(TTC Map donated by Pete Coulman)

We missed this anniversary by seventeen days, but it is still fifty years to the month that the Toronto Transit Commission announced a major revision to the routes that altered the shape of transit in the city. On September 1, 1963, the TTC announced 20 major route changes, including the introduction of six routes, and the elimination and consolidation of six routes, throughout the suburbs of Toronto. The six new routes launched on this date were 21 DANFORTH, 30 DUNDAS (today better known as LAMBTON), 36 FINCH, 37 ISLINGTON and 54 LAWRENCE EAST and 80 QUEENSWAY. Two other routes, 73 ROYAL YORK and 87 WEST MALL were introduced two days later, on September 3rd.

Routes that ended operations on August 31, 1963 included 55 MIMICO, 69 QUEENSWAY, 80 REXDALE and 98 WESTWAY.

As important as the launch of these new routes was their approach to how they served the neighbourhoods they ran through. The new routes represented the beginning of a grid system throughout the suburbs of Toronto. An example of this new approach is best seen with 54 LAWRENCE EAST. On August 31, 1963, Lawrence Avenue East from Don Mills to Orton Park was served by no less than four overlapping routes — many of them branches of routes running north-south through Scarborough. These routes gathered suburban residents and channelled them down to gathering points like Luttrell loop where passengers could transfer with the BLOOR streetcar for the rest of their journey downtown. Anybody who wanted to travel from Lawrence and Orton Park to Lawrence and Leslie had to transfer to five different buses, or take a route that carried them far out of their way.

On September 1st, the number of routes serving Lawrence Avenue east of Don Mills shrank from four routes to one: a single LAWRENCE EAST route that operated all the way to Yonge Street and Eglinton subway station. Similar realignments took place on Finch Avenue, Royal York Road and Islington. To make the grid system work, a lot of investment had to be made increasing service levels on these routes. While the grid system opened up more of Metropolitan Toronto to suburban residents, it still required that more people make at least one transfer (as opposed to several transfers, or diverting well out of their way for suburb-to-suburb trips), and service frequencies had to be increased so that transfer times weren’t unreasonably long. By the end of the 1960s, the grid network had been extended further out into the suburbs, with through buses operating along Sheppard, Finch and Steeles Avenue, making the TTC a viable suburb-to-suburb transit service.

September 1, 1963 saw the biggest alteration to the TTC map since the opening of the Yonge subway and the expansion of the TTC’s mandate to include the suburban municipalities surrounding the old City of Toronto. More than that, it was a recognition that Toronto’s suburbs were more than just a series of bedroom communities, and that the TTC’s job was more than just ferrying the residents to and from jobs in downtown Toronto.

For more information on the rise of the suburban grid, consult the route histories linked to in this article.