History
The station was opened in 1954. It was originally named "Bloor", and connected with a pair of enclosed platforms in the centre of Bloor Street to allow interchange with Bloor streetcars within the fare-paid zone. When the streetcars were replaced with the Bloor-Danforth subway in 1966, the station began to be shown on maps as "Bloor-Yonge", but actual platform signs still show "Bloor" on the Yonge-University-Spadina line and "Yonge" on the Bloor-Danforth Line, following the style common in the New York subway. (Some maps over the years also showed the station with two names "Bloor" and "Yonge", although the style "Bloor-Yonge" is now in use again; both are retronyms of Bloor Station.) Similarly, the automated station announcement system installed in 2007–08 refers to the station as "Bloor" on the Y-U-S line and "Yonge" on the B-D line while the new Toronto Rocket subway trains, which operate on the Y-U-S line refer to the automated stop announcement systems as "Interchange station, Bloor-Yonge". It is the only TTC station named in this way; all other interchanges share the same name for both lines, including Sheppard-Yonge.
The station originally featured a small retail concourse along the corridor leading from the entrance at the south side of Bloor Street. This concourse was closed and disappeared during the construction of the office building at 33 Bloor Street East in the late 1980s.
Due to its congestion, the TTC has been motivated to expand the station. In 1992, it took advantage of building construction over the station to open it out and widen the platforms on the Yonge-University-Spadina portion of the station. This was the first stage of a plan to enable trains to open their doors on both sides: the tracks would next have been slewed outwards within the widened station, and a central platform built between them.
This type of construction, known as the Spanish solution, is employed in the Barcelona Metro and has expanded to other subway systems, such as the Singapore MRT, the MTR Hong Kong, the Shenzhen Metro, the Guangzhou Metro, the Shanghai Metro, the London Underground, the Toulouse Metro, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority in Boston, the New York subway, the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority in Atlanta, and a variant of this in the TTC's own Kennedy Station on the Scarborough RT.
The TTC does not intend to proceed with this, as it would require closing the station for many months. The Bloor-Danforth platform has not been widened, because of the extra complication of construction and disruption in service stemming from it being an island platform, and so it remains heavily congested during peak times. However, the TTC included a roughed-in Spanish solution station platform on the Sheppard line level of Sheppard-Yonge Station.
The TTC experimented with crowd control measures on the southbound platform of the Yonge-University-Spadina level on November 24, 2009, and made it permanent since, given that it allowed for passenger flow to improve by discouraging them from crowding near the stairs leading to the Bloor-Danforth level. These measures also reduced dwell times by a few seconds, such that a few more trains can enter the station during rush hour without building additional capacity.
Read more about this topic: Bloor-Yonge (TTC)
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