The Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) is back for another year, and transit routes serving the annual summer fair can get pretty packed.

The TTC runs four routes to CNE as of 2024, with the 511 Bathurst and 509 Harbourfront streetcars both serving the Exhibition Loop, while the 29 Dufferin bus and 504B streetcar bring visitors to the Dufferin Gate Loop.

Though there are many ways to get to the CNE via transit, including increased GO service to Exhibition Station throughout the festivities, some routes are better than others at navigating Toronto's famously brutal gridlock.

With that in mind, blogTO put two of the busiest routes serving the CNE to the test, putting the 511 Bathurst and 509 Harbourfront streetcars in a head-to-head match to determine which route is more efficient.

Subway riders looking to reach Exhibition Loop can depart from Union Station on the 509 or Bathurst Station on the 511. But which one reaches their destination sooner?

@blogto Replying to @🕵️‍♂️🧐🤔📝🥚eggcellent The answer you’ve been waiting for… is it faster to take the 509 or 511 streetcar?🤔👀#tiktoktoronto #torontotiktok #ttc #ttcjourney #torontolife #toronto #torontoontario #torontocanada #race #challenge #torontostreetcar #yyz #fyp #foryou ♬ original sound - blogTO

Right off the bat, commuters in transit from Bathurst Station to the CNE have to travel a further distance, while people boarding their streetcar at Union will have the benefit of a dedicated right-of-way that whizzes past traffic.

However, Union Station's small underground streetcar loop can get much more cramped, especially right after an inbound GO train offloads passengers from elsewhere in the region.

In our test, the Bathurst streetcar did start to recover some ground on its final approach to the Exhibition Loop, where it, too, uses a dedicated right-of-way.

Still, despite some heavy crowds, the Harbourfront streetcar easily took this race by a healthy margin.

However, if a hypothetical third racer were to have taken the Line 2 Bloor-Danforth to St. George Station and transferred south to Union on Line 1 with near-perfect timing, there is a chance they could have defeated both contestants in this challenge by hopping on a GO Train to Exhibition Station.

This challenge ended up serving as less of a comparable race than a case study in the efficiency of dedicated lanes for transit.

The temporary loss of such lanes has proven disastrous in the case of the Spadina streetcar, which is currently out of service until December for a long-term project to repair overhead lines and tracks.

Travel times on replacement buses effectively tripled in the aftermath of this outage, and remain brutal even after the introduction of dedicated bus lanes along the route's busiest stretch.

For better or worse, commuting on public transit is a big part of the Toronto experience, and blogTO has been producing a series of videos that have thus far featured races between modes of transportation.

Other challenges have covered other streetcar routes, subway trains and even good, old-fashioned walking.