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Long planned upgrades to Toronto's busiest streetcar line have gone off the rails once more, with anticipated improvements to the 504 King's Transit Priority Corridor notably absent from the recently rebuilt intersection of King and Church streets. As City Council’s decision to make the transit corridor permanent nears its seventh anniversary — a move that came only after a seventeen-month pilot period in boosting the ridership and speed of Canada's most ridden streetcar line — signs of lasting changes to the street remain elusive. Years of construction delays, the absence of a detailed design for future improvements, and ongoing political pressure to roll back the transit corridor have all raised doubts about the fate of what was initially a resounding success.
To the relief of transit riders, pedestrians, and motorists, the streetcar track and watermain replacement project that saw the intersection of King and Church shut from early May, came to an end over the past two weeks. On August 15, sidewalks were once again accessible and by August 18, private vehicles and buses were moving through the intersection, with streetcar track switches undergoing testing to ensure a safe return of rail service. The scenic downtown corner looked the same as it had prior to construction's commencement earlier this summer; identical, in fact.
To keen followers of Toronto's transportation plans, this may come as a shock as major changes have been planned for King Street for nearly seven years. Following up on the boom in ridership and on-time performance seen during the initial King Street Transit Priority Pilot in 2017, City Council made the street reconfiguration permanent in early 2019. Along with this permanence came plans to comprehensively redesign King Street along the length of the transit corridor, from Bathurst Street in the west to Jarvis Street in the east.
The City has yet to release any detailed designs or renderings of the project, and the City website on the planned changes for King Street states that staff are still working on a "less temporary" design for the corridor. Finalization of the design is projected for later this year, with construction tentatively projected to commence in 2026. When exactly detailed plans for the final makeup of the street will be released remains unknown, and when actual construction on the final redesign of the King Street Transit Priority Corridor will start is equally unclear.
In the absence of detailed designs, timelines or plans, public speculation as to what the future may hold for King Street has turned abroad. One of the most frequently cited comparisons has been with Sydney, Australia, where for decades the city's main shopping and dining strip was a traffic-clogged, four-lane road. Cars, trucks and buses crowded George Street throughout the 20th century, as the street vied to serve as both a hub of culture and a major artery in the city's road network.
Today Sydney's George Street street stands as a masterclass in the delicate art of balancing a beautiful public realm, efficient surface transit operations, and the day-to-day necessities of businesses and residents. The 2020 shot below across from Sydney Town Hall highlights the seamless integration of the tramway with the spacious pedestrian realm and tree-lined boulevards that line George Street. Off to the side is an eclectic mix of historic and contemporary storefronts. From the initial proposal by the New South Wales state government in 2012 to the completion of the final portion of the pedestrian and transit mall in 2021, the reimagining of George Street took a total of nine years.
Toronto and Sydney's differing approaches to transit malls have followed remarkably similar timelines, with the King Street Pilot first being proposed in 2016, exactly nine years ago. But what exactly have Torontonians received in nearly a decade since plans were first brought forward, and in the same amount of time a city of comparable size has revolutionized its downtown core?
To get a sense of the state of the King Street Transit Priority Corridor, UrbanToronto travelled the bustling street during the evening rush hour on Wednesday, August 20.
King Street at Jarvis Street
At the eastern edge of the King Street Transit Priority Corridor, the first signs of failure are already visible. The eastbound stop pictured is one of six that, according to the ‘Upcoming Improvements’ page on the City’s website, was scheduled to receive a raised modular platform by the end of 2024. Eight months past that deadline, with no update issued, all that awaits customers is a visibly aged strip of tactile pads, a Jersey barrier and a smattering of flexi-posts, the exact same platform installed in 2017 at the outset of the transit pilot.
King Street at Yonge Street
Moving westward into the Financial District, we arrive at the interchange of Canada's busiest subway and streetcar lines, Yonge Line 1 and the 504 King. Throngs of commuters fill the sidewalks, flowing into subway entrances, rushing southward to Union Station or squeezing onto shuttle buses. One could be forgiven for thinking the entirety of Toronto had decided to head home all at once. Yet a glance across the crowded intersection, the pavement incessantly gridlocked as cars rush yellow lights and fail to clear the intersection, reveals a chronic absence of a single figure: the traffic agent.
In a highly publicized move to "fix" the transit corridor in late 2023, Mayor Olivia Chow announced the deployment of 10 traffic agents along the King Street corridor during peak hours, with plans to expand that number to a total of 40 agents by March of 2024. Yet at 5:21pm on this cloudy Wednesday evening rush hour, not a single one of potentially a dozen traffic agents had been deployed to one of the country’s busiest intersections, at the junction of two transit routes serving nearly 700,000 people daily.
King Street at Spadina Avenue
Pushing further west, block by block, the sleek office towers of the core give way to the squat brick warehouses and lively bars of the Fashion District, centred around the broad Spadina Avenue. At the southeast corner of the intersection stands approximately 20 people at what may at first be difficult to identify as a transit stop. With the exception of a small shelter far from the platform itself—the kind found on every bus line in the city—the “improved” stop, supposedly the standard at Jarvis Street, is a dreary sight. It offers no protection from the elements, nowhere to sit, and provides no information about the transit line, with its only sign of existence a piece of paper taped to a lamp post. For those struggling to identify the improvement, it is the black slab of plastic sitting in the curb lane.
The intended impact of these modular platforms is detailed in a report by City staff, one of which is to "improve accessibility by making it easier to board/exit streetcars". It's important to note that this improvement in accessibility does not render the stop or streetcar line formally accessible, as wheelchair users still require the deployment of a ramp by the vehicle operator. The establishment of level boarding, and thus genuine barrier-free accessibility on any streetcar line, will be out of reach for many decades to come. Toronto’s 2009 $1.2 billion purchase of the new streetcar fleet resulted in rolling stock physically incapable of operating smoothly enough to allow at-grade boarding.
Crossing Spadina Avenue and stepping over the neon yellow fragments flaking off from the deteriorating westbound streetcar stop, it was difficult to avoid a sense of having just performed a post-mortem, of a once stunning idea so thoroughly thrashed by the all-defeating inertia of Toronto's Byzantine bureaucracy it now lay in pieces across the downtown core. The decline of the King Street Transit Corridor has been a highly visible affair, with the project's supporters and detractors alike taking note of the state of one of Toronto's most iconic streets.
Smelling blood, attempts to rescind the formal transit priority measures and return full private vehicle access made a return this past summer as east-end councillor Brad Bradford introduced a motion in City Council to do just that along a portion of King Street temporarily devoid of streetcar service. That move was largely neutralized by some politicking from Mayor Chow, proposing a ‘friendly’ amendment that scaled the motion down to affect a grand total of three blocks. Regardless, even the temporary rollback of a portion of the corridor set a precedent. Yet when Bradford's motion to eliminate swathes of the corridor appeared likely to pass, the backlash from the public and business community was non-existent, if not outright supportive.
It's not hard to see why the King Street corridor has inspired few advocates, after all, what does it actually accomplish?
For transit riders, the much boasted about 20 minute travel time along the corridor, achieved following the deployment of traffic agents by Chow in late 2023, works out to an average streetcar speed of 7.71 km per hour. This sluggish pace makes streetcars on the King corridor more than 20% slower than the network average, already the slowest streetcar system in the world. For the great privilege of riding what may very well be the slowest streetcar on Earth, riders can expect to pay $3.25 and endure the incessant short turns and delays that often feel more common than on-time arrivals.
For the businesses and their patrons along King Street, whether they be CEOs of the core's towering Financial District, or the curators of nightlife that run the clubs and restaurants of King West, the public transit initiative is hard to love. Executives and owners themselves disproportionately own vehicles, and for the people they employ, citing the streetcar as cause for their late arrival is as daily a ritual as asking about a colleague’s day. The public realm expansions and curbside dining have long ceased to be a speciality of King Street and the transit corridor, as Cafe TO expanded that practice city-wide during the pandemic. All that remains unique to King Street from a streetscape perspective are the aging pieces of temporary platforms that make the street feel more like a highway construction site than a cultural hub.
For the tens of thousands who flock to the nightlife strip each weekend, the streetcar seems to play little role in their Friday night plans. With no traffic agents on duty late at night and ride-hail vehicles exempt from the corridor’s rules after 10 PM., King West regularly devolves into a parking lot, blocks filled with people piling into and out of Ubers while streetcars sit idling helplessly behind.
As for motorists, the cause for their disdain of the transit corridor is plain to see. In a city increasingly snarled by congestion, caused by construction, non-existent circulation management, and unattractive public transit options, seeing a street seemingly 'empty' induces constant anger. King Street has failed to fulfill the basic function expected of any street — the ability to move traffic — while also falling short in every other respect. This has made it a pariah in the minds of many Torontonians, particularly those from the suburban pockets where mobility is even more tightly tied to the automobile.
None of this is to suggest that the King Street corridor was destined to fail. On the contrary, it was perhaps the most exciting experiment in reimagining Toronto’s streets since the short-lived pedestrianization of Yonge Street in the 1970s. Yet just as Yonge Street was returned to the car thanks to civic ineptitude and political hand-wringing, it appears a similar fate may soon befall King Street.
With the 2026 Mayoral election and the end of Chow's first term set to arrive next summer, detractors of the transit priority corridor will not be short of volleys to fire in the electoral debates. Why is the 504 King still one of the world's slowest streetcars, if not the slowest? Has the space taken from cars become a beautiful, enduring public realm? Have businesses and employees found the declining benefits of the corridor more worthwhile than the confusion and inconvenience it causes? Is there even a plan for the street?
These will not be easy questions for Chow to answer, particularly in the aftermath of steep property tax hikes devoutly defended as the necessary cost of repairing Toronto's broken infrastructure. In fact, since the deployment of traffic agents and installation of revised signage in early 2024, the Mayor's office appears to have lost interest in King Street. Just last week, Chow proudly announced the timeline for reconstruction of a portion of the Gardiner Expressway had been halved from three years to just 18 months. In a city where attempts to widen sidewalks span decades, endlessly dogged by seemingly relentless utility conflicts, labour shortages and a lack of coordination between City departments, the wholesale replacement of an elevated six lane highway in under 20 months must surely represent a marvel of public works.
Or perhaps it represents a much simpler phenomenon, a prioritization of one project and the wholesale neglect of another. It is this question voters will have to ask themselves next summer as Chow once again calls on her broad progressive coalition, centred in the most transit-dependent neighbourhoods in the city, to carry her back into office for a second term.
King Street has the potential to become a civic gem, a vibrant public realm where the city’s finest restaurants, cinemas, theatres, and nightlife venues could turn the street into an open-air bonanza of culture and entertainment. At the same time, decades of decline across the streetcar network could be reversed, delivering fast and reliable crosstown trips years before costly subway projects reach completion. In an era of mega-projects demanding tens of billions of dollars, the improvements needed on King would be measured in the tens of millions, well within the city’s means.
What remains absent is political will: a champion ready to unapologetically promote the economic, mobility and social benefits of bringing Toronto’s high street into the 21st century.
UrbanToronto will continue to follow progress or lack thereof on this street, but in the meantime, you can learn more about it from our dedicated Forum thread, where you can also add to the discussion, or leave a comment in the space provided on this page.
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