toronto subway hours

People want TTC subways to run earlier than 6 a.m. but here's why that isn't happening

Many people in the city would absolutely love for Toronto's subway trains to run just a teeny bit earlier to clear the morning congestion on subway cars and bus routes - but it's not going to happen.

A recent post on Reddit garnered a ton of attention that showed a clogged-up bus route, heading to the subway in the wee hours of the morning.

"I think many people would benefit from a 5 a.m. subway start time," read the post, which has over 300 comments, majority of them agreeing.

Subways don't start ushering commuters across the city until 6 a.m., which is definitely too late to even try to mitigate the overwhelming flow of passengers.

For context, the Montreal metro starts running at 5:30 a.m. and 5 a.m. in both Los Angeles and London.

When I asked the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), why the subway starts at not such an ideal time, they said they've looked at changing subway hours in the past "but opted not to proceed."

"Our single biggest challenge to doing this is negatively impacting our upkeep and maintenance by reducing overnight work hours. We need as much time as possible to do that important work even with creative solutions like early night closures and alternate track use."

With ridership slowing increasing as more residents head into the office, it seems an early start time would help out a lot more people in the morning.

Apparently the TTC's own research said that closing the line an hour earlier "would negatively impact as many customers at that time."

Back in 2016 a slight change did occur, running Sunday trains at 8 a.m. instead of 9 a.m.

There are 24-hour bus services and the TTC said they are adding more early morning buses to help customers.

Of course, this isn't a finalized deal - with the TTC say they're "always monitoring, learning from and adjusting for, ridership patterns to match capacity to demand as best we can."

Lead photo by

Jack Landau


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