The Eglinton Line is Open. Many, Many Thoughts.
Toronto opens its first subway in nearly 25 years.
The Eglinton Crosstown is open.
This post will be long, you’ve been warned. If you’ve just checked out the Crosstown today and want to know my take, or if you didn’t get to and want to know what it’s like, I think you’ll enjoy this.
I woke up at 3:55 AM today, layered up, and got on a night bus to Kennedy station in Toronto’s east end. What followed was two of possibly the most miserable hours of my life — -26 C and a bit windy sitting outside an unopened subway station. The fact that the station, which had plenty of staff in it, was not opened earlier for the people that lined up to be the first to ride the trains, is quite silly — especially because many transit “enthusiasts” are teenagers who showed up clearly underdressed with the bitter cold — I was wearing a lot and even I considered bailing every time a bus pulled up to go back to my warm bed. I’m thankful nobody (as far as I know) was badly hurt, but it was a real head scratcher seeing staff look out from a (not particularly warm, but at least enclosed) station and not letting people — who could have been kept away from the platforms — in. Fortunately, I at least got to suffer with friends!
If you like this kind of reporting, (or if you have enjoyed my YouTube content over the years …) consider a paid subscription. It really helps me on days like this when I’m running in -25 C weather on three-and-a-half hours of sleep!
I wasn’t entirely sure what I was getting into. I decided to arrive about 2 hours before the line got going at 5 AM, but wasn’t sure it would be busy. This line is a big deal — which is a plus for use — but it’s long and relatively high-capacity, and it was unbelievably cold (including in most stations) which are minuses. The outcome naturally ended up being somewhere in the middle, and like seems to often happen with these openings, crowds were pretty limited at the crack of dawn with more people showing up as the day went on.
On The Line
Fortunately, we were eventually let down into Kennedy, where the first train was departing on the line (and so where the most hardcore fans were). Naturally, despite lining up for hours, a lot of people sprinted around me to get on. I’ve had this experience many times, and I still got a seat, so I wasn’t rushing. I didn’t get much time to look at Kennedy, but it really felt gargantuan inside — which as we are going to see is a theme.
As the train got going (I got a seat above the bogie facing backwards), there was some trepidation as to whether the experience was going to be just like on the Finch West line, which is slower than a proficient jogger.
This was made worse by us getting stopped at a red light before we could even fully leave the tunnel portal from Kennedy — which is followed by the surface section of the line, before we later enter the tunnel and turn into a subway. Fortunately, things actually ended up being pretty good. On Finch, the trains would crawl into and out of stations, and through intersections, and even if the TTC still has their draconian speed restriction policy in force, I certainly did not feel it here like I did on Finch. Everyone on the train was commenting that it felt quick … and it did! The infrastructure and trains also felt better: less creaks and groans and less bumps over switches. I think zipping through some intersections and even passing some cars brought a smile to my face!
Upon further reflection, while these speeds were good, I’m not sure we would have hit them had traffic been heavier and if we were not the first trip of the day. I imagine other people probably had a slower experience, but with signal priority and a few other improvements, we should be able to make this very serviceable travel experience the norm.
Pretty soon, we got to the underground segment of the line, and while I could tell we weren’t going quite full subway speed, it was naturally fast and efficient. I was seated on the wrong side because all underground stations have island platforms, but on my ride back I got off at every single station and explored every corner and entrance.
We ended the trip at Mt. Dennis, which is the only above-ground portion of the line not running along a street. The station itself here is interesting: an above-ground island platform with a glass wall, a bit like a greenhouse.
Mt. Dennis is quite a sprawling complex with the yard for Line 5, a big GO-and-Airport Express station, a big bus terminal, a huge heritage office building, and a pick-up drop-off area. The station feels a bit like a campus, and like Kennedy, it really stretches out. The various transit modes are not really stacked or laid out in the most efficient manner, and instead plopped where they will fit.
This is in my eyes mostly fine, but you aren’t getting Hong Kong-style hyper-efficient cross-platform transfers. There is a lot of walking and going up and down stairs (as well as lots of escalators — but I wanted to get my steps in). The big Mt. Dennis and Kennedy hubs really do feel like hubs: you have multiple restrooms, lots of enclosed areas, pick-up and drop-off points, lots of entrances, and tons of amenities, from bike parking, to water fountains, to lots of good new regional transit diagrams.
It will be cool to see how dense new development might wrap around and even take up some of the open land on these two sites in the future.
After a quick break at Mt. Dennis, we headed east to check out all of the proper stations.
I’m not going to review the surface stops on the line, because we already know everything there is to know about them. The shelters are too few (Finch was built later and so is a bit better on this) and not protective enough, you pay your fare at a GO train-style tap point as you walk onto the platform, there are ticket machines on the platforms, nice next train screens, and level boarding, which is nicer than what we see on the streetcars. While I mentioned that Eglinton felt quick on the surface, I would compare the speeds to the Berlin trams, even in central areas — that’s both an indictment of our streetcars, which feel about half as fast, but also a huge opportunity to make them better. When rebuilding and building new streetcar routes in dedicated rights-of-way, we should both expect them to be this fast, and also provide similarly large shelters, level boarding and other amenities.
As we worked our way east I will spare you the details of most of the stations, because honestly they are generally fairly forgettable. They really do follow a pattern:
Platform level has your standard amenities, usually an elevator and a set of escalators and stairs, with more vertical circulation elements (VCEs) at the interchange stations. There are grey and orange perforated panels on the walls of the stations, which look nice (I sort of wish there were more colours) and include the station name in the TTC font with the major north-south streets underneath, as you see here and there on the rest of the subway.
You go up one level and end up on a sort of mezzanine sometimes with two mezzanines and one at each end of the platforms; this is usually where the fare barriers and ticket as well as old-fashioned transfer machine is.
The Mezzanine at Keelesedale. The view down to the platform and trains from the mezzanines are really nice, though the giant concrete walls above the tracks do feel like they are missing public art, which the line does have but feels light on. A number of stations seemed to be missing any major art pieces at all, though the major stations mostly each had something.
From the mezzanine, there are then various series of stairs and escalators up to the surface entrances.
Stairs and Escalators at the main lightbox entrance at Forest Hill. 
Stairs at the secondary entrance at Oakwood. There are no open entrances on the sidewalks — all of them are enclosed within buildings. Stations generally have one major entrance with escalators and a big “lightbox” with a soaring ceiling,
The lightbox entrance at Oakwood. and then one and sometimes two more minor entrance buildings across the street or down the block with a stairs-only entrance, and fewer fare gates.
The entrances have very nice big screens, which will eventually show when the next trains are arriving at the platforms below, on top of the station’s opening and closing time, and the status of the various lines on the network.
Info screen at Caledonia. The wayfinding is a big improvement over the TTCs wayfinding standard — the signs are all consistent, fairly well-placed, clear, and there are a lot of good digital signs — such as next train screens that don’t also have ads, use big font, and show the next two departures. But this is apparently not the same latest standard as Metrolinx has on Finch, so there are some weird and poor design choices, like not specifying the specific place two different exits will take you to. On the walls of each station, you get a nice regional transit map featuring the subway and light rail as well as the GO network, as well as a map of the local area, and a diagram of the station in the style of the Hong Kong MTR.
There are a lot of stairs and escalators in these stations. More than once I climbed over 10 separate sets of stairs to get out of a station, and often it will be three long escalator rides to get down into them. They are often very deep, and taking the stairs means climbing what feels like four or five times further than it would on an old Line 1 or 2 station.
A couple of stations have bus terminals, but in a positive move, it’s mostly the big sprawling suburban stations like Kennedy (pre-existing), Mt. Dennis, and Don Valley.
The Mt. Dennis bus terminal with super nice (regular readers know I’m a sucker for these) lcd next bus displays. There is a modest bus “terminal” at Keelesdale, similar to on some Line 2 stations, but it’s not in the fare paid zone, more of just a little bus loop out back of the big station lightbox. For the more urbane stations, you just catch buses from the street, although sometimes with the shelter of a station entrance.
The reason the stations often end up feeling forgettable is because architecturally they are all the same. Giant volumes and soaring ceilings, hard angles, all white walls with stripes of lights, and a mix of used and empty ad spaces, and lots of glass as you get up to the surface. There is a modern appeal to the design, but it seems like all the white surfaces are likely to get less white and quite dirty over time. It also all just feels pretty sterile, even if the pops of orange (wish the trains had these too!) do help things. There just isn’t enough public art, and more colour would probably make these spaces feel less like the back hallways of an airport terminal and more like a place you might linger. That being said, the stations still feel nice because they are the opposite of the dark and dingy places some subways — including Toronto in places — can be.
Like seriously, without looking at the signs on the above stations, (which are several different ones!) I don’t think you, or I, could tell the difference between any of these stations!
There are a few interesting standouts:
Caledonia has some neat text art on the walls you see as you descend to the platforms, and a switchback as you ascend from the station that lets you look down at the platforms from far above.
Avenue, along with a few other stations, was mined, and so its ceiling makes a broad arch that is relatively uncommon in Toronto. You also can face the crazy east entrance, which has a lot of stairs.
Mt. Pleasant is pretty standard, however one entrance is built wrapped in an old bank facade, which is cool, and a sign of things to come with the Ontario line, which has a couple similar entrance designs.
Don Valley is a brief underground interlude to the eastern surface section, Reminiscent of St. Clair West. The station feels mostly like other stations on the line, but has a huge bus terminal that has already been partially closed for work on the Ontario line. This has meant closing elevator access to it, and this seems like it’s created a really horrible “accessible” route through the station, which requires doubling back to the opposite side of the huge Don Mills and Eglinton intersection, and then looping around the block. Apparently the main access to the Ontario line’s elevated platforms at this station will come off of the walkway from between the concourse above the platform and the bus terminal.
Eglinton-Yonge is kind of the prime station on the line, and kind of weird. The station is a really confusing web of passageways slapped onto the side of the already somewhat maze-like Eglinton station, and connected into a bunch of adjacent buildings.
Eglinton is a piece of work. People will learn to navigate it, but it’s definitely difficult to describe in text. What I can say is that the station feels squeezed in between the adjacent towers, and the existing subway, with a number of locations where the floor slopes in various directions and huge outcroppings jut out from the ceiling and walls wrapping around Line 1, utilities and more. It all reminds me a bit of the McGill station on the REM in Montreal, which also feels “squeezed”.
What’s interesting though is that as an interchange, while the station is fine, it certainly doesn’t feel super high-capacity. The Yonge platform remains narrow, and access to Eglinton is via just two escalators and some stairs. There aren’t a lot of open spaces in the station where passengers can sort of disperse, and so the connection feels like it will get crowded and uncomfortable quickly. It all seems like something that might need a multi-billion dollar expansion and rebuild in a few decades.
Cedarvale then is really extra interesting, because it is the other Line 1 interchange, and it feels both similar and totally different from Eglinton-Yonge. On the same-y side, the station feels like a real maze, because the new concourses for the Eglinton line don’t connect super well with the old stations concourses, so to go between the “stations” you have to go down to a mezzanine and connect by way of Line 1. The stations feel like they are sort of interwoven, and while that is annoying, it does mean that the Crosstown station both feels quite shallow relative to the rest of the line, and that you get some really nice skylights.
Cedarvale and it’s Skylights. Where the station feels totally different from Eglinton-Yonge is that the transfer is good, and super high -apacity. Giant walkways lead from both Line 1 platforms to big mezzanines with tons of open space and lots of vertical access down to the Eglinton line. In some ways, it’s almost as if the better place to change if you’re heading from the east on Eglinton to downtown is Cedarvale, riding past Yonge street entirely. I almost wonder if this is somewhat intentional as a measure to reduce transfers to the very crowded Line 1.
The Good
There is a lot to like about the Crosstown, and I think the centre of many of these things is just that 1) this is Toronto’s first really modern subway, and 2) the surface section is actually decent.
When you’re underground, the stations feel bright, clean, and spacious. The trains are fast and frequent, and the wayfinding is generally very good — with both clear next train screens, and audible announcements about the arrival of trains — I really hope the TTC steals some ideas here, especially the lack of overhead ad signs (all ads are on the walls) and the existence of dedicated next train screens without ads. The station structures — if maybe not the most creative — are at least big and impressive.
It’s also really nice that the line feels highly connected. Connections to GO are mentioned, and the diagrams on the trains and in stations show GO and airport express services, which most transit riders use from time to time at a minimum. The TTC should really add at least the airport express to its diagrams.
But, when I talk about the line being modern, I also just mean the basic stuff. There is cell service (except for on Freedom, which is apparently coming … ) from day one in the stations and tunnels, lots of info screens, digital ads (I know, ads, but on the subway is kind of the one place I’m standing and don’t mind looking at one, and separating them from important wayfinding is a nice touch), there are also quite a lot of empty retail spots — which, hopefully, unlike the TTC’s older spots, can be leased out to little coffee shops and the like (ideally at super low rates, they make nothing sitting empty) because they seem to be logically-shaped and well-serviced. There are also a number of bike rooms at various stations, which most legacy stations do not have, and which feels very of the era. The line is also pretty technologically advanced: trains are entirely driverless in the yard, there are cameras everywhere, every component of the system is in a digital inventory system, and there are even thermal cameras that can move around and look for a fire. This is all cool, but also sometimes not …
Now, while I did complain about there not being enough art, the art that is here is great. I particularly like the stuff at Kennedy, Mt. Dennis, and Caledonia, but the colourful stuff at Cedarvale and Don Valley is also very nice. These art pieces are going to become part of the fabric of this city, so it’s exciting to be here as people just start to get familiar with them.
It’s also clear a lot of stations are just priming local areas for lots of development. Caledonia, Leaside, Laird, and Mt. Dennis are all surrounded by a bunch of strip malls and parking, and all have major developments planned around them. I expect we will probably see clusters of towers and mid-rise developments at each of these “subway” stations down the road, and that will both juice passenger numbers, but also create new destinations that backfill a raison d’etre for each of these stations.
There’s been a long habit of some people in the Toronto transit discourse trying to draw a false dividing line between “streetcar” and “LRT”, and as expected, once people started riding it, they came to the sensible conclusion. The surface section of Eglinton is more or less a “streetcar”, and the underground section is a subway.
In some ways I think this is a loss that should be placed at the feet of many of the most passionate “LRT” advocates. The design we came up with really didn’t take advantage of the boundary-breaking capabilities of light rail, which you see in cities like Calgary that adopt things like ballasted track, reuse of off-street rights-of-way, and absolute priority with railway gates.
And you know what, even the surface section feels pretty good. My trip was not perfect: we did wait at a few lights, but the driving was more aggressive, and we did not slow down so dramatically at every platform and intersection. Definitely better than a bus, and any streetcar in this town, and while I wouldn’t take it over the subway, it’s not half bad and will be a good option if people need to get to the Golden Mile or Aga Khan.
I want you to know that the “the bad” section that follows this “the good” section is probably going to be longer, but not because the line is not good. It is a huge benefit to the city, but the benefits are sort of a few distinct (very big) things — connectivity, speed, consistency. The bad is a lot of small, mostly minor things, but things that really ought to be sorted nonetheless. Fortunately, the TTC and city politicians are asking for feedback, so hopefully they will fix a lot of this stuff.
The Bad
There are a bunch of bad things that need to be fixed with this line. And to be clear, these things are mostly all minor details that don’t diminish what is a very useful piece of infrastructure, but they are still very frustrating to me personally.
Imagine for a second spending your life’s savings on a very nice house. You hire good builders, and they go over budget, and run late, but eventually you get the house, and while it’s structurally sound and the finishes are nice, it’s also got all kinds of random problems. Your bedroom is missing a door, the sink and toilet have switched places in one washroom, the kitchen stove is already malfunctioning. So many of the issues on the Crosstown are totally trivial, and yet the fact that they still have not been fixed after years of delays and budget overruns screams of a lack of care, poor processes — because clearly people noticed these things and yet nothing was done, and (yes I’m saying this) lack of respect for taxpayers. You wouldn’t build a house for yourself and forget the doors, and we shouldn’t expect governments who’ve already gone late, and over budget, and say we don’t need a public inquiry, to put out a transit system with this many issues. I’m not going to bother placing specific blame for problems, because I don’t think the cause of them is always so clear cut, but clearly collectively our transit agencies need to sort this stuff out.
The trains, like those on Finch and the new streetcars (and actually GO trains), have buttons on the doors. This lets the doors remain closed as long as nobody is using them. On super cold days (like today) or super hot days this enables saving a ton of energy by not letting the heat out at a stop where nobody gets on, or at least by not opening more doors than necessary. The TTC already doesn’t use the door buttons on the streetcars, but again not sorting this out for a multi-billion dollar new line is ridiculous. And before excuses are made — these buttons exist around the world and are used quite widely, there is not a Toronto-specific reason we cannot use them, besides not caring enough to do so.
There is clearly some waterproofing issues with these stations (not abnormal, but also something that needs to be fixed). They don’t seem too catastrophic at the moment, but seeing icicles forming on the roof of a brand new station is not good. Waterproofing issues can be fixed, but we might not be able to anymore if we don’t fix them ASAP and let the issue lose salience.
Right now, travel in the tunnels is slower than other subways in Toronto because of a 60 kph speed limit, which seems to be the result of caution around emergency brakes randomly coming on. This is supposed to get fixed, but given how cavalier the TTC has been about having slow zones up and down the subway, and with the speed of Finch, we really need to watch this closely. This speed limit means Eglinton is slower than Line 2 from Keele to Yonge, despite having fewer stops.
I mentioned the line being technologically advanced before, and one particularly frustrating thing is that to keep people off the tracks and the yellow line at the edge of the platform each platform has a pretty serious array of freaking LIDAR scanners up and down it. This is legitimately cool technology, but there are two huge problems with it:
1) The system is finicky as heck. Step on the yellow line or look down the tunnel for your train, and it sets off, but you won’t know it because the audible announcement to step back from the platform edge lags by like 15 seconds. (There are one set of LIDARs on the platform wall, and ones you can see hidden behind the signs placed above the platform edge). They even take over the next train displays to tell you to step back so nobody can see when the next trains are (the next train displays also seem to be wrong some of the time, which ought to be fixed — including the next two trains is nice though). Clearly this implementation is bad: if you’re going to make an announcement, it needs to be loud and clear, but it’s quiet, and in the standard text-to-speech announcer voice, and gets drowned out by the noise of people talking and other announcements in the same voice. The bigger problem though is just that this is a bad bad bad solution.
2) Platform screen doors exist to do the exact same thing, seem like a much more common and probably cost-effective solution, and they physically block access to the tracks. Creating a worse, bespoke solution for keeping the tracks clear on a line like this where (because the platforms are so low) it seems like it might be a weird problem, instead of using bog standard platform doors, is nuts.
The wayfinding is also sometimes pretty clumsy. There were a few places where signs were in weird places, or said things like “to Eglinton West”, which the entire western half of the line runs underneath. There are also indicators placed directly on each platform telling people to walk down because trains all stop at the end of the platform instead of in the middle for nerdy signalling-related reasons. However, these signs being under peoples feet instead of in front of them seemed to mean most people weren’t seeing them, and a lot of people were doing a last-minute mad dash for their train. This one sign I saw being cut off because it’s mounted behind a wall makes the overall point pretty well.
Having fire doors on a transfer walkway like with the Finch West line and at Union Station is super annoying. These doors should be locked open and released to close only if there is a fire alarm.
Some murals really ought to be painted on some of the numerous blank walls along the line. Even just the giant blank concrete walls above the platforms.
The TTC and Metrolinx urgently need to fix the fact that the coupler between the trains is not only exposed, and leaves a wide gap between them, but also has a sort of platform on it that looks like exactly the type of thing a teenager might try to “surf”. This kind of thing has happened with GO trains before, and on the subway, and if it happens here and they slip, it’s going to be a very gruesome death because if you slip there, is basically nothing to catch you or to grab hold of. There are lots of solutions here — San Francisco uses retractable belts like you see in airport queues that connect between the trains, Sydney puts an angled cover on the coupler making it basically impossible to stand on.
There is one more complaint that I hear a lot that I kind of want to push back on, and that’s that the entrances of the buildings don’t all have towers on top — or protections for this. I get the desire here, but putting a tower on top (a few stations are actually designed for this) makes the station more expensive to engineer and build — a real problem in this city already, and ultimately Toronto has no shortage of land to build condos on; we have other problems that are creating many more problems for housing production.
The Crazy
Now, I don’t want to dwell on this too much, but after years of writing about the Crosstown, its capacity, and relative cost when compared to Vancouver’s Canada line, I feel like this next bit needs to be said.
The Canada Line
Vancouver built the Canada Line, a 100%-separate-from-traffic, fully-driverless metro system starting construction just about five years before the Crosstown in just three or four years, and at a quarter the price. People quibble with this, but that means Vancouver got four times the capacity per dollar spent, and after now having ridden both lines, I am even more certain I know why.
The Canada Line’s design really started with the trains, which are half the length of the Crosstown ones, but are wider, more spacious, and have a similar number of doors. Since they are automated and never interact with any traffic, they can also operate more frequently. The Crosstown has much longer trains, but the layout, narrow design, and insufficient door capacity meant even on the first day (which as someone online said quite accurately didn’t seem all that much busier than I’d expect rush hour to be) that people were having to line up to get on stopped trains and that trains were dwelling for a really long time. The contractual capacity of both lines is the same — 15,000 people per direction per hour — achieved on Eglinton with longer trains running less frequently, and on the Canada line by shorter but also wider trains running more frequently.
The thing is, while the capacity achieved by the trains is the same (and felt like it would be similar after having used both), the shorter trains on the Canada line mean the stations are instantly half as long. This meant that they could also be much shallower because even though that route like the route of Eglinton has hills, you don’t have to be as deep to follow them if the places you have to be mostly level — the platforms — are shorter.
The stations on the Canada line are also big enough to handle the capacity of the line, and no bigger. I don’t jest when I say I think the average Canada line station (please look at the images and read the captions, I think it illustrates things really well) could fit within the average underground Eglinton station four or five times over — they are just that big. And while that is nice, it’s kind of for nothing because the trains are the real bottleneck.
Like, it’s great to have these enormous structures, they are certainly impressive, but they absolutely dwarf the stations, instead of being perfectly-sized for them like on the Canada line.
I mean, many of the Crosstown’s underground stations — probably all of them — have more entrances and vertical access than the average TTC subway station — like Ossington, or College (setting aside the interchanges of course). What’s funny is that they look pretty similar to Canada line stations, and are fine! The line is expensive because building big stations is expensive.
Capacity
This leads us to the issue of capacity. I have long said (and often gotten flack for) saying that the Crosstown is likely to be crowded and out-of-capacity sooner than later, and given how busy it was on a freezing Sunday in “soft launch”, mode. I feel so even more strongly now. The trains are just not very big, and the circulation of passengers in and out of them is slow, and made dramatically slower by crowding as passengers have little space to squeeze with the awkward internal layout, as well as the lack of doors.
I wrote a piece that came out today in the Toronto Star about this; basically I see the Crosstown’s capacity problems as a double-edged sword. If the line had all the problems of Finch, then it wouldn’t be very popular and capacity wouldn’t be an issue. However, the line seems to thankfully actually be good and quick, but I think that this, along with the novelty of a new line, the fact that it intercepts a lot of routes that also go to Line 2 and connects with a lot of GO lines means that it’s going to be very busy and that we are going to regret downgrading it from what was planned to be a full subway a few decades ago.
Fixes
There are some things we can do about this. The good thing is that the stations themselves are huge, so as long as we can get more people on the trains, and run the trains more often, it will be fine. The thing is, we really should have been thinking about this from the get go, including by ordering trains that have more and bigger doors (even some regular trams in Europe do!), and by designing the line to operate a higher frequency all the way to Don Valley station where it will interchange with the Ontario line.
Reflections
Putting everything aside, what’s clear to me is that Toronto got itself a much better transit network today. Eglinton is not perfect, and it’s not a subway, but it will make getting across the city faster and more comfortable, and it will create all kinds of useful connections and enable tons of trips that are very annoying at present.
Along with Finch West, Eglinton will shape a clear era in Toronto’s transit development, shaped by both over-optimistic beliefs about the capabilities of low-floor light rail, Toronto’s policymaking, and our ability to sensibly plan transit, but also a desire to create a less intense urbanity, and different patterns of development. As you travel across the network, you’ll notice patterns in these lines that feel like projections from ideas of the past, and also aspirations of the type of infrastructure the city could build. Long term, I think Eglinton and Finch will both be lines we live with and don’t regret, even if they might make other projects — like a fast and high-capacity Sheppard line across the city — a more urgent need.
Ultimately, with these lines, even fewer destinations and neighbourhoods in Toronto remain without rail access, the city has massively increased its supply of electric transit, and fast journeys between many origin-destination pairs are now possible.
This network will also be more reliable thanks to much needed additional redundancy, and it will also be easier to navigate when sections of the system are shut down for work and upgrades in the future, possibly including to fix some of the problems I’ve mentioned above.
Moving Onwards
Beyond fixing the minor issues I mentioned before, I do have some higher hopes and things I want to see in the long term for the Eglinton Line:
Strong signal priority — obviously;
Intersection redesigns and closures in the east end, extending the grade separated section to Don Valley and speeding up the “streetcar”-style sections;
Screen doors at all underground stations, once we come up with a more rational door arrangement and better, higher-capacity trains.
Fortunately though, the Eglinton line opening means there is finally space for us to think more about the other sometimes more important and often just as big projects happening in the city, all of which will be complete or much further along in the next decade.
There’s the Ontario line, which will have the connectivity benefits of the Crosstown, but with even more speed and capacity, and connections through the densest part of the city;
The three big subway extensions, including the western extension of the Eglinton line, which will expand the reach of the system, and the usefulness of the entire existing network;
And of course, the continual improvements to GO, which happen as the result of small independent projects and policy changes, but amount to more than any other single project.
There are also all kinds of other system-wide improvements ahead of us in the next decade. The bus fleet will continue to become more highly-electrified. More existing stations will be expanded and improved, every station will finally be accessible, and I’m sure we’ll see at least some platform screen door retrofits.
The success of signal priority and dedicated lanes on routes like Dufferin and Bathurst may well spell an era of broad improvements to surface routes, and at the same time, we can probably also expect more bike lanes, and Presto integration on bikeshare.
There’s also just the transformation of the urban form of the city. As the housing market cycle continues, we will likely have a huge boom in all kinds of housing, from towers around these new stations, to missing middle development that increases the use of existing transit lines and stations, to new offices in the core that further drive Toronto’s Manhattan-ization and the need for high-capacity peak downtown-oriented transit.
Suffice to say, in many ways, Eglinton opening is just the start of an exciting new era of transit in the city. And while ridership is still down since COVID, if Eglinton keeps doing well, Finch improves, and the subways slow zones are turned around, I wouldn’t be surprised if we complete the rebound quite rapidly, and push hard back into record setting ridership territory. After all, so often the opening of a major piece of new transit infrastructure makes people across a region rethink their travel patterns, even if they don’t touch the new infrastructure.
Me
For me, as I was sitting in the freezing cold today, and looking at a “house” missing bedroom doors, I think I sort of accepted the end of an era for me. I moved to Toronto as a student excited about this project, and I’ve gotten married, had a kid, and done a whole career since. I just can’t keep making transit content the way I used to. I have this blog and will keep publishing, but I don’t want transit to be so central to my identity anymore. I’ll try out a new line, and you’ll see me riding around, but not early in the morning. I’ll write blog posts, and maybe appear in media, but more as someone communicating fundamentals and important realities — not news or hyperbole. Maybe I’ll look for another job working on transit directly, or maybe not.
Transit is a cool field, and I love it dearly, but the unfortunate reality is I live in Canada (which I love), not Japan or Switzerland. Loving transit here is hard, and sometimes it feels a bit like loving skiing while living in Morocco. I feel like I’ve been burned so many times, and done a lot of hard work for free just to so often feel ignored, and sometimes worse. But, as they say, love finds a way.
So for me, time to move on. Into a city with undoubtedly better transit.
Thanks for all your work Reece. Been following you for years and was excited to see this pop up in my mail. Fantastic read.
Great piece Reece. Comparison to the Canada line is apt. Ironically I bet most Vancouver residents would love for its platforms to be twice the length for more capacity. It's suffering from success!
In any case I'm glad to see that line 5 likely isn't a big disaster like Finch or what we might have anticipated. Hopefully improvements come in the next few years. Trams with longitudinal seats and more doors would help. (Funnily enough I have thought that the Canada line trains could use the exact same changes for the next iterations.)