[URBAN NOTE] "Happy birthday to the Toronto streetcar system"

[rfmcdonald]

Yesterday at Spacing Toronto, Chris Bateman celebrated the anniversary of the foundation of the Toronto streetcar network.

There are perhaps few things more symbolic of Toronto than its streetcars. For more than 150 years, surface rail has formed the backbone of the city’s public transportation system, and despite numerous struggles and threats of abolition, it’s still streetcars that principally serve the downtown core: 240 vehicles carrying some 290,000 daily riders across 11 lines.

154 years ago this week, work started on the city’s first streetcar route: a horse-drawn “street railway” between Yorkville town hall just north of Yonge and Bloor and St. Lawrence Hall on King St.

The route was chosen based on its popularity. The city’s first public transit company, founded by cabinet maker and undertaker H. Burt Williams in 1849, operated a stagecoach service between roughly the same two points, linking the Toronto’s main market with what was then the independent town of Yorkville.

Williams started out with just four “omnibuses,” each one capable of carrying just six passengers, but as the business and ridership grew, so did the fleet. By the 1850s, buses were leaving every few minutes during peak hours.

The Toronto Street Railway company was founded in 1861 by Alex Easton of Philadelphia. His vehicles, while still pulled behind a horse, promised a smoother ride compared to the Williams buses. The city’s roads were still unsealed in the 1860s, and the surface was often rutted by wagon wheels or a muddy quagmire in the rain.