The Toronto Transit Commission is hoping to make it easier for commuters to navigate its subway lines by numbering its routes in the same fashion as New York and Paris.

The "wayfinding" proposal will be presented at Toronto City Hall on Wednesday afternoon. If passed, the TTC will shift away from its current road-based naming system and move toward a numerical system.

  • The Yonge-University-Spadina line will be referred to on signs and maps as line 1
  • The Bloor-Danforth line will be line 2
  • The Scarborough RT line will be line 3
  • The Sheppard line will be line 4

"This is about navigating the system, making it easy to get around, not for our everyday users who know how to use the system and know where they're going, but for the casual rider, visitors to the city and for those whose first language is not English," TTC spokesperson Brad Ross told CTV Toronto on Wednesday.

Ross said the TTC is also planning to introduce more pictograms and icons, as well as harmonize the fonts used on signs in subway stations.

"Right now we have a whole mish-mash, almost a ransom note of fonts," Ross said.

The overall goal of the TTC’s proposal will be to introduce a "simple, non-fussy approach" to customer communication, as well as to emphasize the existing colour-code system, according to a report that will be presented by the TTC on Wednesday.

The TTC says the proposed signage will be designed to stand side-by-side with existing signs, without "conflict or confusion," to allow for a gradual roll-out of the change.

As the city debates how an extended transit-service into the suburbs will look like, Don Valley West Councillor and TTC Commissioner John Parker said changing the names of the subway lines makes sense.

"It becomes irrelevant to put names on the subway. The Bloor-Danforth line becomes the Bloor-Danforth-McCowan-Shepperd-who knows what line, so giving them another name makes sense," Parker said.

The proposed plan, however, isn't going over well with some transit riders. While numbered systems work well for New York and Paris, critics point out that those cities have much larger transit networks.

"I don't think it's necessary. We only have four lines so it's not really difficult," one TTC commuter said.

On Tuesday, Ross tweeted a mocked-up photo of an entrance to the Bloor-Yonge station, showing what some of the new signs could look like. The signs in the photo retain the yellow and green colour-coding currently used to identify the two lines.

The TTC will implement a pilot project of the plan at the Bloor and St. George stations to gauge rider response.

With a report from CTV Toronto's Natalie Johnson