While streetcar service on King Street East has resumed at one end of the city, commuters are preparing for another interruption at the opposite end of the route.
Service along King Street at Church Street returned following a summer-long closure of the intersection due to the replacement of aging streetcar tracks as well as a 142-year-old watermain.
According to officials, while work at the intersection was finished on August 18, streetcars did not resume operation until the long weekend following testing on the newly installed tracks.
But as many celebrate the return to service, another shutdown is on the horizon.
“There’s actually two interruptions to come,” says transit advocate Steve Munro. “The first one, which will be next weekend, will be for TIFF because there’s the annual diversion of the service around King and John so that the King cars will not be running on King Street between Thursday [September 4] and Monday [September 10].”
The second disruption, expected to get underway mid-September, will affect many more commuters.
“Although the TTC hasn’t announced a firm date for it, the intersection of King and Dufferin will close for reconstruction. Now, it’ll be the same kind of track reconstruction that we saw at King and Church, but the difference is that the only work to be done is track construction.”
According to the TTC, there will be no service on Dufferin Street between Queen Street West and the Dufferin Gate/Exhibition Loop. The 29 Dufferin and 329 Dufferin buses will divert both ways on Queen Street West over to Shaw Street and along King Street West, while northbound buses will operate via Gladstone Avenue and Peel Avenue. The 929 Dufferin Express route will be shortened to Queen Street West and loop back along Gladstone Avenue and Peel Avenue.
The 503 Kingston Road buses will only operate between King Street West and Joe Shuster Way and Bingham Loop
“They are going to be faced with a fairly big hole in their transit service, both on Dufferin and on King Street West,” says Munro. “People who are living, particularly people who live south of King, will have to walk all the way up to Queen to get transit service, and there will be no bus service on Dufferin. So, people are going to have to walk.”
The TTC says the King and Dufferin service disruption is expected to last until late October.
