The city needs to rapidly complete a time-bound streetcar speed operating upgrade to scale stop-spacing, switch-automation, and signal-priority.

Summary

Toronto has a world-class streetcar network but runs it at a glacial pace. This is the result of a choice about how it is operated, not a shortage of track or vehicles. Stops sit closer together than the TTC’s own standard, streetcars need to halt at every switch because of an outdated rule, and signals rarely work to ensure streetcar priority ¹. Fixing these issues is cheap and much of it is already tested and proven. Signal priority work including phase-rotation can cut delays by up to 42%, and the King Street corridor has shown that clearing intersections can transform travel times ^1,2. The City should waste zero time and implement an operating upgrade it already understands and recommends: consolidate stops to the service standard, finish switch automation to retire “stop-check-go,” and extend signal and left-turn priority across the busiest routes. All of these changes can be fully funded within the $48.8-million Transit Priority Measures budget and completed within twelve months, on the King Street method of measure, publish, and scale ¹. The binding constraint is urgency.

The Recommendation

Toronto should adopt a single, time-bound streetcar speed program and run the system it already owns the way the best systems are already run. The current slowness is not the result of the infrastructure but poor management of existing assets. It is an operating choice and what the city needs is an operating upgrade. By scaling three measures the City and the TTC have already tested – consolidating stops to the TTC’s own service-standard spacing, finishing the switch automation now underway and retiring the “stop-check-go” rule as it lands, and extending signal priority and left-turn treatments across the busiest routes – the system could be transformed within a year ¹. Each of these choices sits on a lever the City controls directly. Traffic signals, the curb lane, stop placement, switches, and the Streetcar Rule Book are all managed through Transportation Services and the Toronto Municipal Code, or directly by the TTC Board that the city appoints. So the changes can happen as quickly as the mayor and council choose to act. Similar changes have been made elsewhere. Zurich gave its existing surface trams maximum priority at every signal, resulting in an average delay at traffic lights of less than four seconds. After seeing the success of the intervention the city chose to double down on improving signalling rather than build an entire subway ³. Toronto has run its own version of the experiment on King Street and reached the same answer ². Combined with less frequent stops and new switching standards it would transform the experience for the average streetcar user. If implemented speedily the impact of these changes could occur and be reported back within a Council term, so the gains are banked rather than studied without end. The streetcar network is already a world class asset. The city needs to stop treating streetcar speed as something to build and start treating it as something to operate.

The Problem

Toronto runs a large, modern streetcar network — a low-floor fleet of 264 vehicles on a substantial system dedicated track ¹. With eleven routes across 308 kilometres, it is the largest and busiest streetcar network in North America ⁴. But it is operated at a pace that makes it less useful for commuters than a bus. The causes are structural, and the TTC has identified nearly all of them in its own April 2026 Speed and Reliability report ¹. Operators slow to 10 km/h through every piece of special track work and stop at switches to confirm the route is set under the “stop-check-go” rule, and enter signalized intersections at 25 km/h ¹. Perhaps most of all, stops sit too close together: streetcar stops currently average 230 to 360 metres apart, below the TTC’s own 300-to-400-metre service-standard guideline, while peer systems that space stops 400 to 600 metres apart run 15 to 50% faster ¹. On the 510 Spadina line, for example — roughly six kilometres with on the order of fifteen stops — bringing the spacing to the 300-to-400-metre standard would remove four or five stops. A streetcar can lose 30 seconds or more for each stop it makes meaning that would provide about two minutes off an end-to-end trip from stops alone, before any signal or switch gain. Each of these problems on its own only creates a small delay — ten seconds at a switch, a missed green, a stop a rider did not need — but they compound into trips that crawl through stretches of the core. This is a cost that falls on the riders who depend on the streetcar most — disproportionately lower-income downtown households, for whom a slow and unreliable trip is a standing tax on their time and on their access to work. The changes needed are straightforward to implement, none would require the Province: the City sets the signal timing and the curb-lane rules, and the TTC sets the stops, the switches, and the operating rule book ¹.

The figure below shows just how dramatic the changes could be based on the travel-time reductions Toronto has already measured from cheap signal changes ¹. A phase-rotation signal at Spadina and Dundas/College cut delays by up to 42% per treated intersection; a corridor package on Dundas by up to 20%; a lagging left-turn at Spadina and King by up to 9% ¹. These are only the results per treated intersection or corridor, not even whole-trip speed-ups. The measures work even when they are applied in a limited fashion, so the network-wide gain is a question of scaling, not of proof and likely to be even greater than the small experiments imply.

The City is not choosing between faster service and a tight budget — it already holds the measures, the evidence, and a $48.8-million Transit Priority Measures program on the books ¹. What it has not done is scale them.

Implementation.

1. Consolidate stops to the service standard. City Council should request the Toronto Transit Commission Board to direct the Chief Executive Officer, TTC, in consultation with Transportation Services and the City’s accessibility staff, to bring streetcar stop spacing to the TTC’s own 300-to-400-metre service standard ¹ — route by route, beginning with the slowest routes, on a published schedule whose criteria (transfer points, accessibility, ridership) are set out before any stop is moved. Report the changes and their measured travel-time effects to the Board within the 2027 service-plan cycle. The right way to do this is the King Street method — publish the criteria, measure the result, adjust — not a quiet across-the-board cut. This is the cheapest and most impactful of all of the changes: it needs zero capital, only a service-standard decision and the discipline to apply it. 2. Finish switch automation and retire “stop-check-go”. City Council should request the TTC Board to accelerate the switch and signalling modernization that is already underway — the double-point automatic switches and the onboard electronics being fitted to the 264 low-floor vehicles ¹ — and to revise the “stop-check-go” rule at each location as soon as it is verified automatic, with a safety case filed for every change. Direct the Chief Executive Officer to report a completion timeline and the measured speed effect to the Board by the second quarter of 2027. The rule change should be tied to verified automation rather than to a calendar: the streetcar should stop at a switch only until the switch can be trusted to set itself, and not a day longer. 3. Scale signal priority and left-turn treatments. City Council should direct the General Manager, Transportation Services, in consultation with the TTC, to front-load the existing $48.8-million Transit Priority Measures program ¹ — extending transit signal priority and lagging or restricted left-turns across the top-twenty transit routes, toward the program’s 800-intersection goal ¹ — and to publish the measured travel-time result for each treated corridor, as the City did on Spadina. Route the work through the Infrastructure and Environment Committee in 2027. The competent standard is Zurich’s: priority that holds the green for the streetcar, measured and reported, rather than priority that exists only in the signal cabinet. Financial impact. There is no material incremental cost to any of these changes. The signal work sits within the existing $48.8-million Transit Priority Measures capital program ¹; the switch automation is already funded and underway ¹; consolidating stops needs limited capital. The binding constraint is pace and prioritization, not money. The Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer would confirm the funding treatment and any operating savings from faster, more reliable service. Risks and objections. The strongest objection to this work is accessibility: wider stop spacing will mean some riders have to walk farther. The answer is to hold stops at transfer points and key accessibility locations and to let the net time saving — which every rider on the route gains — govern the rest, with the criteria published before any change. The overall transformation of mobility for hundreds of thousands of Torontonians will be significant for marginal and mitigated walking time in some cases. A second objection is local backlash: removing a stop or a left turn draws opposition from the block that loses it. That cost is real, but it is local and front-loaded, while the benefit is broad and lasting; King Street shows the trade is worth making and survivable when the City measures the result and publishes it ².

Sources

-[1] TTC, “Improving LRT and Streetcar Speed and Reliability” — staff report to the TTC Board, April 16 2026. https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2026/ttc/bgrd/backgroundfile-285894.pdf

-[2] City of Toronto (Transportation Services), “King Street Transit Priority Corridor Update” — report to the Infrastructure and Environment Committee, February 12 2025. https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2025/ie/bgrd/backgroundfile-253219.pdf

-[3] Cleghorn, D., “Why Zurich is a Model for Public Transportation,” Metro Magazine, March 2003. https://www.metro-magazine.com/10009082/why-zurich-is-a-model-for-public-transportation

-[4] TTC, “TTC welcomes 60th streetcar, expanding fleet to 264” — TTC news release, January 2026. https://www.ttc.ca/news/2026/January/TTC-welcomes-60th-streetcar-expanding-fleet-to-264