Rocket Talk: Can Sunday Subway Service Start Sooner?

By Torontoist

Have questions about the TTC? Rocket Talk is a regular Torontoist column, featuring TTC Chair Adam Giambrone and Director of Communications Brad Ross’s answers to Torontoist readers’ questions. Submit your questions to [email protected]!

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Reader Gavin Crisp asks:

When will the TTC open subway doors earlier than its current wake-up call of approximately 9 a.m. on Sunday mornings?

TTC Director of Communications Brad Ross says:

I wish I could respond with the answer I think you want to read, but I can’t. In short, the Sunday morning subway start time of 9 a.m. won’t be changing anytime soon.
Here’s why.
There are sixty-eight kilometres of subway track in Toronto. Add to that more than six hundred switches and signals. And, of course, the sixty-nine subway stations we maintain.
When the subway closes each night, an army (or maybe it’s a battalion) of maintenance crews descend into the tunnels and begin a wide range of work including: sweeping and cleaning debris from the track to prevent fires; rail and switch inspections; rail and switch replacement where required; repairing decaying tunnel concrete damaged by ground-water leaks; removing asbestos, replacing burned-out lights; re-cabling and replacing the signal system on the Yonge-University-Spadina line with an Automatic Train Control system; and, of course, station cleaning and maintenance that can’t occur when passengers and trains are in the stations.
Much of the work is time-consuming and requires crews to set up in the tunnel for hours at a time. Sunday mornings give our maintenance crews an additional three hours to complete much of the routine and specialized work required to ensure the system remains reliable and safe.
On any given weekday, maintenance crews have just three hours to get to a work location, set up, complete the work, pack up, and return to the yard. Sundays, though, afford us with additional time to complete the routine work but also more complex tasks.
If the TTC were to narrow that Sunday morning maintenance window, some of those complex tasks would not get finished. The result, then, would likely require a disruption to normal service to get the job done; assuming emergency repairs don’t cause us to do that sooner, at a much less convenient time for you, the rider.
Simply put, subway systems require constant and vigilant maintenance. Toronto’s system does not have a network of redundant or express track to fall back on when the mainline needs work. Keeping that Sunday morning window open, therefore, equals a more reliable and safer subway system.
Finally, the TTC does run a network of buses and streetcars on twenty-four routes when the subway is closed—the Blue Night Network. The two routes that replace the subway—320 Yonge and 300 Bloor-Danforth—are the most frequently used routes on the network. The TTC is committed to ensuring people who need to get around, whether at 4 a.m. on Tuesday or 8 a.m. on Sunday, can do so on public transit.