2 days ago
A city in war-torn Ukraine has a mass transit policy some Torontonians are begging for
The lions are everywhere, once you start to look. Riding the trams in Lviv, Ukraine, it becomes impossible not to see the city's namesake animal on shop signs, company cars and the sides of buses.
But the scenery goes by fast. Even as national resources have been diverted towards the defence force in the country's eastern areas, Ukraine's fifth-largest city has managed to implement a transit signal priority (TSP) setup this year for streetcars in the city's centre, giving trams expedited green lights that help them go 10 to 15 per cent faster on formerly clogged stretches.
In a fully implemented TSP system, a bus or streetcar that is approaching an intersection sends a signal to the traffic light at that intersection, receiving a green light. Such systems can be a quick boost for cities looking to increase the share of commuters using public transit, rather than single-occupancy automobiles, key drivers of the global climate emergency. Lviv has installed such a system, despite facing significant challenges related to Russia's invasion.
That leaves some Torontonians asking why Canada's largest city can't seem to fully do in peacetime what Lviv has done in the middle of a war.
"TTC [Toronto Transit Commission] has a very ingrained habit of finding external causes to blame for their problems and to avoid internal review, assuming there's nothing to fix," said Steve Munro, a local transit blogger who has won the Jane Jacobs Medal for urban design, in an email to Canada's National Observer.
"I really don't think the city or TTC are really on top of what technology is available elsewhere for TSP and there is more focus on developing something new for Toronto as if it doesn't exist yet."
A recent Australian study says that Toronto has the slowest streetcar service of all the large world systems for which structured data is easily available. And while the city's transit index from the group Walk Score has improved since a decade ago, that improvement has been negligible — 0.1 points on a 100-point scale, compared with 7.4 points of improvement for nearby New York during the same period. New York's current transit score is 88.6, while Toronto's is 78.2.
If Toronto is to bounce back from its poor transit performance, Canada's largest city might look to a Ukrainian city for answers.
The lack of strong transit options in a city — even in car-happy North America — can hinder its ability to attract employers and population, with some large North American employers now citing good transit as a must-have when making facility location decisions.
Traffic lights, though they may seem distinct from transit, are actually a significant part of the city's failure to build a thriving transit system. Traffic signals in Toronto are run by the city's transportation services department who, Munro said, are "frankly more oriented to roads than transit traffic. Their attitude is that if traffic moves well, transit benefits too. The 'rising tide lifts all boats' theory."
But not all boats are being lifted. The feeling of frustration among Toronto transit riders has been percolating since at least October, when a Toronto-based user posted a video on Reddit under the title " Why no transit signal priority on St. Clair?" The video shows single-occupant vehicles chugging slowly through protected left turn after protected left turn, blocking the intersection as the streetcars jammed with people go nowhere.
Reactions to the video ranged from posts blaming former mayor Rob Ford to a lamentation that the thought of adding 10 seconds to a commute to allow trams full of passengers through, "literally kills drivers" — a rhetorical flourish that appeared to be meant figuratively, based on the context of the discussion.
The user who posted the original video confirmed that, as of May, the left turn blockage they documented in October still exists.
Extra relevance now
The topic of transit signal priority is of greater importance to riders now than ever before, as the Eglinton Crosstown light rail extension is coming along. The project is an undertaking that extends Toronto's existing streetcar system with a line that is part subway, part streetcar.
The provincial government broke ground on the final tunnelled segment of the project in April. While the tunnelled sections do not include traffic crossings, they will add additional riders to street-level segments of the line when complete. With more riders in the overall system, there will be more need to move people through, including the parts that could benefit from the green lights that a fully activated TSP provides.
According to Amer Shalaby, a civil engineering professor at the University of Toronto who has researched how traffic signals and transit should interact, just because existing TTC streetcars have transit signal priority devices installed "doesn't mean that TSP is implemented at all intersections." In some cases, he said, a city may buy a TSP solution for their transit vehicles, then fail to use it adequately due to political pressure or miscommunication.
One project by the city, at least, seems to lend weight to the idea that TTC streetcars aren't doomed to be slow. In November 2017, the city launched a pilot project on King Street to give priority to streetcars on a roughly three-kilometre stretch from Bathurst to Jarvis streets, with private vehicles deprioritized.
"Over the course of the following year, the pilot demonstrated, relatively quickly and cost-effectively, its ability to move people more efficiently on transit without compromising the broader transportation road network," the city wrote in a press release.
The city made the transit priority corridor permanent in 2019.
Deputy Mayor Ausma Malik, a fan of the King Street project, told the CBC that enforcement of traffic laws, along with good street design, is vital if transit priority projects are to work correctly.
"Better enforcement has been our first and very significant step, and as the data shows, the addition of traffic agents along King has resulted in quicker travel times for transit users and safer travelling for pedestrians and cyclists," she told the outlet in 2024.
For a brief moment, it looked like Toronto might be heading toward faster rail routes at a time when new understandings of climate change were putting pressure on cities to improve their transit options.
Slowest in the world
For some transit watchers, though, the King Street project feels like too little, too late, with a recent Australian study saying Toronto has some of the slowest tram routes in the world.
"Who wins and who loses these policy battles, [which] may play out every time a traffic light is reprogrammed, a street is reconfigured, or a redevelopment takes place?" the study's author, Jan Scheurer, wrote in an email to Canada's National Observer.
"My guess is that transit interests only rarely win in Toronto, but why is that so?" he asked, wondering whether pro-transit voices and institutions are too weak, or whether, despite strength, those institutions and thought leaders have come to accept Toronto's status quo as sufficient.
And Toronto-area leaders' alleged attitude problems potentially extend beyond complacency over slow trams: A June 10 investigation by Jack Hauen in the Trillium found that before GO expansion partner Deutsche Bahn (DB) and its client, Metrolinx, parted ways, DB staffers "pushed for ambitious, European-style changes, while some of the Crown agency's leadership resisted, insistent that things work differently in Canada."
The Trillium piece paints a grim picture of a regressive leadership stuck in the 20th century on the topic of mobility.
"While the agency's GO Expansion web page still describes a plan for 15-minute service or better on the main lines," Hauen wrote, "sources mourned the more ambitious version of the project, which they said would have made suburban cores feel fully connected to downtown Toronto, and made rail a top choice for riders looking to travel within the Greater Golden Horseshoe.
"A lot of people within the agency didn't understand that," a former Metrolinx employee told Hauen. "Or they didn't want it."
To be fair to the current mayor, Munro says, the city previously had pro-car mayors "for a long time, and this sets the tone for staff. Although Mayor Chow is pro-transit, she hasn't been in office long enough to force a cultural shift, something that takes years."
Munro's "long time" period full of pro-car mayors stretches well before the start of the century, argues Jason Slaughter, a Canadian transplant to Amsterdam who writes and speaks professionally about transit.
"For the first few decades of subway building, Toronto would build a subway line under a streetcar line, and then remove the streetcar," he states in a recent video essay, saying that, unlike some European cities, where the systems were viewed as complementary, "this was a stated goal of the subway system. It was built less as a way to improve public transit, and more as a way to make room for cars on the surface."
Both Slaughter and Scheurer emphasize policy preferences change over time, and there are still chances for Toronto to bounce back from its poor transit performance.
"[It's important to understand] urban streets as contested spaces, or constant policy battlegrounds between stakeholder interests," Scheurer wrote to Canada's National Observer.
For its part, despite the success of its King Street pilot project, the mayor's office won't say whether it's looking at putting some traffic light systems directly under TTC control. Canada's National Observer left a half-dozen requests for comment via phone and email over the course of 16 days.
No one responded.
On June 16, Robert Fico, prime minister of Ukraine's neighbor, Slovakia, which has been a pro-Russian voice in recent years, acknowledged with approval what most European Union leadership circles have tacitly agreed on for years: Ukraine is likely to become part of the EU once the current war ends.
If the experiences of Slovakia and the other Visigrad countries are any indication, this means that money is about to start flowing from the bloc to Ukraine's infrastructure needs, funding roads, bike paths and transit all over the country.
Tram systems in cities like Lviv, in other words, will not be standing still. They're about to get even better.
