TTC riders gearing up for months of construction chaos

With 2025 serving as a banner year for roadwork, transit expansion and other major infrastructure projects in Toronto, the TTC has scheduled a ton of route diversions and closures that already have residents stressing about getting around the traffic-plagued city.

Just as downtown comes alive for the bustling summer months, three key streetcar lines are being rerouted to accommodate a full closure of the King and Church intersection for track work and a watermain replacement.

The work, which will last from May to at least August, will impact the 503 Kingston Road, 504 King and 508 Lakeshore lines, with vehicles scheduled to head up to — and further congest — Queen Street.

This will increase streetcar traffic on the Spadina-Broadview portion of the already-busy thoroughfare from seven transit vehicles to a whopping 25 in peak hour, all of which will have to navigate around the ongoing closure at Queen and Yonge streets for the new Ontario Line station.

While the City has planned some measures to mitigate delays for the 100,000+ daily customers affected, including restricting street parking and curbside patios along Queen, transit advocates are still concerned about forthcoming headaches that are essentially guaranteed at this point.

One such organization, CodeRedTO, issued a release on Monday demanding that stakeholders implement "emergency streetcar route protections" in light of  "unreliable, delayed and confusing streetcar movement beginning next week and lasting through the summer."

"At peak, a streetcar should arrive every 100-150 seconds, but this diversion will have little to no transit signal priority or advance turn signals, creating streetcar bunching, bottlenecks, blocked intersections and frustrated commuters," the group writes, encouraging the City to ban left turns, add transit turn priority signals and dispatch traffic wardens along parts of Queen, among other things.

For what it's worth, the City already has plans for the latter, along with ramping up parking enforcement, adding no-stopping zones and increasing the duration of existing turning restrictions. And, the TTC has stated that it and the City are doing their best to keep disturbances for commuters "to a minimum."

Unfortunately, the work is also unavoidable. Some of the city's watermains are over 100 years old, and crews are taking advantage of the replacement window to do necessary track work and avoid another closure down the road.

"The watermain at King Street East and Church Street needs to be replaced and in coordination with this work, the streetcar tracks at this intersection are being replaced," reads a City doc about the efforts to keep things running as smoothly as possible over the coming months.

"Based on previous experience with longer duration closures (greater than a month), TTC and the City of Toronto has determined that a comprehensive and proactive strategy is required to reduce the impact to transit customers."

"Transit Priority Measures have been developed by focusing on parking and traffic regulatory prohibitions. These measures aim to reduce delays on the street network for streetcars operating via the diversion route. These improvements were developed by City staff in consultation with TTC to ensure the TPMs align with City policies."