TTC board votes in favour of renaming Dundas Station

The TTC's Dundas Station will get a new name now that the transit agency's board has approved a proposal from Toronto Metropolitan University.

The station will be renamed TMU Station, the TTC board decided unanimously at a meeting on Wednesday.

The decision comes after Toronto city council voted in December 2023 to rename Yonge-Dundas Square to Sankofa Square over Henry Dundas's connections to the the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

According to the proposal from the university, the TTC and TMU will enter into a "partnership framework" that includes the renaming of the station.

Both organizations, as part of the partnership, will create an innovation hub to be known as the Transit Innovation Yard, with the intention of improving transit innovation in Canada.

Coun. Jamaal Myers, chair of the TTC board, said the collaboration is significant for the TTC because it means the transit agency has a new research partner that will help it focus on problems and address them in a meaningful way. 

"To be clear, the TTC is not taking any position on Henry Dundas," Myers told reporters after the decision.

"We are solely responding to the request that was brought forward to us from council. Neither is TMU taking any position on Henry Dundas. This is really about moving forward and creating an exciting partnership. And this was passed unanimously."

The cost of the renaming has yet to be determined, but TMU will foot the bill by paying for the "hard costs," according to the TTC. TMU will also pay for research done as part of the partnership.

The TTC did not say when exactly the station would be renamed.

Mohamed Lachemi, president of TMU, told reporters that the decision to work with the TTC is important to the university and its community because it gives the university an opportunity to serve the city. He said it is an honour to have the station named after the university.

"We do have many challenges and many issues and I think this is a great day to start a strategic partnership between the TTC and TMU to tackle problems, use the expertise that we have and find solutions," Lachemi said.

A report from the TTC's chief strategy and customer experience officer Josh Colle, which was presented to the board, says: "The area around Dundas Station has changed dramatically with the rapid growth of TMU, and the TTC station has become fully integrated with the TMU campus and student life. 

"A change in the station name reflects the evolution of both the local neighbourhood and university, while aligning with the TTC practice of naming stations after public sector institutions and customer destinations, such as York University, Museum, Queen's Park, and Osgoode."

Colle, in an interview later, said the new deal not only benefits the TTC and TMU but also customer experience.

"There's a great interest from researchers to look at tackling some of the biggest problems that pain riders — bunching and gapping, safety and security, some of the flow of vehicles on our busy streets," Colle said.

Dundas Street and other similarly named landmarks are named after Henry Dundas, a Scottish politician active from the 1770s to the early 1800s, when the British Parliament was debating slavery abolition motions.