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Already, there are places in Toronto (such as at Broadview and Queen) where a streetcar in the middle of the road nicks the sidewalk during a turn. “If tracks are in the curb lane, a right turn would be much tighter than it is now to the point of being impractical,” wrote Mr. Munro in an email to the Post.

The narrow streets, in turn, are the fault of the British Army, who laid out much of York’s early streets with the standard surveyor’s width of 66 feet. Vancouver-style trolleybuses would be no solution to Toronto’s streetcar woes, according Mr. Munro. With buses “there would be far more of them, and they would typically stop with their back ends out in the one traffic lane normally available in most locations,” he wrote.

For now, it seems the best Toronto can do is install middle-of-the road stations — such as on College Street — or give the streetcars their own lanes — such as at St. Clair. The awkward width of Toronto’s streetcar tracks (4ft 10-7/8 inches) is also an unfortunate holdover from the 19th century. When tracks were first laid down in the mid-1800s, transit historians assume the bizarre gauge was chosen to give a leg-up to private wagons.

Instead of slogging through notoriously muddy streets, Victorian delivery carts and milkmen could simply pull their wagons along the city’s luxurious and spacious streetcar tracks. Of course, the tracks also unwittingly condemned generations of future motorists to wrestle with slippery axle-breadth steel ribbons.

National Post

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