1966: Bloor-Danforth line on Toronto subway opens to public
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 ธ.ค. 2020
- As of Feb. 26, 1966, there's a new option for Toronto transit riders: an east-west subway line running under Bloor Street, joining the two north-south lines. Rather than forcing riders to change trains if they want to continue south, the Toronto Transit Commission is conducting a six-month experiment in which trains alternate between going straight across and turning south at the "Y" where the lines intersect. In this 1966 news special called Rail or Rubber, the CBC looks at the present and future of commuting in Toronto, whether it be by transit, by car, by ferry or by train.
OMG my mother told me she was on a tv show about public transit back in the '60's but I never thought I'd ever see her interview here! She turns 77 this year. Happy birthday mom!
No way 😱
Now that's cool !!!
How did your parents meet? How old are you (roughly, if you don't want to give specifics)? That's so interesting!
So cool
@@liquidoxygen819 where did they have sex? where they drunk or high? how much money did they make? lol
Remarkable how the accent has changed since 1966.
That young lady is now 73 years old. Hope she is still around, healthy and happy.
That young lady was stunning!
She’s got that Mary Tyler Moore vibe
75 man.
@@georgeamorim3455 She was kinda hot.
Probably ended up with a black guy
Incredible how more than fifty years later we are still saying the same obvious things about countless merits of public transportation, while not much changes in reality. It is really quite saddening
The section talking about GO Transit being created, and the problems it has to overcome (freight railways) applies even today.
@@Nunavuter1 I just would remind you that the federal government sold CN without any provisions for passenger transportation. So yes, nobody cared enough to even stipulate some conditions that Ould benefit the general public. It is the extreme population growth in Southeastern Ontario that make out politicians do the bare minimum on public transportation. For instance, the GO electrification scheme that would hopefully happen in this decade is just a simplified version of provincial electric rail system that was proposed by Sir Adam Beck over a century ago
Think of what traffic would be like without mass transit. It is awful now but without mass transit the roads we be parking lots.
TTC was so safe in those good old days. I wish some of the people who still alive should write a comment.
As a young boy in the early 70s, I'd play hockey from school, and ride the ttc when fare was 10 cents. I lived in Scarborough and would ride McCown bus to warden stn. Even then many drivers kept their door open
There is far too much political correctness and pandering to every special interest clown group in the past 30+ years, its disgusting!
I met someone who told me they lived near the Stockyards West Toronto in the 1950's. As a young boy they would get on the bus with their .22 rifles, pay 5 cents and go a few stops down. In a field they would hunt squirrel and get back on the bus, with people congratulating them for their catch. Imagine that being done in today's time.
People came from traditional family homes, honest, hard working people who respected their neighbours, you didn't lock your doors and most won't know this, but Toronto had firearms carry until 1965, I have seen the expired permits.
There was virtually no crime, no home invasions, car theft or murders, you could walk at any hour of the day and never think of being mugged or raped, remember this was a time when people carried firearms on their person. I was also told there was two gun ranges in the downtown core, one at U of T (University of Toronto) and at Union Station, there was I think one incident in the over 100 years of operation, it was accidental, but no one was ever killed.
Now you're a victim in the city, have to lock your doors, car theft capital of Canada, gangs, murders, daily shootings, drug addicts on the street, safe injection sites, unaffordable housing, traffic, high taxes...etc. Opinions aside no doubt Toronto was better pre 1980's.
This is what diversity does to a city.
Look no one is staring at their cell phones! Everyone is paying attention to where they are going. They look happy and contented. There is no one stabbing anyone and there are no homeless people on the platforms or in the cars causing trouble. Boy, this is amazing!
9:24 - "The Queen Street Subway", good news, they're building that, in uh, the 2020s.
That is the Ontario Line The NEW Line 3
@@alexanderip1003 Yes, I know. Hence the joke about it only being built now
It was being planned as early as the 1920s.
When you get the feel of how culture was directed toward good structure ,no political groups in the hundreds.The character of carrying oneself is so refreshing when looking back at these old clips.
People present themselves with so much more dignity in this era. Remarkable.
Thank goodness metrolinx was not around back then or we would still have at least 2 more years before opening day for the bloor danforth line
Everyone so well dressed. I personally am also at fault for being poorly dressed.
Not a single person of color in the entire video though!
In high school at that time no one was allowed to wear jeans to school .
I remember reading a book about the development of the Toronto subway and the only criticism was that the subway planners did not include an express track so that some stations were bypassed and not overcrowded from the outer city. All the cities with the forethought to make the capital investments in this infrastructure are now great.
The Lower Bay platform was closed after six months of use. People got confused about which train to take. Now it's used for TTC training purposes, as well as filming tv commercials and shows. It's also used for filming movies.
The g cars were to slow for the bloor line,
The old G trains from Yonge Line were slower than new M trains for Bloor Danforth. It is easier to operate separate lines. Passengers were apparently polled a year after opening (6 months integrated and 6 months two lines) and most did prefer one system over another.
Hi Jay. This is a weird question but I happened upon your post and with a name like "streetcarjay" I figured you might know this. I recently bought and restored a TTC streetcar item. I recall seeing them as a kid but I was more fascinated by what they looked like than what their purpose was. It is an indicator light, amber lenses on three sides and looks like a big diver's helmet (cast iron, painted yellow, about 20 inches in diameter). I have searched online for hours for an old picture that has one but no luck. Thanks, James
You might check in with the Halton County Radial Railway Museum and send them a picture. It might possibly be something from an old interurban "radial car" which the TTC ran on various lines between 1921 to 1948. Some of those radial cars were also converted to snow-sweeper cars which were all retired by 1966.@@jamesweekes6726
I remember the blue chairs /soft and still seats available in early 80's and the windows open in the cars in the subway 'cars. Thank you !
I can't get over how little traffic there is on the DVP in that first minute shot. I've been on it at 2 in the morning on a Saturday and seen it busier than that. :D
I know!!!!! That just floored me. It would soon change though. I remember going to Blue Jays games with my dad down the DVP in the late 70's and it was busy. Probably not as busy as today though.
401 has cars on the road no matter what hour it is aswell.
Mid to late 1960's, the rush hour traffic on the DVP was already stop and go.
Apartment buildings advertised their locations as "10 minutes to downtown" and we joked "on a Sunday night perhaps".
Why is everything old school always the best school?
Interesting to see and hear the differences in speech. The Toronto accent seemed a lot more American back then. And notice how a 19 year old like spoke without like ever using the word "like" like every other word.
Also, never heard of the "Y" transfer until now. Seems like a completely overcomplicated idea.
Cool report from a once great CBC.
The Y has been effectively abandoned. But with cell phones and GPS and routing on phone it should be easy for people to take different trains now.
The Spadina bus! The Spadina bus! I got that song in my head now....
I went down to the station
I didn't scream or fuss
I didn't have lots of patience
Waiting for that bus
Dug deep down in my pockets
To try and find some coin
But much to my chagrin
All I found was my groin😄
It should be noted that Spadina Bus was by The Shuffle Demons.
@@kamranahmad4592Who used to sing those lyrics!!
born that year
Incredible how more than fIfty years later we arw still That young lady is now 73 years old Hope she is sitll around healthy and happy.
Proper adults were in charge in those days and even young people tried to act older:- now it's the other way around.
@@eve-marie6751 yea
@@eve-marie6751Toronto is an asylum compared to back then.
I'm one of the rare people who used the wye interchange back in '66.Too bad they killed it - it was fun to figure out which train to take. If used now, it would certainly ease congestion at Bloor-Yonge.
Thankfully that should be remedied with the opening of the Ontario Line in a few years. Funny how they were talking about a Queen Street Subway back then and 60-ish years later it's finally being built.
It was slow.
Shortly after the Bloor-Danforth Line opened, with its wye, an idiot hijacked a train on that line, and demanded to be taken to City Hall.
Back then, subway drivers always left their cab doors open. After the hijacking, they kept them closed for a while.
They were open in the 70's and 80's when the had to open the opposite window for the YongE & Bloor, St. George line to blow the whistle and close the doors.
The final part of the video shows how people commuted to Toronto by rail before 1967, when GO Train service began. They took a CN passenger train.
Very interesting video. Thank you
Right before the 70s when drug culture and slob culture took over.
I'm trying to figure out which one is my Grandfather.. I know he's there. For all I know that cutie I just saw was my Grandmother lol.. Knowing my Grandfather he's probably down the tunnel making last minute inspections while a front office guy is trying to drag him to the premiere and he'd be like, "Leave me alone to make sure its working right!"
Wow eglinton was the last north stop ..Ms. marko was quite the beau..she’s 77-78 years old now..wonder if she has seen this
I recognize that area on 11:01 to 11:06 - That is Bathurst and Wilson, from the building in the background thats a lot of stores and restaurants....Very changed the area then and now, but that building is still around only with new names of the places there.....
That dark haired girl is super hot and I'm sure a huge Beatle fan ...love the way she talks too 🥰🥰🥰
@JamesJohnsonsv. How could u tell?
Empty DVP
and the leafs won the cup in 1967---wow
That woman was delightful and articulate. Intrinsically interesting how Toronto grappled with the demands of public transit against the convenience of private auto transport. 60 years on and we still haven't balanced the two. Most of us are entirely dependent on cars for work others the train, bus or even plane
Toronto was widely known as 'Toronto The Good' during this era.
it was also 'Toronto the equitable'.. private equity now owns the world.. because we had to sell out, you know the 'crisis' and all. No choice 🪡... or was there?
I wonder if their will be a doc like this surfacing in 50 years, about the never completed, never operational, Eglington crosstown ?
1:31 we need this service again, bring back Lower Bay station into service!
in the peak times every 3-5th car doing a service like that wouldn't be terrible.
@@Humulator They'd need to install a crossover there
@@stinkyroadhog1347 where?
@@Humulator At Bay lower. They wouldn't allow the trains to continue east in the way of the line 2 headways and they wouldn't reduce headways on the western end of line 2 just to facilitate this
So they say they’ve reached the vehicular saturation point in the city some 60 years ago, and expressed the need for massive transit. What on earth happened
I was born in Toronto and I am still living here I have seen a lot of changes over the decades but what I am seeing in Toronto today horrifies me. This mega Link's which seems to be replacing the TTC and what a shit show with all this construction everywhere very bad planning by our politician's 😱🤯 😬 they should go back and take a page out of there books 💥🤔🤬🙃🙂
Man, they were telling people to leave the car at home as early as '66? Imagine if they could've seen what Toronto traffic has become by the 2020's, lol.
On that rail extension map, Dunbarton is basically Pickering.
It’s very hard to believe that improvements in TO’s transportation system have not kept up with the population increase. Selling off of the 407 was a huge mistake. We never take the 401 when visiting from the US.
To bad they couldn't some how bring those people fifty years in the past to present time they would be amazed specially with construction of today.
They did. It’s called aging! 😂
Surely, many of them are still alive.
They'd be horrified by the demographic replacement of the canadian population
neat that the Tee Oh accent of yore sounded quite Yankee, reminding us of North Dakotans in particular......
I too was surprised by the accents of some of the people being interviewed. The man who rode the train to work had an almost Jimmy Stewart accent, while the man who lived on the island sounded like he was from Chicago.
The young lady at the very beginning had an accent more similar to the current Toronto accent, as did some of the CBC people. I wonder what caused the shift. Perhaps the current Toronto accent is the result of the old "Midwest" accent mixing with the accents of all the people moving to Toronto at the time.
I don't think time of day or such an excuse had been to blame my recently-encountered inability at following video clips featuring explanations of how, e.g., Thames Valley accents changed over centuries..mind-boggling, whereas actual audio recordings are not 🍸
My grandmother was from TO, she had what we jokingly called "Danforth speak"...
There were two problems with the wye: If one train broke down, both lines would be blocked. And there was the confusion of determining whether the train in the station was going straight through, or going through the wye, because the destination signs were only on the front of the train.
Another major source of difficulty was the different acceleration characteristics of the older heavier Gloucester steel trains and the newer lighter Hawker-Siddeley aluminium trains:- the G trains could not keep up with the HS trains. There were also special next-train annunciator signs in each subway station with several per platform to tell you where the next train would run. Another problem was that most passengers on the Crosstown line actually were going to or coming from downtown but only half the trains ran downtown from east and west so the downtown trains would be jammed vis a vis the crosstown trains and this also slowed down service with people struggling to board and disboard the downtown trains. The "wye" was actually a stupid compromise to make the Bloor-Danforth routing more competitive with the original Queen routing first proposed by TTC staff in 1942. Etobicoke and Scarborough politicians favored the BD route while most City politicians and Metro officials favored the Queen route so the wye was a stupid compromise:- subways need to run directly downtown and the Queen route would run directly downtown with no transfers which would have been best for commuters but the politicians made a mess of it and gambled that the wye would provide a no-transfer service on the BD route but it was a total failure and very expensive. The provincial politicians also got into the act and liked the idea of the subway running under Queen's Park plus a Queen route would have essentially obsolesced the entire streetcar system and necessitated replacing all the half-new streetcars with brand-new buses and thus cost more. Once the wye failed the politicians quietly buried the whole boondoggle and everyone forgot about it.
There used to be those mechanical flap displays about the size of a sheet of paper mounted to the ceiling on the platform: "NEXT TRAIN" They never changed after the wye was discontinued. I think those signs are gone now.
The confusion came about because at Bay station, a woodbine bound train could arrive on both upper and lower levels and at St George, A Keele bound train could arrive on both the upper and lower level
@@stinkyroadhog1347 Yes, that was a factor but only a minor problem really:- I actually was riding the subway regularly as a young high-school student at that time so I'm speaking from personal experience here. The real problem was that at that time 70+% of riders on the Bloor-Danforth line wanted to go to and from downtown and especially so in the rush hours but only 50% of the trains transferred between the "Crosstown" and the Yonge-University line. People would thus tend to wait and jam onto the transfer trains which would delay them plus this was aggravated by the fact that the "G" trains (the Gloucester cars) were heavier with less powerful motors and accelerated more slowly so the "Y" concept simply could not work adequately in practice and especially in rush hours. This concept was conceived and planned without any computer modelling to test it in advance and virtually because computer technology was quite primitive then and the "old fogies" at the TTC had no conception of doing such a thing. The original TTC plan in 1942 was for an east-west Queen line to follow the north-south Yonge line to minimize commuter transfers to and from downtown. However the suburban politicians in Etobicoke and Scarborough conspired with the mayor of Toronto, Allan Lamport, to promote a Bloor-Danforth route instead purely for political reasons while "Big Daddy" Fred Gardiner, chairman of Metro Toronto, favored the functionally efficient plan favored by TTC planning staff so they finally settled on the "Y" concept to minimize passenger transfers at Yonge-Bloor and at St George stations. The "Y" concept could have worked with more flexible dispatching to match actual rider volumes on each branch since they did have a centralized monitoring and dispatching system located in Bloor station (and you can actually look through the window to see it just off the north end of the southbound Yonge platform) and they could certainly draw on the long experience of flexible multiline operation in New York City but the brain-dead neurologically-ossified types who ran the TTC were very arrogant and conceited and would never deign to acknowledge that they might be wrong and to study subway-operations experience elsewhere. With modern technology and some computer modelling the "Y" concept could be made to work quite well today but good luck with trying to get past all the brain-ossification at the TTC:- perhaps if Doug Ford "knocks a few heads together" they might suddenly "decide" to try again.
@@eve-marie6751 It's worth another try!
What a pretty lady--could've been a TV star.
Pretty, but also well dressed. Respectable and elegant. well mannered.
Ms. Marco : )
How wonderful to see fellow Torontonians well-dressed on their commute to and from their end destinations. A far contrast with today's ripped jeans and ultra-casual commuters.
How wonderful to see actual canadians
Allen is rolling in his grave at the amount of congestion today. The Allen was originally supposed to go all the way to Lakeshore - that’s where he fell short.
consider it went from 55k daily riders to 1 million (almost 1.1mil) DAILY.
its nuts how much things have change. I dont think they knew how important subways are for major city. yet DVP/403/401 and 407 are STILL clogged to all high heaven.
At ~23:00 they're talking about what became GO Transit but it had no name then:- I love the comment at 23:13 "if it's going to be successful":- they weren't even sure yet then but now we know better!
GO was an upstart project by the government and they didn't know how it would perform. The coaches were built to a very basic design and the locomotives were converted freight locomotives that could easily be converted back should the operation have failed
State of the art graphics haha
My, how we have fallen... the subways are a jungle today, and no one dresses in a civilized manner anymore...
I agree!
Now they’re roasting goats on the subway. Mogadishu North.
"Diversity is our strength" ~ The king of idiots
🤣🤣🤣
imagine had Rotton-Ø fallen in love with boulevards....eh........
ooohhhhhyes
its fkin ace
and now everyone is brown and no one is happy lol
I was born in Toronto in 1959 of Estonian & English heritage & grew up in Leslieville. Toronto was a great place to grow up. Clean,safe & maybe a little staid & dull but the people were great & had humility. It's fair to say that the ethnic mix was far better, although the SMALL numbers of visible minorities gave the city the splash of vibrancy it needed. I don't recognise or even really like today's Toronto. This video is evocative of what a great place Toronto WAS to grow up in.
I think the present day TTC with its urine soaked stations, countless homeless people patrolling the trains and crushing overcrowding is so much better, don't you?
Actually the correct sixties word for them is "vagrants" and there were no vagrants on the TTC in those days and almost all of them would be just east of downtown TO.
If this is a argument against public transit, just want to say its because of underfunding of public transit and mental health help things.
but one thing you fked up on you did not put a mens and womens washroom at every fkin station ---and you were told to do so ---johnney on the job
Was the DVP ever not busy😂?
Bike lanes and laws protecting bicyclists can also help reduce congestion dramatically.
how so.
They already exist.
they dramatically increase congestion. go by real life not theories
Everyone hates bicyclists though
@@rbl777 People drive less. Bikes are alot easier to park and navigate than 2 ton vehicles. Bikes don't pollute.
I wish Toronto was back like this again: better people. Compare this society to today and then ask why. Facts don’t lie.
tORONTO is now third world ... I left for BC in 1981
Wow... did they ever screw this up. The 407 moves smoother cause theres no collectors...no express ...just a steady flow. Even taking into account theirs less traffic. US cities don't even have that crap / yeap, it looked on on paper, but all the merging on the 401 means that plan SUCKED !!!
I was just thinking it just takes away the drivable pavement . same with hov lanes. scam
The 407 moves smoother because most drivers in the GTA would rather sit through 401 traffic than have to pay tolls...and FYI, plenty of US cities have collector-express highways (Chicago, Dallas, and Seattle to name a few).
The yonge subway should be newmarket Davis drive but sadly Toronto has a government that got its priorities all wrong 😊
Take the GO Train. Not enough density to justify extending it that far.
@@KardiFan2000 Newsflash: There already existed a train line that went all the way from Toronto to Newmarket but they eliminated the route and tore up the tracks.
@@khachaturian100 As I stated, if you need to take transit from Newmarket to Toronto that badly, take the GO Train. Especially since they will be converting to Electric Multiple Units (thus faster trains) in the coming years.
@@KardiFan2000 Not from Toronto, but from York University would be nice -- but that's no longer in operation, and when it was, it was only twice a day. Look up "York University GO Station" on Wikipedia.
The part at 5:10 is pretty cringey.
How to tell people you're a dopey Millennial or Gen Z without saying it.
“Though prettier than most…” 😂😂😂
It's cringey to say something nice about someone? The world needs more compliments and kindness.
@@theschof96 Well there clever little dude, some comments are best kept to oneself.
What he said was matter of fact, nerd.
Gardner and Allen and 400 south never completed big mistake just as line 3 should have been completed going all though Scarborough politics ruined TO
At least Scarborough will now be getting a proper subway
@@KardiFan2000 totally agreed, but you know what they should bring that subway further into Scarborough not just up to McCowan and Shepherd. They should be going north east towards the zoo. Specially, if you want to bring tourists to the zoo no one wants to be on buses.
@@fredroper398 I see where you're coming from...but density pretty much drops off a cliff once you reach the zoo (and most of north east Scarborough). The current plan is to extend Line 4 to meet Line 2 at McCowan/Sheppard at some point (which is sorely needed)...but there's literally no development surrounding the zoo, which already sits on protected greenbelt land, so getting through that red tape to propose a subway (or even an LRT) up there would be a tough sell.
You hear at the And the city official saying we should be putting people out of their cars an into public transit. I don't know about you but I don't vote for politicians and pay taxes to people just so that they can think of ways to tell us what to do I prefer to make my own decisions and choices thank you. It's called freedom and democracy....
Not one single person confused about their gender. Ongiara still working fine.
Ha, ha, ha!:- the transsexuals and drag queens were just better dressed in those days:- you might see Michele DuBarry and Dianna Boileau in there somewhere!
Always gotta have one of those dumb comments
Not a stupid comment, just a reality that was created by sick people
💀
@@TheRandCrews Its more dumb to align with those non-binary crazies. How do doctors deal with you clowns.
Confused clown ~ "I'm a woman."
Doctor ~ "Well there a giant co(k down here maam."