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🇨🇦 Toronto

King Street Transit Priority Corridor

Since November 2017 private cars on King Street between Bathurst and Jarvis must turn right within a few blocks, leaving the through lanes to the 504 streetcar; Toronto made the arrangement permanent in April 2019. What sets it apart is the measurement — the city published monthly dashboards built from streetcar GPS, Bluetooth travel-time sensors, video counts and Moneris card-payment data, so the transit gains and the disputed business effects were tested with the same rigour. Enforcement, not design, turned out to be the weak point.

Live 📅 since 2017 ✔ Editor-reviewed

✔ Reviewed by the 1001 Smart Cities editorial desk · 🔎 Last verified

🚲 MobilityPublic transportTraffic managementSensors & IoTOpen data

📊 Impact

City and TTC evaluation of the pilot year: transit travel time about five minutes better at the 90th percentile and weekday ridership up from roughly 72,000 to 84,000 boardings. A 2023 University of Toronto School of Cities study counted about 6,800 illegal turns or through movements a day, under 0.3 percent of them ticketed.

🎓 Lesson

Measuring a street intervention this closely is rare and worth copying — but the same data showed the gains eroding once ticketing lapsed. A redesign that depends on police attention decays at the speed of that attention.

Evidence🏛️ Official
Scale🏘️ District
FundingCity of Toronto capital and operating budgets, delivered with the TTC

Sources

↗ City of Toronto — King Street Transit Priority CorridorOperator page. Confirms pilot launch 12 November 2017 and permanent status 16 April 2019, corridor Bathurst to Jarvis; says the pilot 'demonstrated, relatively quickly and cost-effectively, its ability to move people more efficiently on transit without compromising the broader transportation road network'.
↗ UTTRI — Overview of the King Street Transit Pilot with the City's David KupermanSource for the measurement programme: 'Summary data are being posted to the project website on a monthly basis.' Names streetcar GPS tracking, Bluetooth sensors and cameras, permanent video-based counting, and manual travel-time and curbside surveys; reports 'improvements to transit travel times of approximately five minutes at the 90th percentile'.
↗ City of Toronto — King Street Transit Pilot annual dashboard (April 2019)The published year-one dashboard, still online. Basis of the ridership and travel-time figures in the impact field. Note for the editor: the file is a graphics-heavy PDF that did not decode through the review proxy, so its figures were cross-checked against the TTC board report and press coverage rather than read line by line.
↗ TTC Board — Results of the King Street Transit Pilot (11 April 2019)Operator report behind the recommendation to make the corridor permanent; source of the 72,000 to 84,000 weekday boardings figure reported at the time as a 16 percent increase.
↗ The Globe and Mail — Data seem to contradict restaurateur complaints about Toronto's King Street pilot (16 Feb 2018)Sentence-level source for the Moneris payment-data strand: consumer spending from Bathurst to Jarvis, October to December 2017, was 'in line with seasonal spending patterns over the last three years' — up 21 percent against a citywide 20 percent — while Kit Kat owner Al Carbone argued the area-wide figures masked local losses and that 'King Street is hurting'.
↗ University of Toronto School of Cities — Traffic violations on the King Street Transit Priority Corridor (Nov 2023)Independent study by Jeff Allen and Qi-Sheng Chen using city vehicle-movement data and police data from 2016 to mid-2023. Finds roughly 6,800 illegal turns and through movements per day, with less than 0.3 percent of offending drivers ticketed; calls the unenforced volume a missed opportunity for a cash-strapped city.
↗ CBC — Drivers not being ticketed for violating traffic rules on King Street transit corridor, study findsIndependent press coverage of the School of Cities findings; corroborates the 6,800 per day and under 0.3 percent ticketing figures. Direct fetch returned 403; verified via search result text and the School of Cities page itself.
↗ City of Toronto — New measures speed up streetcar travel on King Street Transit Priority Corridor (9 Feb 2024)Official account of the December 2023 response: dedicated Traffic Agents at six intersections in weekday peaks, signal-timing changes and dedicated transit signals. States that with agents present 'streetcar travel times between University Avenue and Jarvis Street are approximately 28-44 minutes faster', and that King Street moves 'more than 72,000 riders on an average weekday'.
↗ CP24 — City exploring automated cameras for 'block the box' infractions on King Street corridor (11 Mar 2025)Current enforcement state. The city and Toronto Police have asked the Province for permission to use camera images for these offences; Mayor Chow: 'Right now, it's only police officers that can give out traffic tickets.' Also records fines raised from $90 to $450 and a 2025 budget item quadrupling traffic agents at a cost of $3 million.
↗ Steve Munro — The Vanishing Transit Priority on King Street (21 Oct 2023)Long-running independent analysis of TTC vehicle-tracking data: 'since May 2023 travel times are rising, but worse the 85th percentile values are growing back to pre-pilot levels in some periods', attributed to enforcement that lapsed during the pandemic and never fully returned.
↗ City of Toronto — King Street Transit Priority Corridor Update, staff report (Feb 2025)Most recent operator status document reached. Records that travel times degrade rapidly once Traffic Agents finish their shifts and that a 'more sustainable, full-time solution is needed', and schedules the first mid-block curb extensions (Bathurst to Portland, Church to Jarvis) to begin in 2026.
📎 Cite this project

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “King Street Transit Priority Corridor” — Toronto, Canada. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/toronto-king-street-transit-priority/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.

The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.

🔗 Related projects

🇨🇦 Toronto Automated Speed Enforcement (abolished by the province) · Toronto The city asked Ontario to let cameras enforce this corridor in 2025 — the same year the province switched Toronto's speed cameras off. 🇪🇸 Green Axes Eixample · Barcelona Barcelona redesigned its streets; Toronto only re-signed one. Both gains depend on politics — stalled expansion there, lapsed tickets here. 🇵🇭 EDSA Busway (Carousel) · Manila Manila gave its busway a median lane and 166 cameras timing bus stops; Toronto gave King Street turn rules and monthly public dashboards. 🇨🇦 Toronto Subway Automatic Train Control Resignalling · Toronto Another verified project from Toronto.

🧭 Explore the atlas

🏙️ Toronto Explore every verified project and the city's smart-city story. 🚲 Mobility Browse the main topic behind this project. 📖 Adaptive traffic signals Traffic lights that retime themselves in real time from live sensor data to match actual traffic, instead of running a fixed pre-set schedule. 📖 Congestion pricing Charging drivers a fee to use busy roads at busy times, so traffic thins out and remaining trips flow more freely. 📖 Open data Information anyone is free to access, use and share, published by governments in machine-readable formats under an open licence. 🚦 Asphalt or algorithms Read the wider analysis and comparison. 🏙️ Urban digital twins compared: Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul and Rotterdam Read the wider analysis and comparison.

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