Dundas east of Broadview

[keiichicom]

Hi,

Just wondering why the TTC never provided transit on Dundas Ave. East between Broadview and Kingston road, I realize that Dundas is very close to Gerrard and Queen but it would be nice since alot of people live along Dundas East and an extended 504 street car route could also go all the way to kingston road for people to transfer to the 502/503 that runs along kingston road...

Keiichicom

 

[Platform 27]

I've actually been struck by the very same question in the past.

Now, I'm not one of those great transit historian types, but as best I can tell from the Southern Ontario railway map data for Google Earth I have kicking around on my hard drive, even in the golden age of Toronto streetcars Dundas never had tracks on it east of Broadview. Whether a bus ever ran along it is another matter.

As you hinted, the reason is the proximity to Queen and Gerrard: by the standards of today's TTC route grid, that would be a quite tightly-packed trio of routes. With the exception of the existing Queen-Dundas-Gerrard stretch from Parliament to Broadview, I'm actually having a hard time coming up with another example of somewhere in the city where three parallel routes are that closely-spaced together. (I think for a stretch in the downtown core the King-Queen-Dundas trio are a roughly equivalent distance apart, but the density isn't remotely comparable.)

Conventional transit wisdom says people are willing to walk up to 400 m to get to a high-quality surface route, and it's probable that if a Dundas East streetcar did exist it would run with longer headways than the service on Gerrard and Queen. With that in mind, the only potential riders that would mathematically stand to benefit from walking to a Dundas East streetcar stop rather than one on the existing routes would be a very narrow band indeed. If there were tracks dating back to the '20s there already I could maybe see the TTC maintaining a streetcar run, but to install new trackage would probably never make financial sense.

 

[kettal]

It's a really nice bike route, though

 

[adma]

I've actually been struck by the very same question in the past.

Now, I'm not one of those great transit historian types, but as best I can tell from the Southern Ontario railway map data for Google Earth I have kicking around on my hard drive, even in the golden age of Toronto streetcars Dundas never had tracks on it east of Broadview. Whether a bus ever ran along it is another matter.

Actually, the real reason why is that other than an immediate stub, Dundas didn't exist east of Broadview until the mid-1950s. And if there's never been transit there, it may be for parallel reasons to no transit on the Mount Pleasant extension, plus the assumption by this time that both Queen and Gerrard made it a redundant issue...

 

[W. K. Lis]

The Harbord streetcar provided service on Dundas, from Spadina east to Broadview. It then went up Broadview to Gerrard, where it went east to Carlaw, up Carlaw to Riverdale, east on Riverdale to Pape, where it went up Pape to the Lipton loop just north of Danforth.

 

[keiichicom]

Thanks all, makes sense - closeness to Queen and Qerrard routes.

Also wasn't familiar with the Harbord winding route, interesting...

Keiichicom.

 

[keiichicom]

bike route

Kettal-> I know what you mean, I don't have a bike now but I loved riding either across Dundas or gerrard downtown...