A city committee has voted to study whether it would be more efficient to permanently replace Queen St. streetcars with buses, despite TTC leadership rejecting the idea as a non-starter.

Last month the TTC temporarily replaced its iconic streetcars on the 501 Queen route with buses because of a series of construction projects along the line this summer.

A motion sent to the public works committee Thursday by Councillor Michael Ford (Ward 2 Etobicoke North) asked the city and TTC to do a comparison of the “efficacy of streetcar service versus bus service on Queen,” including factors such as reliability, collisions, operating and maintenance costs, traffic volumes and “delays to other users of the road.” The motion asked the TTC to keep buses running for two weeks after the construction concludes in order to get a comparison to normal streetcar service.

The motion passed in a vote of three to two. Council will consider it at its meeting in July.

Ford doesn’t sit on the committee, but the motion was introduced by fellow Etobicoke councillor Stephen Holyday on his behalf.

In an interview afterwards, Ford said that while he believes buses are “more manoeuvrable when navigating downtown traffic” he isn’t certain they would perform better than streetcars on Queen. He said he wanted an “apples-to-apples” comparison between the two vehicle types and likened his motion to high-profile pilot projects the city has launched to study bike lanes on Bloor St. and priority streetcar operation on King St.

“If we want to be building a 21st century city, a world-class city where people want to come, I really think it’s important that we’re looking at all the facts when we’re debating transit,” he said.

“I would hope that city council backs a report that is forward thinking, and I would expect the mayor to do the same.”

The motion was a last-minute addition to the meeting agenda, and no TTC staff were present to speak to it. But asked about it at an unrelated press conference earlier in the day, TTC chair Josh Colle and CEO Andy Byford asserted that running buses on Queen would be more inefficient than using streetcars. The TTC estimates it is costing an additional $1 million a month to run buses on Queen instead of streetcars this summer.

“Streetcars carry way more people and are an inherently more efficient way to move mass numbers of people downtown,” said Byford, who noted it would take about three buses to move as many passengers as the TTC’s new low-floor streetcars can.

“That means more operators, more vehicles and more garages. It’s inherently inefficient so (using buses) is purely a temporary measure while this construction happens on Queen.”

Byford also pointed out that the city has recently made huge investments in its streetcar fleet, including a $1-billion purchase of 204 new vehicles and a $500-million facility at Leslie Barns to store them.

Colle said the TTC is already collecting data on how the bus replacement is going, “but the streetcar has a long history on Queen and will have a very long future on Queen St.”

Councillor Anthony Perruzza (Ward 8 York West) voted against Ford’s request, which he described as “shenaniganry.”

“I think it’s just us spinning our wheels asking staff to do a lot of redundant work, foisting a big debate on the floor of council that has been held a number of times,” he said.

Perruzza joked that all that was missing from Ford’s motion was the word “trolley,” which his uncles, the late mayor Rob Ford and former councillor Doug Ford, used to denigrate streetcars and “fire up the let’s call it the rage or animosity drivers have who are stuck in traffic.”

He said it was “an absolute fallacy” to suggest “that if you remove the streetcar from Queen St then all of a sudden traffic would simply zip on … Our problem is we have lots and lots of traffic, and we just need to make our transit system better and work more efficiently and having more people take it.”

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It’s not clear how much a study would cost, or how it could go ahead given the TTC’s objection. The committee approved a motion for staff to come back to council next month with more information about Councillor Ford’s request. Councillors said that should include an estimate of how much the study would cost.

With files from Betsy Powell