The past six months brought a seemingly endless string of construction projects and streetcar diversions, and with them an ever lengthening page documenting them. The Fall-Winter 25/26 page is now retired, and a new one for mid-2026 is up.
You can access it through the sidebar on desktop displays, or from a link at the bottom of any page in the mobile version.
Steve Munro 
Thanks for this Steve, though it’s a pity the TTC’s inability to present information coherently makes it necessary!
On a related ‘rant’, it is depressing to see the 503 remains a bus substitution. We have surplus streetcars and few years ago the TTC rebuilt not only the track and overhead on Wellington (which can also be a useful, if seldom used, diversion route) but also all the track and overhead on Kingston Road, which is now totally unused as it has no diversion potential. Maybe you want to comment on how much these rebuilds cost and surmise on whether it was “cost effective”?
Steve: The problem with Kingston Road is that TTC seems unwilling to staff up to match the larger size of the streetcar fleet, and this limits the amount of service they can run. The “six minute network” came at the expense of the Kingston Road car. Meanwhile, the combination of “service” on the Queen corridor and the ongoing mystery of where exactly the service is “today” has clobbered ridership in a once-heavy corridor.
As for coherent presentation, it’s clear some work is being done on the website, but there remain issues of multiple, disconnected (and sometimes contradictory) sources of information, and last minute notices/changes that most riders won’t see. TTC is trumpeting coming changes at test stops with “e-paper” to show up to date info. However, if the underlying data structures are still fragmented, out of date, or just missing, no technology will solve the problem. Indeed, it will just p iss off riders by being inaccurate and unreliable.
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Hi Steve,
I’ve been wondering if you have ever done an analysis on the reliability of the King and Queen cars overnight. I find that these routes, particularly the King car, are often completely unusable and many trips never show up. I’m curious to see how much of the service is actually delivered overnight.
Steve: I looked at the night cars some years ago, and had big problems with data quality as there seemed to be a system shutdown/reset in the middle of the night that created gaps. I should go back to this to see if the data are more reliable now. Thanks for nudging me in that direction.
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Thanks for keeping these updated!
From the list as of now…
I hope they’re building a second CN Tower there, they’re certainly taking the time…
Steve: I am really baffled by the length of that project and waiting to see more details.
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I wonder what will be done at Long Branch loop.
Maybe they will remove the spare track. Streetcars always have to stop just as they enter the loop and check that they won’t be diverted onto the track that’s used….almost never I think.
Maybe they will set up an offloading area at the loop entrance. There was a poorly-paved area there for ALRV/CLRV cars.
Right now, after waiting for the transit signal to enter the loop (one fixed point in the light cycle at Brown’s Line southbound) passengers endure the immediate stop and check, and then a leisurely promenade around the loop to the eastbound track by the shelter. Whose shelter building, last I noticed, seems to be locked to keep out vagrants and stuff,
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Sorry, unrelated questions. Why has the Scarborough East Light Rail Transit (LRT) been renamed to the Scarborough East Rapid Transit (SERT)? I mean it’s going to be the exact same thing as the Finch West LRT which is the exact opposite of “rapid”. Why is the 509 Harbourfront (Queens Quay West) a streetcar line but the Queens Quay East an LRT when it’s the exact same thing (vehicles and everything else as well)? Why was the Downtown Relief Line name dropped in favour of a meaningless number? Sounds like our politicians have been working hard to mislead the taxpayers who are funding these politicians’ pet projects after they deceive us into supporting them.
Steve: There have been problems with LRT nomenclature for decades, depending on what spin people are trying to make. Fifty years ago, we were going to have a true private right-of-way Scarborough LRT from Kennedy to STC with a planned extension to Malvern. This grew out of a TTC plan in the late sixties (which, for the benefit of trolls among my readers, predates my era of political activism). The Bill Davis embraced maglev trains as the “solution”, and they were branded “Advanced LRT” to retain the cachet of the name, as it then was, but to appear to be something better. As we all know, the Scarborough RT never got past McCowan Station.
The Finch and Eglinton lines were both planned originally to have robust signal priority and operate at traffic speeds, but that is not what was implemented. The collective brains trust that brought us that debacle should all be out selling pencils on street corners, not collecting fat salaries. In the process, they gave critics all the ammunition they needed to say that “LRT” doesn’t work, almost as if it were a deliberate ploy to kill off any future projects and keep the subway fraternity happy.
On the waterfront, nobody has any pretensions that the Spadina/Harbourfront line is “LRT” beyond the fact there is a reserved lane. Considering the congested mess in the eastern waterfront these days, any new major transit line there would utterly fail if it had to run in mixed traffic. Also, access to Union is impossible without the Bay Street tunnel.
I have noticed that Mayor Chow has been avoiding the term “LRT” recently both in reference to the Scarborough East Rapid Transit line (SERT) whose name is intended to reinforce the “Scarborough” presence. Never mind that its original name in Transit City was the Scarborough-Malvern line.
The Downtown Relief Line was renamed the Ontario Line and inherits the old SRT “Line 3” branding. It’s an odd choice, but both names co-exist just as “2” and “Bloor-Danforth” are still in common use. Of course the original name for the DRL was the Queen Street Subway. It’s big political problem was that both “Queen” and “Downtown” were too Toronto-centric when the suburban pols wanted subways to serve their shiny new “town centres”. In an era when we could barely afford to build one extension at a time, the DRL sat on the back burner until congestion problems at Bloor-Yonge could not be ignored. Ironically, if the line had been called the Don Mills subway, with clear intent to continue north of Eglinton, it would have been approved a lot sooner, and was projectd to have a huge effect in reducing loads on Line 1 if it went all the way to Sheppard.
There is a lot of screwing around with names for political reasons, sometimes simply to obliterate a previous plan and claim to be building something new. A Queen subway alignment to Eglinton & Don Mills has been around for over fifty years. See Where Would a Don Mills Subway Go? for a 1973 drawing of one proposed alignment.
I fully expect this sort of transit gerrymandering to continue ad infinitum, and hope that we can get through the coming municipal election without another round of tearing up every existing plan.
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In the details in the linked list is the comment
Will an east-to-north turn be added for diversion flexibility?
Steve: I have been told that is in the plans. Waiting to see it for real.
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The gerrymandering reached at its worst when in 2018 a critical report recommending the Scarborough Subway was withheld. Instead of bringing it to Council ASAP, it was withheld because they knew that it would be approved by the Council of the day and so Council resorted to gerrymandering to increase the number of Downtown wards while keeping the same number of wards in Scarborough even though that Scarborough had experienced far greater population growth than Downtown. Gerrymandering aside, why was the report withheld for the new Council which was almost an year away? And guess what? The new Council approved it too as did every level of government over and over again regardless of who was in power because the Scarborough subway had overwhelming support not just in Scarborough but well beyond except for a small number of individuals who spoke the loudest trying to present the illusion that the majority opposed the Scarborough subway but ultimately the quiet majority won which shows that one cannot have their way just by being the loudest.
Steve: Your blind loyalty to ideas of a conspiracy against Scarborough would have more weight if you were at least accurate. Back in 2018, under Mayor Tory and a suburban dominated Council, there was going to be an in increase to 47 members from 44. This was based on population data and projections showing that in the near future with the expected growth in downtown population, that area would be under-represented. The review of old ward boundaries ran from 2014 to 2016. Areas that were already underrepresented in 2014 were in central downtown, Willowdale, north-eastern Scarborough and central Etobicoke.
Etobicoke had many wards whose population was lower than average, and so the inequity could be fixed by rebalancing between Etobicoke wards. Similarly, Scarborough’s population was unevenly distributed among its wards, but things could be evened out by adjustments within Scarborough that did not require new wards. This was not the situation in North York or Old Toronto. The proposed 47 ward map included three new wards in central Toronto, the consolidation of three underpopulated Toronto wards into two, and the addition of a ward in Willowdale.
Part of the justification for going to 47 wards from 44 was that if boundaries were redrawn on a 44-ward model, some Scarborough wards would have to reach west of Victoria Park to gain enough population for equity across the city, and this was strongly opposed. However, keeping the average population down also meant that downtown got more wards because that’s where the growth had been for years and was projected to continue.
All of this became a moot point when the newly-elected Ford government slashed the size of Council.
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E-bikes are permitted on the TTC from 16 April to 14 November. What if an eBike explodes on the TTC during this period and kills many people? Will any of the TTC board members who approved this be jailed? Will there be any accountability? How does an eBike which was unsafe on 15 April become safe on 16 April?
Steve: The dates for eBike bans were chosen to bracket winter conditions when road salt and slush increase the probability of battery breakdown and fire.
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