Steve Munro

Now if only we had a mayor, a bulldozer, and the political will to tell YTZ and their cronies to jump in the lake. Can you imagine any of the current crop in office or hopefuls taking this path?

FWIW: I post pointers to new articles here, on the other place and on FB. I know also that they are echoed on Mastodon. I get the most and promptest responses here. Shows how the urbanist centre of gravity has shifted.

(2) Multiple concurrent changes mask which of them is responsible for improvement, or needs even more work. stevemunro.ca/2026/03/09/5...

The 511 Bathurst car recently had a service increase to every six minutes, and reserved lanes added south of Dundas (with extension to Bloor coming later this year). The results are mixed, and erratic service remains a problem although some of the worst variations have been trimmed. (1)

Another important difference is that there is only a single switch and one frog at each turnout, not the complex layout of a downtown intersection where there are more places for misalignment and bumps.

Not "Orban" -- or an earthier word, pungent, unmistakable.

It's not the rail between junctions or grinding I'm talking about. The complaint in this thread implied rough intersections were due to single blade switches. Nonsense, Orban earthier word if you prefer.

Roughness on special work is as much the hard suspension on Flexitys as the switches. The roughness is on diamonds and on rough joints even on tangent track. Don't blame the switches for everything. It undermines the case for conversion.

All mainline trackage is converted at least to dual pan/pole mode. Some pole only wire still in odd spots but not much. Final conversion gets rid of pole hardware.

There were plans to start a pan conversion 30 years ago and some of the Spadina overhead was built for it. But budgets got in the way so we waited for another generation of streetcars to do it.

(3/3) A long article, for which apologies to TL/DR folks, but with detailed info for whatever route takes your fancy.

(2) Much capacity was lost to stretching running times before 2020, compounded by underutilization of the streetcar fleet which continues even after Toronto bought 60 more cars. Ridership fell on many routes over past decades, and recovery is thwarted by service levels.

Back in 2013, the TTC had a plan for the rollout of its proposed new streetcar fleet that would have increased capacity across the system. Instead what we got over time was service cuts and lost ridership. stevemunro.ca/2026/03/06/t... (1)

But when track maintenance is crap, the issue isn't blade count. Here are two photos from King & Church in April 2024 before reconstruction.

TTC's Audit Committee meets on March 11. The agenda includes a discussion of customer information and metrics, as well as an update on the peer review by UITP of TTC asset management. stevemunro.ca/2026/03/04/t...

A reliable control system should also eliminate the need to crawl through junctions lest a switch throw under a car, assuming of course that the track is otherwise in good shape.

Yes I am working on an article about the audit reports now. There's a lot of stuff about website and gtfs-rt data, as well as the importance of metrics that are meaningful to riders.

I worry that ever-cautious TTC will not be able to get past a system-wide stop-check-go policy claiming it is too confusing to have different rules at different locations.

I suspect GPS will be used more for TSP as a replacement for loop detectors, but there has to be a way to handle switch alignment especially when streetcars are queued at the approach to a complex intersection.

From the Mar 11 Audit & Risk Management agenda is management's response to the UITP review including this text re streetcar switches.

GPS can give vehicle location mainly for TSP, but routing info has to come from the vehicle/operator especially when not running on the scheduled route e.g. diversions and short turns. The main issue is to get away from last-minute detection right at the switch point.

I know they want to shift to GPS based detection as this gives flexibility in changing locations as no physical infrastructure is involved.

The old system depended on a contactor that is incompatible with pans. Also it doesn't deal with the issue of advance detection and integrated tsp.

I am planning to review the changed routes and have been collecting data. Stay tuned.

This situation is a good example of how many design decisions combined to hobble transit with no public debate even while claims of faster trips remained in public materials. Issues that would have been obvious in testing were ignored.

I refuse to pursue this thread further. Good night.

Shitty infrastructure includes bad maintenance. You have an undue focus on only one part of the problem. The question is how to improve ops without waiting 30 years for a replacement cycle, or worse finding that underlying issues were ignored.

That has been the central focus of online chatter and of recent presentations by advocate/consultants at TTC board. If you don't acknowledge the maintenance issues management avoids the hard questions of how we got here.

This would become part of the lore about how streetcars are inherently "bad". That's where this is headed if there is too much focus on only one aspect if the problem.

The SRT derailment came from sloppy inspection and poor maintenance, practices that were found to have infected subway ops too. If this cultural problem is not fixed nothing will change. Even worse a now and forever double blade "fix" could give the impression that nothing can be done.