New site tracks how painfully slow TTC streetcars move

Slow TTC streetcars are nothing new for people in Toronto, but one individual found a creative way to address the problem commuters continue to face. 

Luka Jovanovic, a first-year student studying computer science at the University of Waterloo, launched a website exposing just how slow Toronto streetcars are moving in real time.

Jovanovic tells blogTO he stumbled upon the TTC's public API by accident and leveraged that data to help quantify complaints about slow streetcars. He calculated the average speed of each line by averaging the real-time speeds of the vehicles, and then ranking them from fastest to slowest.

The live leaderboard, which Jovanovic says took him one day to create, shows the average speed of all 10 streetcar lines on Toronto's surface transit network, with just a 30-second delay.

Having lived in Toronto for 18 years before moving to Waterloo for school, Jovanovic says seeing the contrast in transit speeds between the two cities was eye-opening.

"Waterloo has one streetcar line, but it's phenomenal," he says.

Jovanovic notes the signal priority given to streetcars absent from most Toronto intersections, explaining that "It never stops at a red light, its service is regular, and it goes 40 kilometres an hour."

"It's what I wish Toronto had," he says.

On Jovanovic's leaderboard, Toronto streetcars are shown to rarely approach that 40 km/h mark. Instead, the 503 Kingston streetcar and the 504 King streetcar are shown to be moving at 10 and 11 kilometres an hour — sometimes even slower than that.

Even the 512 St. Clair and 510 Spadina streetcars, which operate along their own designated rights-of-way, still move at a crawl, anywhere from 3 to 9 kilometres per hour.

In terms of user interface, it's far from a flashy website with all the bells and whistles, but that's something Jovanovic specifically wanted to avoid. 

"I wanted to make something simple, something very clearly human-made," he says, adding that the leaderboard was created strictly for fun. 

And the intention wasn't necessarily to shame the cash-strapped transit system, but to spark conversation and action to improve service.

"Criticism is always good if it's taken in the correct way," he says. "This criticism should be to make transit better, to push the TTC and the City to invest more in transit."

The speed of Toronto's streetcar network has been plagued with harsh criticism for years. A 2024 study concluded that ours are the slowest in the world, and little appears to have improved since then. 

But Jovanovic is optimistic that things can get better in the future.

"Toronto has a unique kind of spirit compared to other North American cities," he says. "It has the opportunity to move in the right direction. I have hope."

In 2024, Jovanovic designed an interactive map of what the streetcar system looked like back in the '40s. He tells blogTO he's open to creating more informative, data-driven transit websites in the future.