Drs. Brian & Michael Doucet are tonight’s speakers, their first presentation to the ERA. Their presentation is a sweeping and accessible 90-minute journey through the history of Toronto transit from the 19th to the 21st century. Toronto’s streetcars are an icon of the city and a crucial part of one of Canada’s busiest transit networks. Since the 1960s, the city has been home to North America’s largest streetcar system, a network still growing today thanks to new LRT lines in the city and its surroundings. Both today’s streetcar network and the wider city in which they run are heavily influenced by more than 150 years of transportation history. The creation of the Toronto Transit Commission in 1921 produced a state-of-the-art network that extended service into new suburbs. While subway expansion dominated the post-World War II decades and the system was threatened with closure, changing priorities and politics led to renewed investment in the late 1970s. Extensions of the legacy streetcar network, new LRT routes in Toronto and Waterloo and systems under construction in Mississauga and Hamilton mean that electric traction will continue to play a vital role in transportation in Canada’s largest urban region. The story of Toronto’s streetcars is, therefore, a story of Toronto, in particular its transformation from a modest, predominantly British and provincial city in the 1960s, to Canada’s leading metropolis and one of the world’s most multicultural cities.
Dr Brian Doucet is a researcher, author, filmmaker, photographer, award-winning teacher and
Associate Professor in Planning at the University of Waterloo
. Born and raised in Toronto, he lived in the Netherlands from 2004 – 2017, where he received his PhD in geography from Utrecht University in 2010. Since returning to Canada in 2017, he has held a Canada Research Chair, been awarded six major research grants and was a 2025 winner of the Ontario
Undergraduate Student Alliance
Teaching Excellence Award
. He is also the writer, host, and director
ofThinking Beyond the Market: a film about genuinely
affordable housing,a feature-length documentary film which
explores solutions to the housing crisis.
Dr. Michael Doucet is a Professor Emeritus in Geography at
Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University), where he
taught from 1977-2010. While at TMU he developed and taught a very popular
course known as Geography of Toronto. Born in Toronto, his interest in urban
transit developed at a young age. On 30 March 1954, at the age of six, his
father took him to ride the first leg of the Toronto subway system on its
opening day. He has continued to attend opening events as Toronto’s transit
system has grown. Since 1970, he has been taking photographs to illustrate
change in his home city, many of which depict the transit system.
Together, the Doucets are the authors of the award-nominated book
Streetcars and the Shifting Geographies of Toronto: a visual
analysis of change
, which uses historic images of the city’s streetcars to help understand and
interpret how Toronto has changed and why. They are some of the leading
experts on Toronto’s transportation planning and history.
