I like to yap about a lot of things.
Credit cards. Street names. Random buildings.
But nothing more than transit projects.
If you have spent some time around me, you might have heard me make the claim:
“Toronto’s transit system is the best in North America relative to our size.”
And you probably reacted with something along the lines of, “Are you crazy?”
To be fair, the bar is not exactly very high. “Best transit system in North America” is like saying ‘Best Chinese restaurant in Iowa’ or ‘CS student who takes the most showers.’ But still, it is a good bar to understand where we are at.
Today, I want to take you on a little journey through time, to better understand what exactly is the deal with transit in this city.
1849. The first transit system in Toronto opens. It was a lowly stagecoach, pulling passengers from Yorkville to St. Lawrence Market. And it was… wait for it… privately operated (*collective gasp of horror*). Over the next 80 years, multiple different other systems popped up, each serving their own little bits of the city. Some used stagecoaches, while others began laying the city’s first streetcar tracks. Some were radial lines, whereas others primarily served suburban communities. Some provided good transit service, while others, not so much.
Fast forward to 1920. The province looked at this mess, and goes “nuh uh.” All the private systems became integrated into the newly formed Toronto Transportation Commission (later renamed to the Toronto Transit Commission, or TTC). Over the next few decades, the TTC gradually took more and more control of operations, unifying things like fare payment (that’s TTC speak for tickets), vehicle fleets, and running schedules. During this time, the streetcar network also exploded in size, providing increased coverage across what (at the time) were the far reaches of the city’s suburbs.
Toronto 1932 streetcar map.
The transit boom continued into the 1950s, when, in 1954, the TTC formally took over all transit operations in Toronto. That same year, riding on the post World War II economic high, Toronto opened Canada’s first subway. The line ran down Yonge Street from Eglinton to Union, with extensions to St. George, Keele, and Woodbine opening in the years following.
Those decades also saw enormous transit service growth. Streetcars ran as often as every 2-3 minutes during the peak and every 4-5 minutes at all others times (compared to now, when most routes only come every 9-10 minutes - oh, how we’ve regressed).
Then towards the end of the 1960s, a new transit system was emerging in the region. GO (which, I bet you didn’t know, stands for “Government of Ontario”) started as a three year experiment, providing commuter service between Pickering and Oakville. It proved to be a massive success, and over the coming decades service was steadily expanded.
Another development during this time was the growth of other GTA transit agencies - MiWay in Mississauga, York Region Transit in York, Durham Region Transit in Durham, etc. As these regions, for the first time, transformed from rural villages to integral parts of the Toronto urban fabric, their transit systems provided much needed connectivity for locals.
Come the 1970s, however, and tides began to shift with the removal of streetcars in most of Toronto. Previously, routes like Bay, Weston, and Bathurst North that operated extensive streetcar service had their tracks ripped out and replaced by bus service.
This was also when Toronto’s much esteemed suburban bus network system took shape. You have probably heard me yap about how lucky we are in Toronto to have buses along key suburban routes like Finch, Dufferin, or Sheppard running every few minutes all day - this is where that started.
Continuing into in the 1980s, things were once again looking up. The province announced the ALRT project, a new technology that combined commuter rail, light rail, and heavy metro to provide fast, frequent, and electric interurban service throughout the region. They planned, after successfully deploying the concept in Toronto, to export the technology to the rest of the world. Nothing ever came of this concept at home (aside from Line 3, and we all know how that went), but Vancouver did have better luck when they based their SkyTrain system off of the same concept.
Fast forward to the 90s, and that is when everything went down hill. At this time, the province’s finances were a little fucked (recession and what not), so transit service was the first to go. The Eglinton LRT version 1, of which a tunnel had already been dug, was filled in (yes, they literally dug the hole only to dump the dirt back), GO service was cut back, as were local buses throughout the region. It was not a good time.
Then in 1998, amalgamation happened. The old cities of Toronto, North York, Etobicoke, and Scarborough merged to form the new megacity simply known as “Toronto.” New mayor Mel Lastman, trying to appeal to suburban voters, built the Sheppard Subway (now known as Line 4). Deemed the subway to nowhere, it was supposed to be extended after a few years, but of course that never happened. The line’s initial ridership was so dismal that at one point, the TTC considered closing it all together on Sundays.
Throughout the early 2000s and 2010s, the transit network cycled through several boom and bust cycles. Service improvements, then cuts, then some more improvements, then some more cuts. First it was the 2008 recession, then cuts under Ford, then cuts under Tory, then COVID. Back and forth, back and forth.
During this time, we also went through a whollle bunch of transit plans. I mean, just about any government policy in this country has a bit of a reputation for making a dozen plans and acting on none of them, but this period was especially bad. The Globe and Mail made a comedic video on this back in 2013: take a watch.
To make things even more complicated, in 2008, the provincial government went, “you know what we need? ANOTHER regional transit agency!”
And sure enough, Metrolinx was born.
Jokes aside, Metrolinx has done a lot of good for transit planning in this region. Being provincially controlled, they are less subject to the whines of local NIMBYs than municipal planners are, meaning they can push through projects faster. And if it was not for them forcing PRESTO down the throats of every GTA transit agency, there is a good chance we would still be paying with paper tickets and tokens.
Most importantly though, they provide a regional perspective on things. Initiatives like GO Expansion, new wayfinding standards, OneFare, and economies of scale vis a vis bus purchases are unlocked only when you have the size and all-encompassing scope Metrolinx does. There is, after all, a reason why virtually every other city in the world has a similar organization.
That brings us to the late 2010s/early 2020s. And you know what, we have made a bit of progress. As in, we have built some transit. But there is a problem.
Projects Recently Completed
Most rapid transit builds completed in the past few years have unfortunately been vanity projects. Consider the TYSEE (Toronto York Spadina Subway Extension) into Vaughan. Putting aside the chronic budget overruns and delays, the experts at the TTC had argued the line should only extend to York University because there was insufficient ridership demand any farther north. But the provincial government at the time said, “if you want our money, you need to run the line all the way up to Vaughan.” Is it a coincidence that Vaughan just happened to be a major swing riding the Liberals really wanted to win?
I will leave that up to you.
It is no surprise then, that while the TYSEE stations are some of the most gorgeous in the network, they are also some of the least used.
On opening day, I was there, and got interviewed by CBC about this.
Well, 12 year old Andre Zhang was right.
The other problem is that this is not just a one time investment. You see, because of the low ridership (and low ticket revenue), the TTC loses a lot of money on operating the TYSSE. And you would think that the subway into Vaughan’s operating costs would be covered by the City of Vaughan, right?
No.
Toronto taxpayers and transit riders are paying for it.
Make it make sense.
Other examples of these vanity projects include the Mississauga Transitway and York Region VIVA BRT. These two have a combined price tag of **one billion dollars** and not much to show for it. I mean, sure, the stations are nice. But these corridors have ridership dwarfed by pretty much every random Toronto bus route.
And is that really a surprise when this is the land use around the Mississauga Transitway
Seriously. Not only is it in the middle of a field, but there is not even *parking.* I mean, who is the intended rider of this bus?
And this is the timetable for the VIVA Yellow, the route that uses the bus rapidway on Davis Drive in Newmarket.
While we can never fully understand the rationale behind these projects, I do suspect it has a lot with governments of all political stripes trying to court voters in the 905.
But on the up side, splashy transit projects spur housing development. Even if the transit is useless. So maybe it is not all bad.
Oh well.
Point is, we repeatedly see that this is the story of transit planning in this city. Transit is not placed where its needed the most - rather, it is built where it brings the most political leverage.
It is all politics.
And now, where are we today? Our transit system consists of an embarrassingly scant core network of two and a quarter subway lines, complemented by a frequent but slow and unreliable network of buses and streetcars that love to get bunched together. Connecting to the suburbs is GO, operating primarily as a commuter rail service that gets people into downtown in the morning and out in the evening. Then, we have all the 905 transit agencies, providing core service along a few key routes but other than that running buses every 30 minutes or worse on most major corridors.
Sure, there has been some increases in transit service. Brampton and Waterloo specifically have seen massive boosts in ridership, driven in part by explosive population growth. And GO has introduced enhanced off peak service along its Lakeshore, Stouffville, Barrie, and Kitchener lines
But there is so much more on the horizon. And that is what I want to spend the rest of this piece talking about.
Projects Under Construction
First, the elephant in the room.
The Eglinton Crosstown and Finch West LRTs (what’s left of David Miller’s Transit City plan) are (finally!) nearing completion, and both should be operational by this time next year. These projects have faced extensive price overruns and delays, and have also been criticized for excessive stoppage. I mean, the Finch West line, for example, stops on average every 570 meters - that’s closer to a bus then it is a subway (Line 1 has a station every kilometer).
Another major problem is a lack of transit signal priority - that means that the LRTs will have to stop and wait at traffic lights just like any other car. In every other city around the world, their signal programming will automatically extend green lights and hold red ones to allow for faster travel speeds on transit. You know, if you’re spending like ten billion dollars to build the line you might as well help it run a tad faster. Right?
Not here.
But you know what. Let us be positive. They are done (almost). Some transit is better than no transit. This is a victory.
Out west in Mississauga, the Hazel Mccallion Line (AKA Line 10) down Hurontario Street is also coming along nicely. This project has largely flown under the radar so far (probably a good thing), and is poised to bring a north-south link to the Peel Region for the first time.
Looking a bit further ahead, the next wave of projects are also getting underway. The Eglinton Crosstown West extension, Ontario Line, and Yonge North subway extension have (finally) after decades of yapping, begun construction, and are all poised to open in the next decade. The Ontario Line is particularly notable for using driverless light metro technology, adopted widely around the world but (for some reason) not yet in the GTA.
Beyond that, many initiatives are in planning but not yet funded. In Toronto, the Waterfront East LRT will provide connectivity to the fast growing docklands district, and the Eglinton East LRT and Sheppard Subway will bring rapid transit to Eastern Scarborough for the first time. The Dundas West, Queen, and Highway 2 BRTs in Halton, Peel, and Durham, respectively, will enhance connectivity along their key corridors, and hopefully (unlike the ones in York Region) actually have buses run on them.
And then, there is the biggest project of them all, and you probably have never even heard of it.
GO Expansion. Or, as the OGs call it, GO RER.
Its goal is to transform GO from a commuter rail system into a regional one.
What is the difference, you ask? (Ok, maybe you didn’t. Too bad, I’m telling you anyways).
A commuter rail system serves, as the name suggests, commuters. It imports workers into the city en masse in the morning, then exports them back out to their suburban homes again in the evening. A regional rail system, on the other hand, operates more akin to a subway. It connects people to all destinations at all times of the day.
Thus far, GO Expansion has two main stages.
Stage one, which began in 2012 and is almost complete, is about enhancing service delivery. Over the past two decades, GO has acquired most of the track it runs on from its freight partners. This means that they own most of the physical infrastructure and no longer need to compete with freight trains for space. With this newfound ownership, they have begun double tracking. Whereas previously most lines only had one track, they are adding a second track on core sections, allowing trains to run in both directions. This work also requires rebuilding stations with new tunnels, bridges, and platforms.
The results of these improvements are starting to show. We now see trains on the Lakeshore lines every 15 minutes on weekends, on the Kitchener Line every 30 minutes during the midday, and additional service improvements are expected soon.
And if you have been on a GO train outside rush hour in the past few months, you will know - these changes have led to explosive ridership growth.
But it gets even better. Under stage two, which is just getting started, GO is electrifying their network. Currently, their trains run on diesel, which is expensive, loud, dirty, and inefficient. Electrification involves the purchase of dozens of electric locomotives, the installation of thousands of kilometers of overhead wires, and construction of associated power substations. Not only does this allow trains to run far more often, it means they can run way faster and closer to one another.
This project is, for the first time, being led by DB (the German national rail operator). For a long time, activists and experts alike have been talking about looking for best practices outside of North America and to the rest of the world, and it is exciting to see that that is what GO is doing.
As a corollary to this is the plan to add new stations (or, for those of you old enough to remember, the remnants of John Tory’s SmartTrack) in the City of Toronto, leveraging the existing trackage to provide additional connectivity within the city. New stations include at St. Clair/Keele, Spadina/Front, and Midland/Finch. Exciting stuff.
So, that is what is happening.
I do not need to tell you how great it is. When I say that Toronto is in the midst of North America’s largest transit expansion, I mean it. It is an exciting time for our city.
That being said, not everything is fine and dandy. Equally as important as what is happening is what is not.
Let’s start by talking about the bus network. For decades now, buses have been the backbone of the transit system in the GTA. But the problem is, they are not flashy. Running more buses doesn’t give politicians the same wonderful photo ops and talking points that opening a cavernous (if empty) subway station does. So, bus service suffers.
Recently, Mayor Olivia Chow (a supposed defender of the TTC and transit) announced bus service would be back to “99% of pre pandemic levels soon.” Sounds great, right?
The problem is, you know what is included as “bus service?”
a) Shuttle buses used during subway closures
b) The buses that replaced Line 3
And think about how many buses it takes to replace a single subway train.
So when she says “service is increasing,” what she really means is “we are shutting the subway down more and more and replacing it with buses.” Clever, right.
Here is another gimmick they use.
If you know anything, you will know that the traffic in this city has gotten so much worse over the past few years. And so, that means bus service has deteriorated.
Think about it this way. If it takes a bus an hour to make a round trip, it can make 24 of them in a day. But if it takes an hour and a half to make the same trip, then it can only make 18. So, the bus comes less often.
And this is exactly what is happening. While politicians boast that the number of service hours is increasing, the actual amount of service (i.e., how many buses arrive per hour) has actually fallen.
Similar patterns of neglect of the bus system can be seen all around the GTA. With a few exceptions, most bus routes and frequencies have not changed since the early 2000s. But think about how much our region has grown since then. And you will see why this is becoming a problem.
RapidTO, an initiative designed to help speed up bus service by painting dedicated bus lanes, has now been in planning for five years and only 1/5 corridors has been implemented (with no clear timeline for the rest). Routes like the 35/935 on Jane or 54/954 on Lawrence carry upwards of 30,000 people per day, yet the buses are stuck in a sea of single passenger cars, often taking more than 10 minutes to clear a single intersection.
This is not some fancy rapidway or transitway. This is quite literally red paint on the ground. How long could it possible take?
The same is true on a regional scale. GO Bus service along some of the region’s busiest highways comes only every hour or two outside of the peak periods, with poor local transit connectivity. Buses to popular destinations such as Niagara and Kitchener are often overcrowded, and it is routine to be stranded at a stop because a bus is full and to be forced to wait a full hour for the next one.
And of course, we need not even discuss the abysmal state of 905 local buses. Many corridors do not even have service, and those that do see buses every thirty minutes to an hour. When the service is like that, anyone who can afford to will drive.
All this is to say, building up the backbone of the local transit network is simply not a priority for politicians of any political stripe.
The same can be said for Toronto’s streetcar network.
Reading through the TTC’s service planning document, the average speed of the 501 streetcar is around 9 kilometers an hour.
Yes, you read that right. Nine.
The 510B along Spadina, which runs in its own dedicated lane, is even worse. 8 km/h.
I remember seeing a tweet (which I can no longer find, unfortunately) of a few guys dressed up as a TTC streetcar participating in some sort of charity run event. One of the comments was, “they are moving faster than the actual streetcar does.”
This would be funny if it was not actually true.
Why are streetcars slow? There are a bajillion reasons. They include:
Too many stops too close together
Traffic, including street parking and left turning cars
At cross streets with track switches, the streetcars absolutely crawl through them, taking FOREVER
And to make matters worse, because they are slow, streetcars are even more prone to bunching than buses.
Annndddd to make matters double worse, because they are so big and carry so many people, they do not come that often to begin with.
[When the TTC upgraded to the new streetcars that had double the capacity of the old ones, they took it as permission to run less cars. Since, y’know, there’s the same overall capacity.]
That is why it is quite common to be waiting 25+ minutes for a streetcar to show up downtown during rush hour.
It is often said that the reason Montreal is such a bike city is because their local transit is so shitty. I think we are starting to see this in downtown Toronto as well.
The third and biggest problem is that things just cost so much damn more to build.
In 2018, when Doug Ford announced his slate of transit initiatives, the three flagship projects were expected to cost a combined 30 billion dollars.
Now, six years later, the Ontario Line alone is projected to almost hit that number.
When things cost too damn much to build, we build less of them.
If you want a detailed overview of what is going on, check out the Transit Cost Project. But here is the tldr:
Construction workers are heavily unionized and in short supply, so they make BANK
We like to build really big and elaborate stations that look nice but are not functionally necessary
We like to tunnel things instead of putting them on viaducts (which are much cheaper) because people do not like seeing or hearing trains
We have a desire (and sometimes a legal requirement) to buy from domestic manufacturers, driving up costs
We like to outsource everything to pricey consultants instead of simply doing it in house
We run procurement with sketchy backroom deals and very little transparency
We do not standardize designs or construction methods, instead insisting on doing everything from scratch
And things are not just a little expensive. They are very expensive.
I am talking more than double the price of equivalent projects in other countries.
And before you ask, no, this is not because they use child laborers or whatever. Looking at the phenomenon of “infrastructure cost disease” (as its known), it transcends national borders - there are many wealthy countries that can build for cheap too.
And finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention the whole other host of little things that should be improved:
Adding PRESTO to the Bikeshare and the Islands ferry system
Adopting a unified wayfinding (signage) scheme across the region
Actually enforcing fares and ensuring people pay for transit so the system has the funding it needs to operate
Closing Yonge/Bloor streets to non-local car traffic during subway closures so shuttle buses can move at a (half decent) speed
Better communications regarding the status of projects - what work is being done, timelines, and what the fuck is going on
So, where does this all leave us?
I think that at the end of the day, I stand by what I said at the start: we have a good transit system.
We have politicians of ALL political stripes who at least PRETEND to care about transit (the same cannot be said for the rest of the continent. Consider the Democrats in New York or the Republicans in California. Everywhere else, it seems to be a competition of who can destroy transit faster).
We have a population who, by and large, are willing to take transit when it is fast and reliable (just look at the explosive growth weekend GO Train ridership has undergone, largely with suburbanites who normally drive around).
We have literally tens of billions of dollars poured into our transit system - funding that is committed to yielding real, tangible results.
Is there room for improvement? Of course there is.
I think that unlike issues of healthcare, education, or the economy, most people do not really know what is going on (not saying they are experts on those either, but at least it is comparatively better). Greater public education about how transit works, the issues they face, and how we can fix them will help transform our systems dramatically. I think I have touched on many of these issues (in brief, of course) above.
But all this being said, it is important not to lose sight of this most fundamental fact.
We are building more transit than anywhere else in North America. Our transit is not perfect, but it exists. And it is getting better.
In 15 years time, our public transit will be unrecognizable when compared to the system we have today.
And that is something we should be proud of.
Streetcar map from:
https://www.blogto.com/city/2019/02/toronto-streetcars-map-1932/