In my last column, I talked about how Uber — the tech-company behemoth that has caused so much controversy in the transportation debates in Toronto and other cities around the world — has raised a sort of two-headed debate: One about its behaviour as an employer and corporate citizen, and the other about the need, underlined by its products, for innovation and change in public policy.

This second element — what Uber’s success says about the status quo — was particularly evident this month with the launch of its new service, UberHop.

UberHop is, essentially, a micro-bus service. Drivers with vans or SUVs pick up four or five passengers, each paying $5, from a specific location and drive them to a drop-off point at another location.

For its introduction, the service picks passengers up in Liberty Village, CityPlace, the Distillery District or Fort York, and in all cases drops them off in the Financial District. Uber says it will expand the number of locations it serves according to demand.

Like Uber’s earlier offerings, this service appears possibly illegal — the city has laws banning competitors to the TTC from running jitney or bus services. But in keeping with Uber’s traditional role, its aggressive — and even objectionable — behaviour as a company points out an area where public policy has failed to respond to the needs and wants of the city.

As the increasingly essential municipal politics, planning and transportation blogger Sean Marshall pointed out in an essay this week, the new service is a compelling example of how Uber “has done exceedingly well identifying a problem in the marketplace and coming up with a solution.” And the direct problem here, he notes from the list of pickup locations, is largely a failure of the 504 King streetcar line to adequately handle and move the passengers that two decades of recent residential growth along that line have created.

I’ve written before — most recently about a year ago — about how I think we could revolutionize transit downtown by, essentially, turning King St. into a dedicated transit, pedestrian and cycling corridor. The need for a King or Queen subway has been debated in Toronto stretching back a century, and a Downtown Relief Line that more or less mimics the route of the 504 car remains a perennial subject in Toronto, one whose urgency is always discussed but whose construction never quite becomes a priority.

The existing streetcar already handles more passengers a day than the Sheppard subway line, and its service is notoriously spotty, its vehicles snarled in downtown gridlock as they move through the central city. It seems not only possible but desirable — and relatively affordable — to make huge improvements to the 504 line to make it a relief line of its own, quickly, able to serve its riders better, and attract more riders overflowing out of our full downtown subway lines.

Marshall, in his piece, looks back further to point out that this immodest proposal is neither particularly radical nor particularly new. A 2001 proposal from the TTC itself (detailed at James Bow’s Transit Toronto website of TTC history) would have shut down the street to car traffic from Dufferin to Parliament.

The proposal resurfaced in 2007 in different “pilot project” form, but again went unimplemented.

JP Boutros, who was senior transit advisor to Ford-era TTC chair Karen Stintz, has written often about trying to revive that proposal as a “Surface Downtown Relief Line,” unsuccessfully.

If the merits of that idea were not obvious enough before, the viability of a competing private-sector service charging a significantly higher price to carry people along pretty much the exact route of the 504 streetcar should prompt a reconsideration.

Just this month, the TTC has held big announcements to promote the introduction of all-door boarding on streetcars and the introduction of Presto payments on them — modest improvements that will make them run a little faster.

The buzz generated by Uber’s launch of a jitney bus service many people will choose over streetcars shows how much more dramatic an improvement is needed, and we already know how one is possible on King.

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NEXT COLUMN: A micro-opportunity in the suburbs suggested by UberHop.