound at Dundas Street leaving an an enormous gap in service with both the two remaining vehicles running southbound from Castle Frank.
The transition from three to two vehicles on the route was never managed at all. It was left as one suddenly winking out of existence, and the 15 minutes per bus headway suddenly was two buses every 25 minutes, and the supervisors would let that ride all night long.
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After walking the area today (Dec. 29), it seems that the York/Adelaide Street bypass track is still weeks from completion. The Queen/York intersection has not yet been started although the west side of the York Street roadway is fenced off north of Adelaide. (Will TTC staff be laying the rails on York Street, or will Metrolinx be contracting a third party?) Along Adelaide, there are two trenches in the street where the track should be. It seems though that the Adelaide/Victoria junction might not need replacement.
Steve: The work on York is not planned until Spring 2024. Not sure when Adelaide will be done although we’re now in the usual winter construction break. As far as I know, TTC is doing the actual track work on York, with Metrolinx only responsible for the paving contract.
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