Another driver thought the Queens Quay streetcar tunnel was a normal road and went right in
Do the security gates mean nothing? When you’re driving an allegedly stolen vehicle, maybe not
A 40-year-old man has been arrested after driving an allegedly stolen Honda Accord into the Queens Quay streetcar tunnel yesterday. According to CP24, he fled the scene by running away, and the vehicle was towed out of the tunnel. He’s being charged with dangerous driving and possession of stolen property over $5,000.
Streetcar service was suspended for about four hours as a result, but has since returned to normal. Not to sound cranky, but this guy not only stole someone’s car, allegedly, but then made people late for four hours. That’s almost as annoying as when drivers block the streetcar tracks in the winter.
Related: Torontonians spent 100 hours of our precious lives in traffic last year, on average
Security gates have been installed at the Queens Quay streetcar tunnel since 2018, to get ahead of precisely this kind of issue, and there is abundant “Do Not Enter” signage at the tunnel entrance.
Perhaps in the heat of the moment, the driver didn’t notice. He floored it all the way to the ferry dock station.
This is not the first time someone has driven into the tunnel. Would you believe that dozens of drivers have taken this completely wrong route? In 2020, a driver accidentally entered and drove all the way to Union Station. “It’s clearly marked that it’s not a roadway,” a TTC spokesperson said at the time. “It’s gated.” A driver did the same thing in 2017, and explained that he was simply following his GPS.
Do we have any of those way-too-big speed limit signs stashed in a storage closet somewhere from when the province cancelled speed cameras and sent us giant signs instead? Maybe we need to slap some “THIS IS ACTUALLY A FORBIDDEN TUNNEL AND YOU’RE GOING TO BE IN TROUBLE IF YOU DRIVE IN HERE” messaging on one of them, just to really be clear.
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Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
