As I currently live in the upper reaches of North York, Wilson Station is my “home” station as I use it more than any other. Built for the Spadina Subway extension in 1978, and the northern terminus until 1996, this station is a maze of corridors and driveways, and is the TTC’s best attempt at an Escher drawing.
As I explain after the fold, this maze-like set of corridors results in one of the longest and most difficult walks between subway and bus in the TTC. However, embarrassingly long escalator repairs has had a severe impact on this station’s already limited accessibility.
Before Downsview Station opened in 1996, Wilson was a hive of activity. Three separate parking lots surround the property (on the west side, the active Downsview Airport prevented development, a big box cluster was later added). No fewer than 17 routes served the station, more than any other in the system. A later addition added a new north bus terminal to serve all the routes heading to the north up the aptly-named Transit Road to Allen Road North.
Of those 17 routes serving Wilson in 1993, several are now long-gone, such as 163 Rustic Road, 3 Ancaster Park, (later merged into an hourly peak-only 120 Calvington) and 118 Finch Via Allen. Cutbacks, and the opening of Downsview Station reduced the number of routes serving Wilson to 7 (of which two serve in both directions). With the withdrawal of the 7A Bathurst rush hour service between Wilson and St. Clair West, this is down to a manageable 6 routes. But even with the closure of the north terminal, there are 16 bus bays, half of which are now unassigned.
There is one redeeming feature of isolated, sprawling, and ugly Wilson Station – the art, which was common to all Spadina Subway stations. Below, taken by Craig James White, is Ted Bieler’s striking Canyons. But another art installation, back-lit photographs of Toronto, are badly faded and should probably be replaced or removed.
Photo courtesy of Craig James White
Due to the rather unusual layout of Wilson, to transfer from the subway to a westbound bus currently requires taking four sets of stairs or escalators, and is one of the longest walks to transfer from subway to bus in the system. Unlike Downsview, Lawrence West and Eglinton West, the bus terminal is not on top of the subway tracks, but is across the southbound lanes of the Allen. To make the station wheelchair accessible, a minimum of three elevators would be required unless substantial renovations were to take place, like those already underway at Victoria Park Station.
As Wilson has such a long walk and a maximum of four stairs or escalators to connect to buses, one would hope that the TTC would at least minimize the difficulty for customers making the daily trek, particularly seniors and passengers with strollers. The stairs can get very slippery when it is damp outside (for some reason, the floors seem to be coated with a musty, slippery mess every damp day), and escalators, even when stopped, offer a better grip.
But in mid-October, four escalators were blocked off with some work started, but otherwise left in suspended animation. Since then, the blocked escalators collected only dust and litter.
The only visible work done in the last four months has been the addition of new stickers with updated expected dates of completion. Originally, the signs read “expected back in service November 30, 2008”. Then new stickers stuck on top read December 31, 2008, January 31, 2009; February 28, 2009 and now March 31, 2009. (An article in The Fixer column in the Toronto Star in January covered this issue, when work was expected to be done by late February.) By late January, frustrated patrons added messages of their own blasting the TTC and the ATU.
Though while I still stand by my assessment that the TTC has been a recent success story, I still think there’s lots to be done. The TTC ought to be embarrassed and I think owes its passengers an explanation.
37 comments
This is my home station as well.
I had never been to Wilson before moving to Toronto in December, but I didn’t find it that laborious to navigate. Granted it’s a lot of up down up, but it doesn’t feel any worse then Downsview.
I’m not surprised to hear the escalators were broken before I even thought of moving here. Passing by them I often notice pools of water in the bottom well or frozen blocks of ice. No wonder they don’t work.
The biggest issue I have with the station is that the bus levels are freezing cold, often because a door on the lower level is stuck open and unable to close, and insufficient seals on the doors. Standing outside is sometimes warmer.
Some TTC stations you just have to wonder: “What the heck were they thinking when they designed this place?” Warden, the second-last station on the Danforth line is also a mess and shares some of the same problems.
Thanks for mentioning Victoria Park Station which is my home station. It is a bit of a pain tranfering from subway to bus right now but this annoyance is worth it. They have built some temporary bus bays in the old car parking lot and on Victoria Park as well. Now they are getting ready to demolish the old elevated seperated bus bay platforms. This slight inconvenience is tolerable because this station will soon be much more efficient and accessible. My wife and I are moving and I will now have to use Warden Station. I hope they have plans to modernize that poorly planned station as well. I hope your Wilson Station gets some treatment. Victoria Park reno’s are part of the TTC’s station modernization plans. They also plan on doing Pape, Islington and Kipling stations. Hopefully they see how a well laid out station will help increase ridership and give Wilson and Warden stations a similar treatment.
It is my home station too.
Because I often walk into the station instead of taking the 104 Faywood (which is so infrequent my 10 minute walk to the station is more reasonable even on the coldest day) I really hate the fact that they only have one person manning the one booth from the Kiss and ride and no one manning the booth from the Eastern Parking lot forcing people to walk all the way to the entrance on Wilson where it passes underneath the Allen.
That entrance is one of the reasons I cannot wait for the TTC to move to fare cards ala the New York City transit system so even unmanned those of us without month passes can buy a day pass easily (by a machine) or even a one way fare from the machine and enter those unmanned entrances. Also rooting around in your pocket through your change on a cold winter day to look for a token is just plain annoying! Again, a card would be infinitely better!!!
Yes, there are plans for Warden Station too, although I don’t know when the work will actually take place. In brief, what will happen is:
1. The parking will be relocated to the lands east of the station now occupied by open space and hydro towers.
2. Part of the north parking lot has already closed for parkland and community centre purposes. I’m not sure of the future of the rest of it, and presume that Massey Creek will be preserved.
3. The south parking lot will be replaced by the new bus terminal that will be built as an island rather than as separate bays. Roughly speaking, there are three levels of circulation. One is the existing subway platform. One is the existing mezzanine level that will reach out to the southwest over the new bus terminal. One is the terminal level. This arrangement allows vertical elements like escalators and elevators to be shared.
4. Most of the existing bus terminal and lands on the southeast corner of St. Clair and Warden will be sold.
Some additional info on both Victoria Park and Warden is available on the City’s website:
http://www.toronto.ca/planning/warden-vicpark.htm
I prefer the simple designs of the downtown stations (King, Queen, Dundas, Dufferin, etc.) as opposed to the the palaces out at the ends of the subway lines. If the station is not a terminal point for a bus or streetcar, a simple street transfer or center transfer platform (like the old Bloor streetcar transfer with the Yonge subway) is all that is needed.
Wilson needs to be rebuilt, and this time may some talented architects be commissioned.
Steve Munro, thanks for the info. about Warden Station. I have been looking for and hoping the TTC had plans for that heavily used station as well. My wife and I are moving this month to that area so I won’t get to use the new and improved Vic.Park Station as much but I still appreciate it.
A few months back in the Toronto Star, the head of London England’s Piccadilly Line was here in Toronto checking out our transit system. He was really impressed with how the TTC has laid out it’s bus/subway stations. I have was born and raised in Montreal and lived most of my life in Vancouver (where I became a transit fan after a car accident) and one thing I really appreciate about Toronto’s system since moving here 3 years ago are some of these bus/subway stations. They make transfers a lot easier and comfortable.
I see that Eglinton Station on Yonge St. used to have those seperate bus platforms. Glad they got rid of those. I find the island type platforms and what they have planned for Vic. Park a lot easier to transfer especially from bus to bus. Glad they are modernizing more of these stations. I don’t get up there much but Wilson sounds like it needs one of these Modernizations makeovers as well.
Coxwell station gets coated with that slippery mess all the time too – I’ve seen a half dozen people wipe out this winter just inside the entrance, just in the few seconds it takes me to walk in. Only a matter of time before someone breaks an ankle. Of course the people behind the ticket counter just shrug and look on. “Not in my job description” I guess.
Wilson was one of two 1978 Spadina-liners designed “in-house” (the other being St Clair West)–and it shows. That’s when the TTC design staff overreacted to the Montreal Metro (or, maybe, the Spadina stations by Erickson et al) like a middle-aged square growing sideburns and donning leisure suits and embarrassing himself in the process.
I’ve always wondered about those tourist-kitschy Toronto photos: were they meant to be “art”, or “decoration”, or *what*? (Though they could be *replaced* by art, perhaps.)
I find many of the suburban subway stations confusing — I almost always lose my way at Finch. So it’s no surprise that I’ve missed seeing Ted Bieler’s Canyons. I am going to have to make a stop at Wilson the next excuse I can make.
Re: the mention of Downsview Airport.
I wish we could get Downsview Airport closed and Bombardier relocated to Pearson or Buttonville or Oshawa (and the museum too, to the City Centre Airport). I thought there might have been a window to do that when Boeing closed the Douglas plant at Pearson but I think Air Canada snapped up that space.
It would be a loss of aerospace jobs to the 905 at a time when industrial jobs in the 416 are already in decline but it would open up a huge area for development right beside Wilson and Downsview Stations.
The addition of this area, planned in a similar manner to the eastern Portlands, could kickstart the neighbouring Downsview Park and make an even better case for a Sheppard West rapid transit link, either a subway extension from Yonge or a conversion of the existing subway to a through-running light rail all the way to Eastern Scarborough.
Thanks for highlighting the accessibility issues that plague this station. I have attempted to contact the TTC for a response to their prolonged escalator issue without success. Letters to my Councillor, Mike Feldman, have also gone unanswered. Councillor Adam Giambrone has forwarded my concerns to the TTC’s Chief General Manager’s Office and I’m waiting for a response. The article in The Fixer suggested the TTC is waiting for a part to be replaced. The subway collector said the outage was due to a leak. The TTC boasts it is responsible for the most escalators in Canada, so why can’t they efficiently repair them when they break?
That note about the leak is interesting because that is the explanation for the extended outage at Kennedy station of the long escalator down from the bus platform to the subway level. According to the TTC, the leak is now fixed and we should have escalator service sometime in late March.
Of course, the expected date for this on the Elevators and Escalators page
http://www3.ttc.ca/Service_Advisories/Elevators_and_escalators/index.jsp
keeps changing, just like the target date for many other repair projects. This has been a very, very bad winter for escalators, even without the flood at Union that diverted a lot of workers from other stations.
Mark Dowling: I’ve always imagined Bombardier moving not to Buttonville or Oshawa, but to Brampton Airport (which is actually in south Caledon). One of the runways would have to be expanded, but the site also has something that no other airport in the GTA has anymore – direct freight rail access via the Orangeville-Brampton Railway.
I still have sympathy for TTC in-house labour, and even unionized TTC workers (their union local leadership, though is another matter), but I thought elevator and escalator maintenance might be one area that should be done by a private firm that specializes in this sort of thing, like Otis. You don’t see this nonsense in the packed Eaton Centre, even though the building is about the same age and gets huge crowds.
Speaking of broken escalators, the one at Scarborough Town Center has been broken going on three months now. You would think with 12 bus routes going through that station that they would get around to fixing it….
“I wish we could get Downsview Airport closed and Bombardier relocated to Pearson or Buttonville or Oshawa (and the museum too, to the City Centre Airport).”
When it comes to the museum, haven’t you factored in the heritage aspect of its present premises? I can’t see the redevelopment of *that* going over terribly well–and the fact of the museum at least respects its original function…
Re: Downsview, also consider the military facilities there including the Defence Research and Development Centre as well as several units. Not that they couldn’t move, too, but there are more things going on there than just Bombardier (and all of those sad, unsold automobiles parked row after row).
At least they are finally repairing the leaky roof at Eglinton West. Now if they can focus on the platform. Someone is going to slip on the ice, and fall onto the tracks one day.
I thought the first picture in this post was Kipling station(*also in a sorry state)
It’s amazing how much work over-all most TTC stations need. To add to that new subway lines?
They have the money, they just can’t get their organized-selves in order.
Islington Station (my home station) original start date on refurbishing Spring 2008. Then Autumn 2008. Now Summer 2009. Should I believe this?
Presumably stations like Warden & Wilson, at the outer reaches of the subway system, would have been laid out with the train relatively far away from the buses to facilitate fare collection under the TTC’s old multi-zone system. You would have had to pass through turnstiles to transfer between the two. I’m not saying that they couldn’t have been closer, but it explains some of the seemingly useless hallways found in some of the suburban stations. Contrast Lawrence station, inside the downtown zone, with the old Sheppard station, which was not.
See here.
Wrenkin:
By the time Wilson was even designed, the single-fare system was in full force.
I think the poor layout has to do more with having the station in the median of the Allen, while the buses are reached in island platforms on the west side. Lawrence West and Eglinton West are designed well – they can get by with one or two elevators, and the buses are directly above up one level from the subway trains.
I went through Wilson every day for two or so years, until last year. My favourite was a puddle of water at the bottom of one of the columns on the lowest level – the puddle was being soaked up by what appeared to be a pile of old sweatshirts. The wet pile of sweatshirts was there for at least SIX MONTHS.
I started using Wilson Station as soon as it opened to make the trek up to York U. on the 106.
It was pretty frustrating to look from the original 106 platform, on the east side upper level, at the trains pulling into the station, while realizing that you were separated by a couple of flights down and a couple of flights up.
The north terminal added to people’s frustration. Everyone started walking across the road to get to the lower level of the (now) south terminal, either to transfer or to get to the trains. This is somewhat unsafe, so of course barriers were put up to force people to go down the stairs, through yet another scenic tunnel, and back up (to get to the south terminal’s buses).
This barrier worked about as well as the barrier in the middle of Bay Street just south of Front….
Wilson Station let you pretend you were an urban explorer, exploring a maze of twisty passages–while actually following the prescribed route.
The TTC should really make an announcement about these stations preferably in the Star and/or Sun including the schedule for everything to be resumed to it’s original state.
Ed: I’ve had the pleasure of that dank north terminal in 2007 when the TTC re-opened it to basically rehab the bridge-like structure on the upper deck of the main terminal. There was a fence, but there was also a surly TTC supervisor to yell at customers attempting to make the surface connection, while chatting with TTC employees making that same “unsafe” transfer.
It was such a pain, I went out of my way to take north-south surface buses or go from York Mills to avoid it.
Another issue with Wilson nobody’s mentioned is the risible lack of coordination with the recent power centre development to the SW–I suppose, the worst of *both* worlds of planning…
This seems like a station whose modernization would involve complete demolition and reconstruction.
Or, for that matter, a complete reconfiguration of the entire transportation network here–roads included.
With a bit of a non-advocating cringe, I might suggest that this is Toronto’s most promising spot for a futuristic “La Defense” array…
I’m trying to figure out who created the sticker in the photo — there appears to be an email address.
If someone can make it out, I’m at transit@eddrass.com or 416-922-0077.
I asked TTC earlier this winter about escalators and they forgot to get back to me.
-ed
PS: The short unit on the south end of Bloor station southbound was out again this week, only a short while after being repaired. How long has it been motionless in the last 12 months?
Ed: The email and address on that sticker (some time and effort went into it, and adorned all of escalator maintenance posters) urges riders to contact Danny Nicholson at the TTC, with his title, email and phone number.
I contacted someone at the TTC as well about a month earlier before finally posting this article. He responded quickly, but said someone else would follow up. That second person never got back to me either. I would have liked to write this post more like a “Fixer” piece, with some background and explaination of the problem at this particular station from the TTC.
I’ve been in touch with the Wilson station user who created those stickers as well as with the TTC itself.
I hear one escalator was repaired this week, but now additional units at Wilson may be malfunctioning.
Working on a story for Monday.
http://www.metronews.ca/toronto/blog/post/203822
As of today (March 31, 2009), the TTC has posted new signs explaining the reason why 4 escalators were down for 5 months. The signs are visible and are reinforced with black tape (I guess to prevent frustrated customers from ripping them down that became common practice). Although the new signs do not excuse the TTC for being unresponsive for so long, it does show some effort to communicate with its customers, although their website has not been updated as of yet. The signs read:
“The escalator has been out of service as a results of extensive structural repair required due to a broken drainage line. The drainage line has been fixed and in accordance with TSSA regulations, TTC crews are making the necessary repairs to the escalator components, which were exposed to water.”
Now if only an explanation could be given for all broken escalators!
TC: I saw the signs and took some pictures. Let’s see if they turn out. Still, it’s missing an apology or regrets for this situation – at least if the TTC explained the problem properly in the first place, maybe people would have understood.
some further details are listed here:
http://www.metronews.ca/toronto/blog/post/206246
They are working now! However I see a bunch of boxes with new parts in them for the escalators. So I’m guessing we’ll see them down again soon.