Yesterday morning, I took the Downtown Relief Line to work. Or rather, a downtown relief line. I got off the bus at Dundas West subway station, as usual, and rather than shoehorning myself onto the Bloor subway to experience the intimacy with complete strangers that has become the trademark of the Toronto morning subway commute, I got onto the 504 King Streetcar and took a seat.

It was an interesting, comfortable ride. Travelling above ground, I was able to maintain a signal on my phone, catching up on the day’s news, and to look out at the growing, changing neighbourhoods along the way (Roncesvalles, Parkdale, Liberty Village, and so on through the financial district). I didn’t have to change vehicles to get into the city’s core.

There was just one catch: it took 42 minutes to get to the corner of King and Yonge, about twice as long as the 20 to 25 minutes the same trip takes on the subway.

On Monday, Mayor John Tory, TTC chair Josh Colle, and TTC CEO Andy Byford announced, with great fanfare, a measure to cut the travel time on the 504. By allowing people with transfers and Metropasses to board at the rear doors, Tory said, they could cut the travel time on the route by about 10 per cent. Which means the trip I took could be cut to as little as 38 minutes soon.

At their banner press conference, I wish they had gone further. Much further.

There are plans on the books to spend a lot of money and perform massive construction operations over many years to offer subway alternatives that, to some extent, mimic the route of the 504.

The Downtown Relief Line that’s been pitched for a generation would travel from the east end somewhere along the Danforth, down along King (or another nearby street) and then back up to Dundas West Station. It would take — over two projected construction phases — the better part of a couple decades to build, and probably cost $10 billion or more. (It would travel the trip I took in 13 minutes, according to a 2012 Metrolinx projection.)

John Tory’s own proposed commuter relief line, SmartTrack, would travel from Dundas West to Union and back up through Leslieville and Riverdale to meet the Bloor subway at Main St. It would, he promised on the campaign trail, take seven years and $8 billion to build. (It would likely travel the trip I took this morning in about 15 minutes.)

I hope, sincerely, that both of those get built, because as the city grows, we’ll need more and more capacity and more and more options in our transportation network.

But it seems to me there’s an opportunity to move much more quickly and much less expensively to provide some relief to the overcrowded subway line — and to commuters — by using the existing King streetcar line.

All you’d need to do is make the 504 run much faster than it does now. Which could be accomplished fairly simply in a couple of ways.

First of all, you could eliminate about half of the stops.

The single biggest impediment to streetcars moving faster is the number of stops they make — both because they cannot get up to speed in between them, and because of the time it takes to open and close the doors and load all the passengers. Right now, people on Bloor St. are well-served by a subway route that only stops at major streets —Bathurst and Spadina subway stations, for instance, are 600 metres apart, a relatively manageable walk for almost everyone in between who wants to board a train.

On the same stretch of King St., the streetcar stops at Portland and Brant streets in between — which means a streetcar needs to stop every 200 metres or so. Sometimes the stops are even closer together — on Broadview there are places where the 504 stops are less than 100 metres apart. The left field fence at the Rogers Centre is farther from home plate than many of the stops between Dundas and Danforth are from one another. You could throw a ball between stops, and it would arrive far faster than the streetcar would. If the TTC spaced stops 500 to 600 metres apart on the 504 route, they could speed up the streetcar a great deal.

Second, we could close King St. downtown to car traffic. Serious proposals to do just that surface every now and then, in large part because it’s already a terrible street to travel by car — today there are about three times as many streetcar passengers as cars on King in an average day.

Closing the road to cars between, say, Dufferin and the Don River, would mean the streetcars could move without ever getting caught in car traffic. (The move could open up a major new bike route, too, and perhaps even a one-way lane reserved for taxis and delivery vehicles, if we wanted to do that). At the ends of the route, on Roncesvalles and Broadview, we could eliminate street parking and make the streetcar tracks a designated right-of-way.

I think by doing this — based on admittedly rough estimates of timing, eyeballing the speed of streetcars in some parts of the city where stops are placed farther apart and the vehicles run in rights-of way — it’s possible that the trip time on the 504 could be cut by 30 to 50 per cent. Which means the trip I took on my commute to work could take 20 to 30 minutes, making it competitive with the similar subway trip.

Here’s the best part: it would cost very little to test this idea out, and take almost no time, by the standards of transit improvements. A pilot project could be set up in a few months — you put bags over some stops to close them (just as we do during construction) and use pylons and paint to close the street to car traffic (just as we do during construction). And if it works, you make it permanent — and perhaps introduce other improvements, such as traffic signal priority that would ensure streetcars never have to stop at a red light. If it doesn’t work, you go back to what we have now.

Would it be disruptive to traffic? Maybe. The former assistant commissioner of public space of New York City, Andrew Wiley-Schwartz, recently told me and a group of other people over an informal dinner that they found the anticipated traffic chaos from moves such as pedestrianizing Times Square never materialized, and in some cases traffic actually flowed better. But if we launched this pilot project as Queens Quay and Front St. reopen after years-long periods of construction, the downtown grid as a whole would see a net immediate increase in car traffic lanes available, and we could study the effects on the network.

In any case, as a six-month or one-year pilot project, it wouldn’t be any more disruptive than the kind of road closures we endure regularly for routine construction. Compared to its potential to transform transit travel for tens of thousands of people in Toronto, it seems a relatively low-risk endeavor, and worth a try.

Already the 504 streetcar carries 60,000 passengers a day — one third more than the Sheppard subway line we spent eight years and $1 billion building in the 1990s, and a third more than the Scarborough RT route that is the planned site of a $2.8-billion subway extension that might open in the early 2020s.

If a pilot project on King proved successful, that number of riders could grow substantially as more people take the streetcar as an alternative to the existing subway — which could require buying more streetcars in time (at a cost of tens of millions of dollars, versus the billions a subway requires), and suggest the possibility of making the same kinds of changes to other routes — the similarly routed 505 Dundas car, and possibly the Queen and Gerrard streetcars, too — offering even more convenient, quick routes into the core as alternatives to the subway.

Call it Streetcar Rapid Transit. During the election campaign, John Tory talked a lot about the need to be “bold” and to put the existing rail network to better use to provide relief for commuters. This idea would do all those things. It would also be inexpensive and relatively simple compared with SmartTrack or any other big idea currently on the table.

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As far as I know, this is not a proposal that is seriously on anyone’s radar, even as the assembled press and transit heavyweights of the city gathered for the hoopla surrounding a modest change to boarding procedure this week.

But as I sought relief on the 504 from the crowding of the subway yesterday, I had time to dream.