UNO News Net: RAPTORS PARADE: TTC, Metrolinx struggling to cope with Raptors parade crowd

A fan takes a photo standing on a crosswalk light on a street light pole during the 2019 Toronto Raptors Championship parade in Toronto on Monday.

Toronto’s public transit agencies were struggling to cope on Monday as hundreds of thousands of basketball fans descended downtown to join in the Raptors’ victory parade.

As of early afternoon, three TTC subway stations — Queen, Osgoode and Dundas — were temporarily closed due to what agency spokesperson Stuart Green said were concerns about crowding at street level.

“People were finding it difficult to exit the station and we didn’t want crowds filling stations,” he said.

“As awesome as today is, it has put additional strain on our service. We planned as best we could with additional subway service and staff to monitor crowding.”

Green couldn’t put a number on how many people took the TTC Monday but said ridership was much higher than usual. As many as two million people were expected to attend the parade, which started at Exhibition Place and wound its way downtown to city hall.

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“Many of them would have taken the TTC. We move 1.7 million on a normal weekday,” Green said.

He said the large crowds caused by the Raptors’ successful 2019 NBA playoff run have been the biggest single phenomenon to disrupt TTC service in recent years. The situation has been made more challenging by the fact that unlike other major events such as the Pride Parade or New Year’s Eve celebrations, the Raptors crowds have come during weekdays and outside of holidays.

The TTC announced its planned operational changes for the parade day on Sunday, and they included more frequent subway, bus and streetcar service in the downtown core. The agency also planned diversions to about a dozen bus and streetcar routes to accommodate the crowds, and deployed additional staff to help manage high passenger volume.

Green said those plans had to be modified Monday when the TTC decided to turn streetcar service back to avoid congestion downtown.

GO Transit was also experiencing much higher than normal ridership. Scott Money, a spokesperson for Metrolinx, the provincial agency that operates GO, said all of the service’s buses and trains were operating at or above capacity Monday.

“This has been a real team effort and we have all hands on deck to get people down to the parade and back safely. Extra staff and extra transit safety officers are working to help our customers,” he said.

Money said on a normal day GO carries 200,000 people, “and today is definitely going to exceed that number by far.”

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There were reports of excited basketball fans crossing live tracks at Union Station in order to get to the parade, something Money said was dangerous, illegal and “never worth the risk as trains can come through at any time.”

“We are asking customers to please be patient, stay behind the yellow line and never cross the yellow line or run across tracks,” he said.

There were also crowding issues outside of Toronto, as people from across the region made their way into the city to celebrate the first time the Raptors or any Canadian team has brought home the NBA championship.

At Aldershot GO station in Burlington, tow trucks could be seen removing cars that had been parked illegally around the stop once its parking lot reached capacity.

The parade was slow to progress and celebrations were still going on in front of city hall well into the early afternoon.

Money said Metrolinx was bracing for an extremely busy evening rush hour, and advised that anyone who didn’t need to travel immediately should delay their trip home.