Читать книгу Toronto Sketches 11 - Mike Filey - Страница 8

I think I’m correct when I suggest that the city street that has received the most attention by the media over the past few years is St. Clair Avenue, and in particular the part that stretches west from Yonge Street. And there’s really no need to repeat the almost unanimous consensus that the construction of the dedicated streetcar right-of-way along this street could have been done faster, cheaper, and with less disruption of the neighbourhoods involved. People cleverer than I am have told anyone who will listen (as well as some who won’t) just how it should have been done in the first place.

Actually, this brief preamble leads us to the subject of this chapter. The construction of the new St. Clair right-of-way isn’t the first (or even the second or third) time this broad thoroughfare (which was initially a muddy and often impassable concession road blazed through the forest exactly one-and-one-quarter miles north of Bloor Street) has been subjected to major road work.

In fact, in the 1911 City of Toronto Archives photo (opposite), the street is undergoing the first of those seemingly interminable construction projects. And you can almost hear the neighbours wondering just what impact the arrival of the electric streetcar was going to have on their pastoral way of life. Under a magnifying glass, I think I can even see a “Save Our St. Clair” poster.

Looking east on St. Clair Avenue from just east of Dufferin Street, 1911. Note the newly built Oakwood Collegiate in the background on the right.

The same view almost one hundred years later.

In the photo, rails are just being laid, but soon the streetcar would become a permanent fact of life for those living out on St. Clair West. But you’ll notice there’s something missing — the good old TTC. Another decade would pass before what was originally known as the Toronto Transportation Commission would take over responsibility for the city’s public transit needs. When this photo was taken, the new St. Clair streetcar line was just being built by the city’s Works Department. The reason it became the department’s project was because the private company that looked after the transportation needs of the rest of the city steadfastly refused to build tracks and operate a streetcar service in a suburban area of Toronto that they said wouldn’t generate any money. And unlike today’s municipally owned TTC, for the private company the reasoning was sound. The object of providing transit service was simple — to make money, and lots of it, for the company owners and its shareholders.

And so it was that when the first streetcars on St. Clair began running on August 25, 1913, they were operated by the city, while other streetcar lines remained under private ownership until the TTC took over on September 1, 1921.

A brief aside: Some readers may recall a time when those in the know claimed that electric streetcars were “dinosaurs,” and that by 1980 Toronto would be rid of them. In fact, they said the St. Clair route should be one of the first lines to vanish. Not only was the TTC smart enough to keep them, but many Torontonians have come to embrace the streetcar, as have several American cities and their citizens. And, in a strange turn of events, the TTC has recently ordered a large number of new, state-of-the-art streetcars to replace its aging fleet of CLRVs and ALRVs (Canadian and Articulated Light Rail Vehicles).

Worldwide, electric vehicles are seen as the way of the future for numerous smog- and traffic-choked cities.

February 7, 2010