Toronto's streetcars (trams) have been a subject of controversy forever. Personally, I quite like them, and I think people would be shocked at how bad Toronto's traffic could get without them (they hold multiple times more passengers than buses). We've had a glimpse of that from time to time when construction projects necessitate bus replacements (an increasingly common occurrence). They are also preferable environmentally. Many people, though - mainly car drivers, to be fair - viscerally hate them, and blame them for all sort of evils.
Anyway, be that as it may, a new study of tram systems around the world has found that, while Toronto scores well on service frequency (departures per hour per direction), it comes in dead last on network speed. Essentially, Toronto has the slowest trams in the world, and by quite a large margin.
Toronto's streetcars are about three time slower than those of Utrecht, and twice as slow as cities like London, Göteborg, Stockholm and Sydney.
Now, to be fair, Utrecht is a relatively small city, but London? Hold on, though, London doesn't have trams! Or it didn't last time I was there. When I checked, it turns out that "Trams run in parts of South London between Wimledon, Croydon, Beckenham and New Addington". Oh, so not in the busy central part of the city, then? Well, of course they will run faster!
Stockholm and Sydney, though, fair comparison, right? Well, maybe. But Stockholm's figures are from 2017 and Sydney's are from 2016, while Toronto's figures are from 2024. So, not really an apples-to-apples comparison in an increasingly busy world.
Toronto's streetcar system may indeed be bad, although a comparison factoring in dollar investment may be more illuminating, given Toronto's notoriously underfunded public transit system. But I think that BlogTO could have done a better job of offering some perspective rather than just a blanket condemnation.
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