Replacement high pressure sodium lamp on left, the white glow of Toronto’s classic “acorn” lamp on right.
Street lighting is an important, yet overlooked, part of any city’s standard infrastructure. For over seventy years, Toronto’s streets were lit with an elegant and increasingly unique streetlamp design. But modern standards and a desire for standardization will see this change, just as Toronto’s streetcars and street signs have.
Toronto Hydro, which is responsible for Toronto’s street lighting, is replacing the older “acorn” lamps with high pressure sodium (HPS) cobra head lamps (so-called due to their shape when seen from the top or bottom). While surrounding municipalities are switching to white-burning LED lights, Toronto Hydro is installing the older beige-orange glowing lamps.
I asked Toronto Hydro what their long-term plans were for the city’s street lighting infrastructure. Read more on Spacing’s website.
On April 8, Toronto City Council approved a motion brought forward by Councillor Paula Fletcher to change that. Councillor Fletcher’s motion was titled “I’m Walking Here.” Only two months later, new signs are already appearing across Toronto — in Scarborough, Monarch Park, and Swansea. For a city that often takes years to adopt what may seem like simple, easy solutions, this was implemented impressively quickly. The new signs look like standard yellow “no exit” signs, but with a “pedestrians excepted” note at the bottom.
My hope is that these signs will entice Torontonians to get outside, go for a walk, and check out some new streets and parks, enticed by these signs inviting through passage.
In related news, this week Toronto Council approved the expansion of sidewalk slow clearance to all of Toronto’s streets, a service that was previously provided only to suburban areas, where unobstructed sidewalks made municipal slow clearance easy to do. With new snow equipment able to navigate narrow urban sidewalks, Toronto is now finally able to provide universal snow clearance services, a boon for full accessibility.
As public health restrictions ease and stores and restaurant patios reopen this Friday (supported by the city’s willingness to reallocate road space on streets like Yonge and Danforth), there’s never been a better time to for a walk.
Union Station’s Great Hall is one of Toronto’s great indoor spaces. The station was constructed during Toronto’s first great building boom, in an era that began with E.J. Lennox’s Old City Hall (completed in 1899), and concluded with the completion of the Bank of Commerce Building, opened in 1931.
Work on Union Station, built for the Grand Trunk Railway and Canadian Pacific Railway, began in 1914, with the grand headhouse completed in 1920, construction delayed by the First World War.
Foreshadowing the long-delayed station renovations that are still ongoing, work on the elevated tracks and platforms connecting to the new station took nine more years, though a lavish official opening took place on August 6, 1927. By then, the Grand Trunk Railway was fully absorbed by Canadian National Railways (now CN).
Toronto’s Union Station became Canada’s busiest and most important railway hub, with direct trains to cities throughout six provinces and six American states, with through sleeper cars to even more US destinations via Buffalo. Though Montreal was Canada’s largest city until the early 1970s, CN and CP operated out of separate terminals.
Up high, the names of 27 Canadian cities are carved into the walls. On the north side are the names of cities that were served primarily by the Canadian National Railway (the former Grand Trunk, Grand Trunk Pacific, National Transcontinental, Canadian Northern, and Intercolonial Railways, as existed in 1914-1918); on the south, were the names of cities served primarily by the Canadian Pacific Railway.
On the north side, from west to east, the cities read:
Prince Rupert – Edmonton – Saskatoon – Winnipeg – Port Arthur – North Bay – Sarnia – London – Toronto – Ottawa – Sherbrooke – Levis – Moncton – Halifax
Ottawa – Sherbrooke – Levis – Moncton – Halifax, on the northeast corner of Union Station’s Great Hall
On the south side, from east to west, the city names read:
St. John [NB] – Fredericton – Quebec – Montreal – Hamilton – Windsor – Sault St. Marie [sic] – Sudbury – Fort William – Regina – Moose Jaw – Calgary – Vancouver
Montreal – Hamilton – Windsor – Sault St.-Marie – Sudbury – Fort William — names of cities over the entrance to the train concourse
Many, but not all, cities had direct train service from Union Station; the rest required a change of train at Montreal for points east, Sudbury for Sault Ste. Marie, or Jasper, Alberta, for Prince Rupert.
As rail passenger services declined after the Second World War, the number of destinations reachable from Union Station declined. Fredericton lost its rail service in the 1960s, with buses connecting it with the CPR Montreal-Saint John train. (A VIA-operated RDC restored service between Fredericton and Saint John for a few years in the 1980s.) Sault Ste. Marie lost its RDC service to Sudbury in early 1977, though an intrepid traveler could technically still get to Sault Ste. Marie by rail until 2014, by taking a VIA train to Franz or Oba, and then waiting for many hours in remote Northern Ontario for a southbound Algoma Central Train.
But it wasn’t until 1990, due to severe cuts made by Brian Mulroney’s PC government, that daily passenger service across the country came to an end. No longer could a rail passenger reach Calgary, Moose Jaw, Regina, or Thunder Bay (Fort William) by train. In 1994, with the rerouting of all Montreal-Halifax trains to the CN route though Lévis and Campbellton, stations in Sherbrooke and Saint John lost their remaining service. In 1998, CN abandoned its tracks through central Lévis, requiring the Ocean to be rerouted away from the ferry connection to Québec City. And in 2012, the Ontario government ordered the end to the Northlander, which ran through North Bay to Cochrane.
Today, just 14 of the 26 destinations proclaimed on the walls of Toronto’s Union Station can be reached by train. In Fredericton, there are not even any rails remaining.
Despite the decline in medium and long-distance passenger rail services in North America, Toronto’s Union Station is more relevant than ever. GO Transit began operating in 1967, and expanded throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Now, thanks to its role as hub for commuter and regional rail, regional and intercity buses, local transit, and the rail link to Canada’s busiest airport, Union Station became busier than ever. Today, most passengers are headed to places like Aurora, Mississauga, Pickering, or Burlington, despite the promises of far-flung destinations etched on the Great Hall’s walls.
Barry’s Bay, on Greyhound’s Peterborough-Pembroke route, is one of many smaller towns and villages that permanently lost all intercity bus connections since the COVID-19 pandemic
On Thursday, May 13, Greyhound Canada announced that it was permanently ceasing operations. This should not have come as a shock to anyone following the intercity transport industry: for over three decades, intercity bus carriers in this country were privatized (Gray Coach and Canada Coach Lines in Ontario, shut down (Saskatchewan Transportation Corporation), or strangled by continued cutbacks and poor customer service (Greyhound). In 2018, Greyhound Canada ended all its remaining services between Vancouver and Sudbury. The loss of commuter and student traffic — Greyhound’s bread-and-butter in Ontario and Quebec — due to the pandemic led to a temporary, then permanent shutdown.
The next day, on Friday, May 14, Megabus — operated by Coach Canada, a subsidiary of UK-based Stagecoach — announced that it would begin service on the Toronto-Ottawa and Toronto-Kingston routes abandoned by Greyhound. Two buses a day will soon operate between Toronto, Scarborough Town Centre, Kingston, and Ottawa, daily except Tuesdays and Wednesdays, terminating at St-Laurent Shopping Centre, a stop on Ottawa’s new LRT. Though this provides a new option for travelers between the big three cities (VIA Rail continues to serve this route), it does not fill the gaps left by years of decline by private intercity bus operators.
Before Greyhound’s website disappeared, I downloaded the PDF schedules for Ontario and Quebec. In 2019, Greyhound operated three routes between Toronto and Ottawa: an express bus, with stops only in Scarborough, Belleville, Peterborough, Madoc, and/or Kanata, a local bus, making stops in cities and towns along Highway 7 between Peterborough and Carleton Place, and a Kingston-Ottawa bus via Smiths Falls. You can view and download the schedules below:
Peterborough loses two buses a day to and from Ottawa and express bus service to Downtown Toronto (which made the trip in less than two hours off-peak.) Though Peterborough is still connected to Toronto via GO Transit bus Route 88, it can take nearly three hours to go between Union Station and Downtown Peterborough, including a train connection at Oshawa, and many local stops in Clarington and along Highway 115. Other towns, such as Norwood, Marmora, Madoc, Perth, and Carleton Place, lose all bus services, except for a commuter-oriented weekday run between Ottawa and Carleton Place.
Greyhound has chosen to become irrelevant to most Canadians long before the final shutdown announcement. Northern Ontario, at least, still has Ontario Northland (which has expanded its reach), and the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area has GO Transit (though gaps continue to exist in that network). If your rural community is lucky, your local or regional municipality launched a new, subsidized bus or microtransit service. There is also VIA Rail, which serves most larger communities that lost Greyhound services in 2020-2021 (Windsor, Chatham, Belleville, Ottawa, etc.), though it is typically more expensive.
Despite these continued and emerging services, there remains a need for government support of those crucial links left behind by Megabus, VIA, and GO Transit.
Rail diesel coaches (RDCs), introduced to Canada’s railways in the 1950s, were used on branch lines and in local service on busy mainlines through the 1980s. Today, they can only be found on VIA’s Sudbury-White River service, a remnant of the once-mighty CPR transcontinental network.
Updated December 18, 2023 as part of my interactive maps migration.
I recently completed a map of all Canadian passenger rail services that operated in 1955, from Whitehorse, Yukon, to St. John’s Newfoundland. As I wrote back in March, the decline in rail services in Canada can be attributed to a few factors: passenger train revenues were augmented by express cargo and mail, mixed trains, carrying both passengers and freight, were still justified in a time before trucks took over general industrial traffic. An incomplete highway network in northern Ontario, Newfoundland, and much of Western Canada also guaranteed healthy passenger demand in an era before jet travel became accessible to the masses.
The introduction of rail diesel coaches (RDCs), with their lower labour costs compared to conventional trains kept some branch lines going through the 1960s, but by the mid 1970s, neither Canadian National nor Canadian Pacific were interested in running passenger trains anymore; both were increasingly focused on bulk freight (grains, minerals, chemicals, finished automobiles) and intermodal container traffic.
VIA Rail took over most of CN and CP’s passenger trains in 1978, with direct government subsidies helping to fund its operations and capital expenses. By then, passenger train service was concentrated in the highly populated Quebec City-Windsor Corridor, but there were still three trains a day between Halifax and Moncton, two trains daily between Montreal and Atlantic Canada, between Winnipeg and Vancouver, and between Calgary and Edmonton. Scheduled bus connections, some even operated by VIA Rail, provided connections to places such as St. John’s, Fredericton, Charlottetown, and the Okanagan Valley.
Cuts imposed in 1981, 1990, and 2012 devastated the network. By 2019, there were only three trains a week in Atlantic Canada, two trains a week between Toronto and Vancouver. Even the Corridor saw cuts: there were five trains a day between Toronto, Kitchener, and Stratford, in 2019, there were just two. The only bright spots were an increase in the number of trains between Toronto and Ottawa and growing commuter rail networks in Toronto and Montreal.
A revised map, linked to below, depicts the passenger network in 1955 and in 1980, just prior to the 1981 cuts. Routes operating between Canada and the United States are depicted (CN, CP, New York Central, Delaware & Hudson, Great Northern, Northern Pacific, and White Pass & Yukon in 1955, Amtrak and White Pass & Yukon in 1980). More information on each route is available by clicking on the lines.
Cutting down trees to make way for a surface parking lot in Downtown Brampton
Earlier this April, contractors hired by Metrolinx cut down trees on its Downtown Brampton property, where twelve houses once stood. The work, originally scheduled for the week of March 22, did not begin until April 12.
The tree removal brings Greater Toronto’s regional transit operating and planning authority one step closer to building a new 200-plus surface parking lot in a city that hopes to renew its downtown core.
Starting in 2016, Metrolinx purchased over a dozen homes along with two four-storey office towers in an area bounded by Railroad, Nelson, and Elizabeth Streets, immediately south of the Brampton GO Station. It vacated and demolished the houses between 2016 and 2019, and left the two office buildings vacant. Metrolinx’s plan was to build a new surface parking lot to expand parking capacity, though in early 2018, the Liberal provincial government announced a new Ryerson University/Sheridan College campus on the existing main parking lot on the north side of the station. Metrolinx’s acquisition of occupied homes — including heritage-listed buildings and a rooming house — made more sense.
After the election of a new Progressive Conservative government led by Doug Ford, funding for the educational campus was pulled, though the City of Brampton and Ryerson University continued to advance plans for the downtown area. The city bought up more of the downtown core, including the southeast corner of George and Nelson Streets, across from the vacated office buildings, as well as the thirty-year old office building at 2 Nelson Street West, below which is the Brampton Transit downtown terminal. These newly acquired lands would be home to a larger bus terminal that would link to an expanded GO station and a proposed extension of the Hurontario LRT, and an Innovation Centre that would serve the education campus and include a new central library.
The old plans for the Ryerson Unversity/Sheridan College building on the GO Transit parking lot, and a Centre for Innovation on the southeast corner of George and Nelson Streets. The Metrolinx lands are in the block between the Centre for Innovation and the GO Station/proposed Ryerson building
Already, there are several high-rise developments in the downtown area under construction or in the planning phase. More development lands will be unlocked with the Riverwalk project, which will improve flood protection along Etobicoke Creek while providing an improved public space.
A two-tower rental highrise development is progressing on the old Dominion Skate Factory lands, across the tracks from the GO Station, bringing hundreds of new residents to the downtown core and right to the station.
Given Brampton’s urban aspirations for its downtown core, another surface parking lot — adding 200 spots to the existing 861 spaces — is not the right idea.
At Bramalea Station, construction has nearly finished on a 1,300 spot parking garage, part of a larger project that also includes a new, larger station building, a larger bus terminal, additional pedestrian tunnels, and improved platforms and security features. Bramalea already has over 2500 parking spaces, but unlike in Downtown Brampton, this is a logical space for parking expansion. The station is surrounded by warehouses and factories, at the intersection of two major truck routes, and close to highways. It is not a place that is easily urbanized. However, improved pedestrian and cycling access is very much warranted.
New garage nearly complete at Bramalea GO Station
With the expansion of parking at Bramalea GO, why is Metrolinx eager to add another parking lot in Downtown Brampton, especially with Ryerson’s downtown plans on hold?
Misleading “no exit” signs, like these on Maitland Place at Jarvis Street, will soon be changed by the City of Toronto to indicate that indeed, pedestrians can continue through
Though these signs are required under traffic codes and regulations, they do not reflect that in many cases, there is an exit for pedestrians.
I quickly created a Google map of all locations in the City of Toronto marking such locations. Through a social media campaign led by Walk Toronto, we were quickly able to map over 450 locations where a pathway, sidewalk, or staircase allows a pedestrian to continue their way where motor vehicles are forced to turn around.
The motion, which was amended to strengthen the wording, requests city staff to develop a new signage standard to indicate where “no exit” signage betrays a pedestrian passage, and to begin installing these new signs this year.
Councillor Paula Fletcher’s motion (inspired by @Walk_TO) to have staff modify “No Exit” signage in places where there are, in fact, exits for pedestrians carries via show of hands, with some amended wording. https://t.co/owNfqtPgNUpic.twitter.com/eevn2bMwkN
The map that I created based on Dylan’s initial suggestion will be used to help identify these locations.
Given the ongoing pandemic, where we are all subjected to yet another lockdown, walking is one of the few permitted ways for each of us to get outside, enjoy the fresh spring air, and get much needed exercise. Knowing where one can walk, especially away from heavy traffic or busy sidewalks and paths, will only help unlock the city for more Torontonians.
I want to thank everyone who submitted locations for the map to Walk Toronto or to myself via Twitter or directly to me on this website. This couldn’t have happened without the help of fellow Torontonians.
Former Canadian Pacific locomotive #136 hauls excursion trains at the South Simcoe Railway in Tottenham, Ontario
December 17, 2023: The complete map has been migrated to a newer ArcGIS Online account, on account of ESRI suddenly changing its monthly service account to charge bandwidth. That was a pay-as-you go account that helped me get re-acquainted with the ESRI ArcGIS Online platform before I set up a full online subscription to support a small business I co-founded in 2021.
However, I am happy to announce that I completed updates to the Ontario Intercity Transport Map and the 1955 Canada Passenger Rail Map, and that they are safely on a new subscription server at ESRI Canada. Please let me know if you have any suggestions or corrections to the maps, especially during the migration phase.
Sadly, passenger rail has faced a long, slow decline in Canada. Though commuter and regional rail systems in the Toronto and Montreal metropolitan areas have expanded tremendously over the last fifty years, rail service in general has declined in frequency, reliability, and even in speed. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, just six trains a day in each direction operated direct between Canada’s two largest cities, the fastest of those trains taking 4 hours 48 minutes to go 539 kilometres to get from Toronto to Montreal.
Seventy years ago, 28 trains on a typical weekday called at CN’s Hamilton Station, departing for Toronto, Niagara Falls, London, Guelph, Barrie, and Simcoe, with another 12 trains calling at the TH&B station on Hunter Street. In 2019, just six GO trains departed Hamilton for Toronto each weekday, with no direct connections even to Niagara, London, or Guelph.
There are several causes for the decline in passenger rail. In 1955, which the map below depicts, passenger train revenues were augmented by express cargo and mail, with the mail contracts alone helping to subsidize many branch lines. Lightly-travelled branch lines were served by mixed trains, which carry both passengers and freight. In Northern Ontario and Quebec, many highways were still of poor quality or unfinished — Highway 17 along the Lake Superior coast was not complete until September 1960. Construction of Highway 401 was just getting underway in 1955. In addition, the airline industry was still new, and air travel was expensive.
Improved highways drew more passengers to coach buses, while the move to trucks for cargo and mail deliveries made many branch lines unprofitable. Larger jet aircraft made air travel cheaper and more convenient for long distances. The major railways concentrated their energies on modernizing their freight networks, with CN and CP building new freight classification and intermodal yards outside of central Toronto, while focusing on bulk freight and shipping containers.
Though CN made efforts to win passengers back in the 1960s and early 1970s with new fare structures and equipment like the Turbo train between Toronto and Montreal, the government of Canada stepped in and took over most intercity passenger rail services in 1977. Though VIA Rail Canada acquired new modern locomotives and rail cars for the Ontario-Quebec corridor services, cuts to government subsidies made in 1981, 1989-1990, and 2012 forced further service cutbacks. British Columbia and Ontario also cut passenger services on their own rural railways.
I mapped the year 1955 for several reasons. I have CN and CP schedules for those years in my collection, while I found contemporary Ontario Northland and New York Central schedules online. It was also the year both railways inaugurated new transcontinental trains: CP launched the Canadian, while CN launched the Super Continental, luxurious diesel-hauled trains with modern sleeping cars and lounges. There were six trains a day leaving Montreal and Toronto for Vancouver that year. In 2019, there were just two trains a week.
In 1955, there were still many branch passenger and mixed trains in Ontario and Quebec, most of which were gone by 1965. Mixed trains were notoriously slow, though, but in many cases, there was a faster parallel highway coach. 1955 was also the last year for CP’s electric trains between Kitchener and Lake Erie, with the London & Port Stanley and Montreal & Southern Counties railways ending passenger runs a year later.
For Ontario and Quebec, I used Paul Delamere’s amazing Ontario Railway Map Collection and Quebec Railway Map Collection, adapting his work to identify those routes used by passenger trains in 1955, then mapping them on my own server. Mapping other routes was much more labourous.
Original version of interactive map
Please contact me if you have any suggestions, corrections, or other feedback.
The starting wage for an Amazon fulfillment centre employee is $17.00 an hour, despite notoriously tough working conditions. With most professional and office workers at home, and with ongoing pandemic restrictions, Amazon has enjoyed significant sales increases. But those workers picking and packing orders are not able to work from home – and workplace spread has been a significant factor in COVID-19 transmission in Ontario.
Brampton, home to two of the GTA’s fulfilment centres, and close to Amazon’s Mississauga, Milton and Bolton warehouses, has been a COVID-19 hotspot. Like Toronto, Peel Region has been under lockdown and stay-at-home orders since November.
Like most new logistics facilities, the new Scarborough warehouse, like the other five GTA Amazon fulfillment centres, is in an industrial area on the city’s outskirts, where land is plentiful, but transit and pedestrian access is lacking. East of Tapscott Road, Steeles Avenue narrows from four lanes to two, and there are no designated pedestrian crossings at the intersection with Eastvale Drive. The eastbound TTC stop at Eastvale Avenue was removed in 2018 after a passenger was struck and killed trying to cross the street after disembarking from a 53 Steeles East bus. The next nearest stop, at Tapscott Road, is 300 metres west.
Steeles Avenue, looking west towards Eastvale Drive and the signalized intersection beyond, at Tapscott Road
The sidewalk on the south side of Steeles Avenue ends at Tapscott, a few hundred metres west of the Amazon fulfilment centre. On the north side, the sidewalk ends at Ferncliffe Crescent in Markham. Despite a new residential area in Morningside Heights, to the east, there is no sidewalk along Steeles to connect to it. Pedestrians heading to Amazon or towards Staines Road must choose whether to walk in the mud, or on the busy roadway. Though the posted speed limit is 50 km/h, motorists regularly travel at 60 km/h or faster.
Looking east on Steeles from Tapscott Road – despite the sign advising motorists of pedestrian activity, there are no sidewalks leading east towards the new Amazon fulfillment centre (Sonali Praharaj)
A stairway and ramp were built on the north end of the Amazon property, likely with the expectation that a sidewalk on the south side of Streeles Avenue would soon be installed. This would provide improved pedestrian access to the fulfillment centre. But without a safe and logical way to get to it from the street, it remains largely unused.
Passmore Avenue, on the south side of the fulfillment centre, was rebuilt with a sidewalk in the late fall of 2020, months after Amazon opened. However, it requires a lengthy walk north to Steeles Avenue up Tapscott, and there are no sidewalks on Tapscott from Passmore south, towards McNicoll Avenue. The intersection of Passmore and Tapscott itself – controlled by an all-way stop – still does not feature proper crosswalks.
Looking east on Steeles from Tapscott Road – despite the sign advising motorists of pedestrian activity, there are no sidewalks leading east towards the new Amazon fulfillment centre (Sonali Praharaj)
Though there are two TTC bus routes that operate to the corner of Tapscott Road and Passmore Avenue – 53B/953B Steeles East and 102B/C Markham Road – for months, workers had to walk on the roadway, through a construction site to access those buses. Anyone looking to go east, towards Morningside Heights, or southeast, towards Malvern, still face a long, dangerous walk or a lengthy bus commute.
The corner of Tapscott Road and Passmore Avenue
The TTC, starting January 11, 2021, began diverting the 53B Steeles East bus to directly serve the Amazon fulfillment centre, finally serving a major industrial trip generator and reducing essential workers’ travel times. Even still, the new sidewalk on Passmore ends at the warehouse entrance – anyone waiting for a bus must still walk and wait in the snow or mud.
Eventually, Steeles Avenue will be widened, with new sidewalks and bike lanes, and Morningside Avenue will be extended north to Steeles Avenue. However, these improvements have been planned for years and completion is still several years away. Though new warehouses have opened here, civic infrastructure has not caught up.
New TTC bus stop serving the Amazon Fulfillment Centre on Passmore Road (Sonali Praharaj)
The TTC’s service change, adding a new bus stop on Passmore Avenue, was a welcome – yet overdue – acknowledgement that essential workers, especially racialized and lower-paid workers, deserve better. It is inexcusable that new employment uses are planned, approved, and constructed before the appropriate pedestrian infrastructure and transit services are in place. It is also inexcusable that after a TTC customer was killed that a nearby bus stop was removed, rather than safety improvements added instead. This is not just a matter of ensuring a basic level of safety for pedestrians – this is a matter of justice for those we consider essential workers.
At least the new Yonge Street Rapidway would serve York Region’s busiest transit corridor, supporting new high-density development in Richmond Hill. Unlike on Highway 7 or in Newmarket, there are no two-phase pedestrian crossings on this part of Yonge. Unfortunately, a botched connection between the new Rapidway at Major Mackenzie Drive created a new problem for the YRT/Viva transit network.
This issue — along with the other problems with York Region’s Rapidways that I discussed previously — should be held up as lessons on what not to do when building new transit rights-of-way in street medians, be it on Hurontario Street in Mississauga and Brampton, planned BRT lines on Dundas Street in Mississauga, or Queen Street in Brampton.
