OP-ED: Toronto transit needs to build on what we have, not fall for old tropes

Transit planning is a long-term endeavour, not a one-time project with a single solution. In a municipal election year, we need to demand more from leaders and those charged with planning and running transit services than simple soundbites that recall old political slogans.

On Friday, January 2, the Toronto Star published an op-ed titled “To fix transit in Toronto, we need to embrace a simple idea: subways subways subways.” The author of that article, blogger and transit advocate Reece Martin, provocatively uses the words of controversial late mayor Rob Ford to advocate for his preferred solution to Toronto’s transit woes: building more subways.

On Saturday, January 3, CBC Toronto published a story titled “Scarborough residents say they’re being left out of transit improvements in the city.” In it, reporter Olivia Piercey quotes several local advocates, including the president of a local residents’ association, who want to see more subways in the city’s east end as well as the construction of the Eglinton East LRT, which would connect Kennedy Station with Guildwood GO Station, University of Toronto’s Scarborough Campus and the Malvern neighbourhood. They also want better transit to speed up travel within Scarborough, rather than serve the suburb-to-downtown trips. Piercey also writes, incorrectly, that “Scarborough has been without a subway line since the Scarborough RT shut down in 2022 after a train derailment.” It is worth noting that there are three subway stations within the old boundaries of Scarborough: Victoria Park, Warden, and Kennedy, and that three more are being constructed.

Unfortunately, neither of these transit takes address some of the major mobility issues in the Greater Toronto Area, nor do they offer solutions for affordable, quick, and effective transportation that can move people efficiently and comfortably across the city and the region. This includes making better use of our existing infrastructure and fixing LRTs and streetcars to match speeds elsewhere in North America and in Europe. It also means investing in buses, which have helped to make the TTC a success story in years past.

In his article Reece Martin makes several worthy points. The Eglinton East LRT will not be faster than the buses it is intended to replace because it will run entirely on the surface, subject to the same problems faced by the Finch West LRT, despite Scarborough advocates pushing for that project. The costs of transit construction – be it subway or LRT – have become unsustainable. Meanwhile, Metrolinx, which is expanding the GO Transit rail network, is ambivalent about the role regional rail can play in the Toronto area, reluctant to expand beyond operating a commuter rail service. Though construction delays and cost overruns are seen as a specifically Toronto problems, rapid transit projects in peer North American cities such as New York have also struggled to get started, never mind completed, in a timely fashion.

But then Martin goes on to tout subway construction, quoting Rob Ford’s mantra. Mayor Ford, along with his brother, Doug, was obsessed with the idea of a “war on the car.” During his short term in office,  Mayor Ford moved to rip out cycling infrastructure in Downtown Toronto and on two Scarborough roads, raised TTC fares, reduced bus service, and even ordered TTC buses pulled from regular service to pick up the high school football team he was coaching in 2012. At Queen’s Park, Doug Ford has continued fighting the “war on the car” by restricting the installation of new cycling infrastructure, removing speed enforcement cameras, and focusing on the construction of new and expanded highways.

Furthermore, by declaring the Transit City LRT plan “dead” Mayor Ford only delayed the start of construction of the Eglinton-Crosstown and Finch West LRTs, increasing the costs of both. The replacement of the Scarborough RT with a modern and extended grade-separated LRT was cancelled; it took a decade for construction to begin on a subway extension to Scarborough Town Centre. It will not open for at least another four years as it too has seen major construction delays.

The Finch West LRT, which opened just a month ago, was never intended to provide the same speeds as a rapid transit subway, nor should it. The prior bus route, the 36, was one of the busiest surface routes in the TTC’s network, yet it mostly served local needs; the LRT was intended to provide more capacity along with a higher-quality ride, with modest – yet real – improvements in travel times. The slow speed on Finch is not just a matter of having too many stops or not introducing aggressive transit signal priority (though it would help), but also reducing station dwell times, speeding up service through intersections, and eliminating unnecessary schedule padding. These lessons can be applied to the surface section of the Eglinton LRT, as well as those now underway in Mississauga and Hamilton. In Kitchener-Waterloo, the Ion LRT has active transit priority, and its trains run like clockwork, every 10 minutes on weekdays. In Minneapolis-St. Paul, a city region with even harsher winters than Toronto, light rail trains on suburban arterials get full signal priority and they speed through signalized intersections without the restrictions placed on Finch.

It is one thing to advocate for subways, it is quite something else to plan where they should go, which neighbourhoods should be served, and how to pay for construction, operation, and long-term maintenance. Replacing LRTs already committed to with limited-stop subways is not always a viable solution, as we learned when Rob Ford was mayor. What we can do, right now, is speed up buses with measures such as all-door boarding, transit priority, dedicated lanes, and queue-jumps at intersections. In New York, social democratic mayor Zohran Mamdani was elected with a platform to improve the city’s buses. In Toronto, Mayor Olivia Chow is also leading plans to speed up buses on priority routes.

Speeding up buses and fixing our LRTs can provide the solutions commuters across the city are looking for quickly and at reasonable cost, while connecting neighbourhoods together, rather than just to downtown. Toronto already has a network of 900-series express buses that can be prioritized.

We simply cannot rely on a single solution to our transit woes.

Sean Marshall is a Toronto-based geographer and writer, with a passion for walkable cities and great public spaces. His writing and consulting work focuses on public transportation, pedestrian safety, and public spaces.

Photo by Sean Marshall