The Toronto Traveler

Subway Sundays: Five Reasons Why Toronto’s Subway is Important

by Justin on April 20th, 2008

Photo Credit: Flickr

1) Strikes Affect the City Massively: The TTC has been on strike before; many times in fact.  During my own time in primary, middle, secondary and now post secondary school, the TTC has had at least three different strikes that I can remember off the top of my head and there were probably a number of near misses as well where the union was able to negotiate a deal with the city at the last minute in order to avoid a strike.  And those near misses were good things too, because the city is paralyzed without the TTC.  People can’t go to work, tourists can’t visit the places they want to visit and generally the mood of the city goes down when the TTC is not around.

2) Main Tourist Attractions are Near Subways: Whether you are talking about the CN Tower, the Rogers Centre, Roy Thomson Hall, Casa Loma or any other major tourist attraction in the City of Toronto, almost all of them are built near subway stations.  This is not to say that the buildings themselves were constructed with the subway in mind, but rather it is to say that the TTC provides a route to the city’s main attractions that allows tourists that don’t know the city very well to get to them relatively easily.  This makes the TTC very important for Toronto’s tourism industry.

3) Rush Hour is better on the Bus: I remember the feeling of joy I had when I first got my driver’s license and now six years after the fact I’ve come to realize that I hate driving downtown.  If I take the bus, train or streetcar however, I can fall asleep and let someone else worry about the driving.

4) The TTC is Cheaper: Whether you are a person working a job where money is tight or whether you are a tourist trying to see Toronto on a budget, the TTC provides you the opportunity to save a ton of money on gasoline.  A monthly metropass is just over $100 and a weekly pass is around $30.  If you toured Toronto in a car for a week, the first time you filled up you would already be past the amount of money you’d need to pay for unlimited weekly travel on the TTC.

5) The TTC Reduces Smog: Whenever people ask me when they should come and visit Toronto, I usually recommend that they do so during the summer.  While part of this is just my Canadian bias feeling that someone can’t truly see Toronto in all its glory without some snow on the ground, another part of it is the fact that downtown Toronto during the summer has problems with smog from time to time.  For a city’s downtown core that is already prone to poor air quality days, can you imagine how much worse it would be without the downtown subway system?

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POSTED IN: Getting Around - Local Transportation, Photos, Top Ten