The Toronto King Street Pilot was conceived to address this urgent commuter crisis. PUBLIC WORK and Sam Schwarz Engineering were tasked to assist the City of Toronto and the Toronto Transit Commission in re-imagining how King Street could work to deliver an exceptional transit commuter experience, while looking for ways to bring new forms of public life to the narrow and crowded sidewalks. The team came up with a system of reorganizing vehicular through-traffic to a series of abbreviated local access loops, effectively creating a transit priority corridor with all the associated streetcar commuter benefits.

Since commencing the one-year pilot in Winter of 2017, the reduction in vehicular traffic has delivered immediate improvements to streetcar service, resulting in an approximately 5 minute savings during the afternoon commute for the slowest streetcar travel time. Even more dramatically, the pilot has allowed the TTC to add streetcar capacity, resulting in a 40% increase to hourly ridership counts at the peak of the pilot. Throughout 2018, the project has leveraged the additional space freed up by the pilot street reconfiguration to add a series of 21 new pop-up public space installations and events along the length of the corridor. In year-two, Mayor John Tory announced a design-build competition to help activate the street, expanding as many as 44 new public spaces along the stretch of King between Bathurst and Jarvis Streets.