London has its Bakerloo; Washington its Blue line. Toronto has the YUS — the Yonge-University-Spadina line.

For now, anyway.

But the TTC is preparing to tinker with tradition and begin numbering its subway lines in the same way as Paris or Madrid, cities that have much larger systems.

It’s part of a broader effort to make the Toronto system simpler to navigate for newcomers and occasional riders, and to standardize the higgledy-piggledy signage that has grown up across the TTC.

The subway lines will be numbered according to the order in which they were built. The YUS would be 1; the Bloor-Danforth, 2; the Scarborough RT, 3; and Sheppard would be 4.

The Eglinton-Scarborough Crosstown LRT, which is supposed to open in 2020, would be 5, and new light rail lines on Finch West and Sheppard East would be added on as they go into service.

The numbers, displayed as simple, graphic numerals in coloured circles that correspond to the TTC’s subway maps, can also be easily incorporated into mobile apps.

It might seem like a rather pragmatic approach, but the numeric system is nothing new to the TTC. Numbers have long been used in internal operations. The first of three digits in the run numbers at the front of the subway trains correspond to the line on which they run.

“A lot of properties around the world use numbering systems. Some use letters, some use colours. We feel that — to simplify the signage in the TTC and way-finding for visitors to the city, for occasional users and customer communications — that renaming the lines into a numbering system would make good sense,” said TTC spokesman Brad Ross.

All of the signage in the system will be changing, and where it makes sense, converted to pictograms that will help non-English-speaking riders find their way. But the TTC is still figuring out whether to use north, south, east and west to point to destinations, or whether to use terminal station names such as Finch or Kipling.

If you don’t know the city and you’re underground, you may not understand which way is south, said Ross. But if you use a map you can see that the terminal station for the Number 1 line is Downsview.

The potentially confusing bits are still being worked out. “If you get on at Queen’s Park and you want to go to Finch, you’ve got to get on southbound and then you end up going northbound,” said Ross.

The preliminary plan will be rolled out at the Toronto Transit Commission’s public Oct. 23 meeting. It will then be tested at a yet-to-be-determined interchange station later this year or early next. It would then go back to the TTC board for approval and the changes would have to be incorporated into the budget.

“It won’t be inexpensive, and we’ll have some dollar figures to share at that time,” said Ross.

One side-benefit of the new numbering system will be that it gets around the thorny problem of what to call the city’s dream subway, long known as the downtown relief line. Transit planners say another subway is a necessity to relieve crowding on the Yonge line. But lately the “downtown” has been dropped from its name for political reasons.

Metrolinx and TTC officials, who haven’t yet found the billions needed to build it, fear the downtown designation misrepresents the benefits of such a subway, which would carry suburbanites into the city with less crowding. Calling it a suburban relief line is the flip side of the same problem.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Under the new scheme, it would be just another number.