The King Street pilot project may be here to stay.
The pilot project began in November.
That's when the streetcar was made the king of King, basically banning vehicles between Jarvis and Bathurst.
Mayor John Tory strongly expects King Street to becomes a permanent transit corridor, in some form, after the pilot ends on December 31. "Obviously you could make some changes to that based on what the data says otherwise why would you have bothered in having the pilot project and collecting all the data."
Tory wants to see all the data before he comments on any possible change that may be considered but, so far, he likes what he sees. "Based on the transit ridership, the reliability of streetcars, the fact that I think we're making progress on normalizing things for business, the fact that I think traffic has been minimally interfered with, and the fact that according to the Ryerson study there's been a very significant additional economic benefit. I think for all those reasons you would certainly think we're heading in the direction of making this a permanent transit corridor."
The study put out by the Ryerson City Building Institute pegs the annual time savings for riders of the King Street streetcar at $11.5 million.
"It's definitely not perfect. There's not enough data about how every single rider on the King Street streetcar is being affected by the pilot project. We tried to be conservative in our estimates knowing this data isn't perfect. So, instead of assuming the full time saving benefits would be passed on to every rider we assumed about half of those time estimates would be passed on to a given rider," explains Research Manager Graham Haines.
His team used a method used by Metrolinx to calculate their findings.
"Definitely having better and more data would allow for a more fulsome analysis but I think what is fair to say is that this $11.5 million gives us a ballpark figure of what these time savings are worth," says Haines.
He doesn't believe that with more complete data the time savings could show no time savings or negative time savings.