Allowing riders to board through the back door of the city's busiest streetcar on King St. is one step in what Mayor John Tory is promising will be a determined march toward better transit and traffic relief in Toronto.

Transit riders on the 504 King car will be able to board via the backdoor between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. starting Jan. 1, formalizing a policy that has been used on an ad hoc basis by streetcar drivers, who are allowed to apply it at their discretion.

“These are the first steps we need to tackle our transit crisis,” said Tory, who rode the King car to Massey Harris Park near Liberty Village on Monday with TTC chair Josh Colle and CEO Andy Byford.

Tory promised “no mercy” for people who try and cheat the system.

All-door boarding is expected to cut in half the time that the streetcar, which carries 60,000 people a day, spends waiting for passengers to board and disembark. The TTC estimates it will cut the end-to-end trip by up to six minutes.

Colle said he expects the new policy to improve overall street congestion, as it will increase the amount of time streetcars are in motion.

“They won’t be spending so much time at the stops,” he said.

Queen and Spadina, the second and third busiest routes, already have a back-door boarding policy. The TTC hopes to have it on all 11 streetcar routes and boost its team of 20 fare enforcement officers to 100 by the end of next year.

“We have done a raft of research into what other transit properties have done where they have introduced fare inspectors and we are very confident that the fare inspectors both by the fares they levy and by the deterrent they represent will more than cover the cost of their own wages,” said Byford.

One hundred officers will cost about $10 million a year.

The TTC estimates it currently loses about $20 million a year in fare evasion on the subways, streetcars and buses, some of it from turnstile jumpers and people who walk in the side doors of stations but some from counterfeit fare media.

Byford downplayed the issue of fare cheaters.

“We don't actually want to issue fines. What we are aiming to do is educate people, give them advice that they must have proof of payment,” he said.

Checking fares will become easier once the TTC rolls out the provincial Presto system across all its vehicles, he added.

“You won't have this complexity of tokens and tickets,” he said.

Tory also acknowledged the transformational impact that Presto will have on TTC service.

“It's going to make a big difference,” he said, adding that he's already talked to Byford about ways of accelerating that launch.

Presto is available in 15 subway stations and on the first of the new streetcars running on Spadina but it isn't expected to be available across the system until 2017.

“If we could accelerate that roll-out... that would make a big difference,” said Tory.

Officials at the press conference stressed that the all-door boarding is one in a series of steps needed to improve streetcar performance. But they downplayed the possibility of turning King St. into a transit corridor, an idea that Byford had earlier floated.

“There are a lot of implications to doing the kinds of things that are often seemingly very simple, the impact on business and the impact on others. The idea is to get the city moving.... We will keep moving through a series of steps that keep moving in the city,” said Tory.

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More than half of TTC riders use an unlimited-ride Metropass. Transit officials are telling streetcar riders to always take a transfer as proof-of-payment if they're boarding through the front door with a ticket, token or cash.

Byford called the introduction of the new longer Bombardier streetcars the ultimate solution to over-crowding on the 504 where riders complain they frequently have to wait for two or three cars to jam on to a vehicle.

He said that the TTC is talking to Bombardier about the delivery schedule for the new streetcars and although the roll-out doesn't put King St. in line for new vehicles until 2017, that is “not set in stone.”

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