Toronto: A Huge Setback for the Greatest Transit Project in Canadian History, and How to Save It

The hardest post I've ever written.

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This post is going to be very long. If you care about this issue as much as I do then you’ll understand why. It is complex, there are many moving parts, and there is much to say. (Like watching this unfold is a big thing that made me want to stop doing YouTube.) I’ve broken it into four main sections, which will have big headers at the top of them — background on why this matters to me, the big news story, where we go from here, and what you can do. It was hard to write this — I talked to a few friends who strongly suggested I should, and so even though this whole situation has felt a bit like losing a loved one I decided to stay up late and pull an all-nighter (with a baby) so I could get it done.

I also sort of summarized in a YouTube video here, though there are less details:

Why This Matters to Me

What you may not know about me — Reece Martin — is that at least half of why I moved to Toronto (besides attending UofT) was the transit expansion. You might scoff at this idea like people have frequently over the years, but I remember staying up late at home in Vancouver, having spent only a few years (outside of when I was a young kid) in Toronto, watching public consultations for projects like the Davenport Diamond Grade Separation.

I had been to Sydney, and Tokyo, and Amsterdam, and the idea of a modern electric regional train system for Toronto felt so obvious — it was extremely odd to me that it didn’t already exist honestly. I knew other North American cities (okay, American cities, short of a single poorly-maintained one in Montreal) had electric train systems, but they looked old and dysfunctional (a surprisingly accurate read!) — it seemed like Toronto was aiming for world-class, and it was very exciting (this was the mid-2010s).

When I got to Toronto from the almost rural exurbs of Vancouver I was enamoured with living downtown, for obvious reasons — but one of the first things I did was go and start riding GO trains to see what it was like. Back then there were few very high-quality videos of the system that I remembered from when I was a toddler and my father sometimes took me along for his commute on the green octagonal carriages — lot of nostalgia there. The first video I posted on YouTube was of a GO train, and I probably made more videos on GO than on any other topic over the years.

Over my years living in Toronto, my YouTube channel developed (perhaps like a new era-Steve Munro blog more focused on system expansion as opposed to the existing TTC network?), and I met my wife — who was always huge part of the YouTube channel behind the scenes, and even more importantly was willing to do insane things like ride GO trains around town all day and pull all-nighters at Paddington station so we could be the first to ride London’s Elizabeth line. Doing transit YouTube in Toronto was hard — I’ve had almost no correspondence from the TTC over the years, less than from agencies in places like Paris and Sydney, and while Metrolinx was nice enough to invite me to a few things — including a cool TBM tour, they’d also scoff at me for asking to be invited to media events, such as to see the Eglinton Crosstown, even as my videos on their projects — often quite positive about Metrolinx’ ambitions! — got hundreds of thousands of eyeballs.

I developed a huge friend group of transit people in Toronto — I’d say 70% of my friends are transit folk — working for engineering firms, and of course, TTC and Metrolinx. We’ve bonded a lot over the years riding transit together, we have a group chat where we complain and cheer about decisions being made, and it’s a really heartwarming thing; I met one of my best friends as I defended Metrolinx’ talk of electric locomotives for GO against my friend’s preference of electric multiple units (they were probably right). While I might seem cynical and negative on social media, our conversations and a lot of my videos painted an optimistic picture of Toronto — a city which was, and still is, doing a bigger transit expansion than anywhere else in the western world (besides Paris).

When it was announced that Metrolinx was going to work with a consortium of companies — including DB — to upgrade the GO network into modern electric regional rail, my friends and I went out for a lavish meal and toasted to DB. I was very excited, and actual Germans started reaching out to me.

I want to head this off early. DB has a bad reputation in Europe because of train delays — this is a real problem. The extent to which it is DB’s fault and not the result of austerity with regard to infrastructure funding is debatable, and the urban and suburban systems run by DB are great. I remember riding the FEX train into central Berlin from the airport after having rode the Elizabeth line in London and remarking that the ride felt even smoother than in the already better-than-North-America UK.

Complaining about DB creating problems because they have poor on-time performance on the long-haul trains they run over the rather complex German railway network (they run probably 1000x or more trains than Canada’s national rail operator) feels like complaining that your run coach isn’t Usain Bolt, but “just some guy that came in 10th”. Other companies bid (MTR dropped out, SNCF was in the other consortium) but DB won. We had and have much to learn from them.

Some of them were working on this project because they had heard about it in my videos, some had found out about me from my videos. (It makes me extremely sad to the point of tears that some of these people who relocated across the world to a country with worse transit, and a punishing housing crisis, may well have got laid off on a Zoom call and had their ideas thrown in the trash.) Many of these folks were passionate about the project to the extent that they were willing to meet some weird YouTuber guy outside of work hours to talk about how the system works and what might make it better. There were wild and interesting ideas about what could be drawn from, not just Germany, but places around the world.

Basically, I built my career and life in Toronto around GO Transit and its rebuild, and to some extent the way things have gone makes me feel sick to my stomach, I am depressed, but I am still hopeful, read on.

The Big News Story

A few days ago, a rather long and dramatic article came out in “The Trillium” that goes into all the problems that lead to Metrolinx and the portion of the consortium with DB in it (things are complicated, there were multiple sort of sub-consortia within the larger consortium) having a falling out. The article is great and it’s absolute worth your time to read it.

In this section, I want to sort of go through the article and give my commentary. Partially because the article is in some ways just a summary of the things I’ve been experiencing (mostly secondhand) in slow motion through friends working for Metrolinx and the consortium over the past several years — It’s painful stuff.

Some people seem to think that the cancellation has to do with the former CEO of Metrolinx departing, which doesn’t really seem like the case. He was at the helm when the project started, but this was going on over years, and even after he left.

The article starts by talking about how Metrolinx is “claiming” that the consortium failed to deliver and that they don’t have the funding to continue (Metrolinx is simultaneously building what is possibly the world’s most expensive subway as well as many other pricey projects, so a shortage of capital seems... questionable), this is then countered by sources suggesting DB pushed for a more ambitious project, that was maybe seen as too radical by Metrolinx leadership (who, I couldn’t say).

A big problem with this process (and a lot of P3s in general) is that there is no transparency, this is a bigger issue with bigger and bigger projects. Metrolinx will say one thing, others will say another. It’s basically impossible to validate anything for the layperson because there aren’t documents, et cetera, being released. All kinds of excuses are given as to why this needs to be the way (for example, to maintain competitive bidding), countries like Italy have far more transparency and also far lower prices, so that sounds like just an excuse to me. It also just feels wrong that the public doesn’t get to see how projects it’s paying for are developed.

You can see how this harms projects from something I talked about in another post. A heritage portion of Toronto’s Union Station was causing problems for the regional rail project (this was not disclosed broadly to the public and we only know about it because of comments at a trade show), and it’s removal was clearly seen as impossible. Had there been transparency, an obvious solution might have been found — relocate it somewhere else. I have a passionate audience of rail lovers, and not one comment suggested we shouldn’t do that. But, people can’t tell you something which they don’t know about is ok.

The article then goes on to talk about how because of this cancellation the project is going to go from great, to just alright. I will talk more about this later in the post, but it sounds roughly accurate to me. The raw difference in outcomes might not be that big, but the missed opportunity and years wasted certainly are!

Initial plans announced for the project would see almost subway-like frequencies, which is frankly less than you’d see in Sydney or Tokyo (where the regional trains just get subway frequencies), but also buried were massive speedups that would have shrunk the whole GTHA region, making it as fast to go to distant suburbs from Union on electric trains as just going to Finch on the subway. The quote “This is nuts” sums it up well: it was super exciting — standard international stuff.

There is also mention of international experts (can confirm) and how Metrolinx and DB did not really get along. It also mentions how Metrolinx made it hard for them to do their jobs. I personally had people who clearly were incredibly invested in the project tell me for over a year how it seemed like Metrolinx was trying to make them fail, and how they didn’t seem to even want them there. This is obviously terrible and unacceptable, but to be fair it’s also probably not entirely surprising that when you bring in outsiders to do the jobs you’ve been doing, you might feel resistant. The article mentions as Metrolinx has before that DB was not ready to take over, but I can confirm based on documents I’ve seen that the plans for what the network was actually meant to look like were changing at an almost unbelievable clip. It would be hard to imagine anyone being able to hit such a small and fast moving target in a timely manner.

The article mentions that there was not clarity about what Union would look like (I assume this means platform configuration, which passionate online enthusiasts have noted saw plans change several times over the last few years), or how often train would run. These are perhaps the most fundamental problems for the project and I will come back to them.

Probably the thing that has disturbed people who aren’t in the transit scene the most are comments in the article about how some folks at GO Transit didn’t want to run frequent bidirectional trains — like every other world city that isn’t in America.

GO Transit is technically part of Metrolinx, but as people who know more about the organizations and the history have told me (and from what I’ve seen this checks out) the fact that GO was much more established than Metrolinx when it was “absorbed” means that in some regards GO absorbed Metrolinx more than Metrolinx absorbed GO.

People see this as wild, but this is just the reality of North American railroading — it’s conservative! I know it’s weird for people who are deep in a sort of America-centric, two-party, left-right dichotomy to imagine that (it was for me at first too), but that’s just sort of how it is. Furthermore, when you think about GO as a shuttle for drivers from the suburbs to the Toronto central business district — it does do that very well, and the trains and stations are pretty nice! (As we Canadians love to compare ourselves to America, in a lot of ways GO is nicer than the American commuter railways) Basically, I don’t think we should be surprised that people who developed something which does one thing very well over decades would be resistant to that changing, even if clearly the system could do many other things at the same time. I remember one comment that stuck in my head: “trains every few minutes, what is this, a subway!?”.

This is another place where transparency would have been extremely helpful. It would take one old-timey railroader suggesting GO shouldn’t run frequent bidirectional service, a media frenzy, and this attitude may well be purged for good! Instead, you only know about this if you’re a weird transit nerd like me!

The article then discusses how DB was taken aback by being hired and then not really being listened to or embraced. One example given is that GO currently runs some ludicrously inefficient shifts where people are working for like 25% of the shift (but being paid for the whole thing). This might not seem super inefficient to North American railroaders who run commuter railways that leave the trains parked most of the time, but it is horrifying stuff for people who run serious mass transit systems. It’s mentioned how there was disagreement about using German scheduling software (which I’m sure was just from a German company and not literally in German) and then this quote is given: “The rail veteran who worked for ONxpress, however, said Deutsche Bahn wanted software that hosted data in Germany, which wouldn't be allowed under Canada’s cybersecurity laws.” This quote sums up so much of the problem with the way this project went... the Germans came in with obviously good ideas, there were also obviously some barriers to implementing them — but, instead of finding solutions (like I don’t know MODIFYING THE SOFTWARE!!!! — I think I can complain about this, I was a CS major) we just killed the thing. It would be like if you hired a running coach, he tried to get you to run faster than you could, and so you fired him.

The next sections talk about sort of unsurprising stuff: the usual MBA-type problems with dysfunctional organization, bureaucracy, and aversion to change. Even Metrolinx hiring duplicate staff to the people they already hired at the consortium. There is mention of employees spending most of their time doing bureaucratic busywork instead of “building a railway”, and I can only imagine that might have been the sort of stuff that made it so DB couldn’t deliver on time (I don’t know for certain); you can imagine someone trying to complete a project might get slowed down if you were constantly making them attend irrelevant meetings and fill out forms that weren’t clearly adding value.

Some key issues that come up included a lack of understanding of signalling, discomfort with the number of trains crossing level crossings, and Union station. I want to address why these things are a tad silly individually:

• The signalling on the GO network has clearly been a big problem since long before this project (it doesn’t have train protection, and it is much less automated than systems internationally so we literally need two people at the front of every train, somewhat like a human redundancy), so if it was a real issue, that’s on us for not solving it sooner.

• The number of trains crossing level crossing being an issue seems like a classic North Americanism — sure, level crossings are not great (I’ve said this lots of times over the years), but Toronto already has a highly grade-separated rail network, and few truly egregious level crossings remain. Many cities which run far more trains than us also have more level crossings. The attitude toward level crossings seems to be at least somewhat downstream of “North American railway brain”, where level crossings are terrible because all we have are massively multi-kilometre long freight trains that mean gates are down for a long period at a time. Meanwhile, cities like Calgary have tons of level crossings on their light rail (which runs every few minutes), but it’s not a huge issue because the electric trains pass quickly — they are short and fast — and the gates reopen. Are electric GO trains light rail? No, but they are much closer to that than to a massive freight train. It’s also the case that most of the concerns about level crossings (let’s be real) are probably about . . . delays to drivers, not whether they are sufficiently safe.

• Union Station still being a problem was an own goal. We could have rebuilt the platforms when the city embarked on its enormous rebuild, but we didn’t. Clearly the solution is fewer, wider platforms (the Dutch learned this from the Japanese for Utrecht Central which I like to remind people). But, whatever the issue — people like Jonathan English have been talking about actual solutions to the problems for over a decade (see his proposed regional rail network from 2012 here, and from when he was at the Toronto Region Board of Trade here — kind of crazy they guy isn’t running this project at Metrolinx honestly). It’s generally concerning to me that so many passionate people are on the outside and not brought into the fold in the North American transit industry. I’ve never been to an industry conference for example (or worked at a transit agency!). We decry a reliance on consultants, but people work as consultants because they aren’t working for the agencies!

Eventually, the article gets to talking about the “minimum viable product”, which is basically just frequent Lakeshore line service, and upgrades to those tracks through the Union Station Rail Corridor (USRC) — something I’ve been discussing as a reasonable first step for years. There is talk about this being all Metrolinx can do within the current funding envelope, but that’s silly. Anyone who knows transit knows English-speaking countries pay multiple times what other parts of the world do for the same stuff, and part of it is… stuff like what this article is about. You might have money to do more if you weren’t only getting into serious technical details on frequent GO train service like a decade (imagine the cost of that time in wages, lost benefits, and inflation) after the Liberals announced the plan!

It is depressing that there is mention of “descoping” speed increases, since these would help make GO even more competitive with driving (it’s usually already faster when trains run, they just don’t run often enough). The kinds of speed increases we are talking about would have meant some truly un-North American rail infrastructure, but also that places like downtown Markham and Port Credit would be short trips from downtown (I hate to say it, but you could probably get to Port Credit and back before you could get to the end of the Queen Streetcar) — it would be game-changing stuff, if it happened.

It does seem that the planned electrification basically ends on the eastern and western outskirts of downtown — pointing to battery trains and the Union station issues I discussed in that other blog post. Though I’m happy to see the UP Express getting electrified sooner than later, since the upgrade programs that made it possible also made that corridor electrification ready. The UP is really successful, to the point Metrolinx is having to try to push people to use less expensive, but arguably worse GO trains — when they should just be pumping way more trains onto the airport route (Vancouver which has a smaller airport had more than twice as much train capacity to its airport!).

This all brings what is probably the core problem to a head — There just wasn’t a coherent agreed upon plan.

To understand railway infrastructure, you have to understand how the railway operates. The way trains run, how fast they run, and how frequent determines exactly what infrastructure you need and where. If trains are passing each other, you need a siding or maybe an extra platform; if services are crossing over, you might need a flyover. I talked about this stuff on my YouTube channel for years.

And this is the problem. Again, we are over a decade in, and the article includes quotes from Metrolinx like this…. (emphasis mine)

“In town halls, Metrolinx leadership described defining the scope of the project as a major challenge that they hoped to figure out soon.”

“We’re getting close to being able to articulate … what the plan is going to look like and when service-level enhancements arrive,” Lindsay said on June 4.

What has Metrolinx been doing in the many years since this project was announced? What’s odd is that some infrastructure that we know we need is still not ready, while we’ve built some stuff (like these tunnels under the 401) that have sat complete but unused (and unusable) for years. In some cases, it seems things we already spent money on at some stations will need to be ripped out and redone to accommodate changing plans. This is not only delaying the project, but it’s wasting tons of money, and what’s worse is that when you spend money on stuff you don’t use, and don’t build stuff you need in the short term, you can’t deliver more trains sooner.

For example, if instead of building very expensive tunnels under the 401 we accelerated the Stouffville line double-tracking project, we could probably have 15-minute service (at a minimum 30-minute service) from Brampton to Markham from now, and hourly out to Kitchener!

Not having a clear plan for when you will run trains when means you can’t optimize these things, and so service improvements are delayed. The changing plans seem to be downstream of oddly-changing requirements, and an attempt to make perfect something which cannot be made perfect — or cutting costs even while clearly we are spending tons of money. An example of this was changing the Lakeshore East / Stouffville quad track section from a New York subway-style local/express, with the express tracks in the middle and the locals on the outside, to a side-by-side arrangement to remove a single flyover structure. We could afford that flyover many times over if we weren’t hinging the future of transit in the GTHA on inconsequential details for years at a time. “Well what would you suggest Reece!?” (I will address this in the next section).

What clearly needed to happen here is that we needed to create a masterplan a decade ago that wasn’t entirely set in stone, but which had a train schedule and a service plan, and gave us something to build towards — clear infrastructure requirements. Maybe over the years we’d change our minds (though it’s not like populations and the shape of the city have changed that much in the last 10 years!), but those could simply be adjustments to an already accepted ground truth, not a whole new plan that we have to rethink everything to make work.

There is also mention of freight. The reality is most of the GO network sees little to no freight, but the freight companies maintain very powerful rights to use the network in emergencies as has happened from time to time. I get the sense that we go above and beyond to accommodate freight trains, probably in part because freight railroaders are the vast majority of railroaders in Canada, and there is a lot of crossover between these groups, but also because most of the rail infrastructure we’ve built is designed for freight trains. The issue here is sort of one of malicious compliance. Some people seem to think we need to do way more to allow the odd freight train to use the network than we do in reality, and that makes projects more expensive (the Davenport guideway would be way smaller and cheaper if it was only for powerful passenger trains, and an at-grade freight track that was perhaps embedded in the planned “greenway” path was activated — and the path shut down for the once in a decade emergency that might require that), and stuff like level-boarding and high platforms harder. A lot of these problems are manufactured of course, since if you go to the US northeast you can see double-stacked container trains running under electrification wires, and freight trains running past high platforms.

The point is Metrolinx screwed up here. (It should go without saying but this is an organization level failure, and lots of people at Metrolinx are good, smart people that want great transit, I’m sure DB also has people who think we should just throw in the towel because we’re hopeless) They wanted a bold expansion, and they hired people who knew how to run a much better railway, but Metrolinx wasn’t a good customer and seemed unwilling to do the necessary work to run a boldly expanded railway. They seemed to not want to change how things work, but then they want to run many times more trains! It’s also clear that the organization did not have broad buy in — if people don’t understand, or want to understand how modern high capacity railways work, they shouldn’t be working on a system that is trying to become one! It of course couldn’t have helped that there wasn’t a clear, and public facing plan to build from and point to — or seemingly in depth knowledge of what other places do. Just “look Sydney and Paris have trains with wires!”

All in all, the article is good, but depressing. Its hard not to feel like years (and probably lots of money) are going down the drain, probably in large part because of hubris and incuriosity, and I’m not going to lie — this sucks. But, I think the bigger question it poses is… where do we go from here?

Where We Go From Here

While we may have lost the so-called “Express Subway”…

The truth is, we haven’t lost anything besides time, and the respect of the international transit community (probably). A railway is a living thing that will last for over a century. This is a bump in the road to be sure, and it should have been avoided (the amount of overlap with bungled transit projects like the New York Second Avenue Subway and California High-Speed Rail really makes me wonder if anyone asked “How are we avoiding that here?”), nothing has changed since this article was released. I’ll go even further and say that if you were planning to go buy a condo near a station like Port Credit, or Unionville, that you should still do it; these places already have the track capacity to operate 15-minute service (and quite possibly better — as Ottawa’s Line 2 shows!) under construction. What’s really been set back is GO being like BART, or a regional subway like the Paris RER, not GO just being a half-decent railway (in some places it already is this today, like the Lakeshore line, and my personal expectation is that at a minimum the three other “RER” lines will get at least as much service as Lakeshore has now — the infrastructure will enable it, and the public will demand it (you play a role here!)).

In fact right, at the end of it this is mentioned:

“Another senior Metrolinx employee, however, said the work already accomplished and the agency’s public commitments make them optimistic that it will be able to at least get to 15-minute service intervals and electrification.

“That seems to be the only coherent plan at the moment,” they said.

“Honestly,” they said, “that is the part that is keeping me from going full doomer about the project.”

I want to present to you the reality of the network we have today, what we should hope for in the future, and how we can get there.

The Network of Today

The reality is, as the GO network exists today, we can run trains every 15 minutes all day long on the Lakeshore Line (we’ve done it before pre-Covid, and do it on weekends right now). Once current double tracking projects wrap up, this should also be possible on the Kitchener and Stouffville lines. I say should be, because the reality is that for GO, 15-minute service seems to feel like running a 100m dash, while for a typical electric suburban rail system it’s a walk. We need to adapt our organizations and expectations to make this the norm, and understand how other places do it.

A Train Solution

For example, we may well not have enough trains — we have more than you’d think because, again, we’ve historically left them parked a lot of the time, but if we need more, we can order more. That we haven’t ordered new trains (Metrolinx has picked up a few more locomotives) indicates that there are decisions which need to be made, but to me getting some Alstom LINTs or Stadler FLIRTs, both of which are certified in North America and have operated in Ottawa seems obvious. Maybe some adaptation will be needed to run on the GO network, but these trains (in diesel form to be clear) would work great for GO; they have acceptable dimensions, can be coupled together for more capacity, are faster, and could be used to supplement the current fleet during times when more trains are needed — i.e. the peaks. Since they are multiple units, you could use them on local stopping services and have the older locomotive-pulled trains used for longer distance expresses. Even as those older locomotives and iconic coaches are retired, these diesel multiple units could take over their “long-haul” role as they are replaced by even more performant electric trains in the core.

But, trains take time to build, and we haven’t ordered any. We should do that, and soon, because it’s a major limiting factor to running more service!

Signals

Now, to run more trains safely it would be good to have a better signalling system. It would let trains run faster, closer together, and with less employees on every single one. And this doesn’t mean job losses — we want more drivers on separate trains! Thankfully, Metrolinx seems committed to ETCS, which is the global solution to this problem. It’s battle-tested, used in loads of countries (including Mexico and maybe in the US with Brightline West if that still happens) and is an overlay, so it doesn’t break compatibility with older trains. We can stay the course on this.

Stations

One thing I’ve been critical of Metrolinx for for years has been the lack of sensible station planning. In some ways, with a big break in the project, this might get another look, and it should.

Plans Metrolinx has had in the past didn’t include junction stations where all lines would stop — the best example is Scarborough station, where the Stouffville line diverges to the north and the Lakeshore East goes to the east. Metrolinx planned to only have one of the lines stop at this station (currently only Lakeshore East does), and that means that regional journeys from Durham to Markham and vice versa would require going much further into the city simply to backtrack out. This makes no sense, and is downstream of the same “trains should only run in one direction at a time” “this isn’t a subway!” thinking that imagines people only ever want to go to Union station (which is cynically backed up by data showing people only ever really go to Union station, because we make doing anything else nigh impossible!). This is not in line with what other cities would do in these locations, and it makes for a worse regional transit network for no good reason (Scarborough has loads of space for more platforms).

What’s concerning (you learn this the more time you spend around transit) is that with this kind of technical field, you need people to buy in. There’s a million excuses and angles to shoot down an idea like letting passengers connect between stations outside of the city centre (which would help our city centre crowding problems!), but it’s obviously possible if you want to make it happen.

Another obvious own goal that we will need to fix down the road at great cost if we don’t sort it out now, is securing sites for at least two more downtown GO stations east and west of Union (I prefer Spadina and Sherbourne to the east, though I am less passionate about the eastern sites specific location). These would let many people walk to and from their destinations to a station that is not Union — which common sense and our eyes tell us does not have enough capacity for way more trains, and which the transit agencies already know. The Spadina station is particularly obvious, because there is increasing office space that is closer to Spadina and the rail corridor than to Union Station, and it would also be the prime station for accessing the SkyDome — which GO already knows drives tons of ridership — they run lots of extra trains! Securing these sites now would be a bit of a pivot to a more forward-thinking attitude that we clearly desperately need. And it would be following best practice from places like Japan and the UK that protect transit infrastructure space sometimes decades before it’s needed.

We should probably also protect other sites for stations all over the region where rail lines intersect with major streets, or big redevelopment sites, or where the existing stations are far apart (3+ km), so that when big redevelopments happen, we can put up a bunch of apartment towers and have them all surround a frequent regional rail station, which is basically how Paris has kept up its housing supply over the years!

Anything else?

Besides running the frequent trains, the network will soon (as in the next year or two with construction already happening) be capable of running better trains, and building more stations. Since we are already working on upgrading the signalling and at least electrifying the Lakeshore, all we really need to do is respond to demand. When trains start running sufficiently frequently at all times of day and every day of the week — such that it’s now a subway-style turn-up-and-go service that doesn’t require consulting a schedule — ridership will increase substantially. At that point onwards, corridor ridership will probably grow at a more or less constant rate, accelerating with big developments and connecting transit lines. With eventual electrification, ETCS signalling, and at least two tracks on the Lakeshore (and only lacking electrification on the other lines), in addition to our really long platforms, we have enough capacity for decades of growth (we will need those extra stations though, but they should be pretty simple to build, if we need to get rid of some of our downtown train parking to build them that would be ok!). Even with diesel multiple units (like Ottawa already has today) we could run a 10-minute or better service on the electrified lines as well (parts of the London Overground were unelectrified for a time; it’s not great of course, but it’s also not fatal!). The sort of nice thing is that once Lakeshore is electrified, the frequent part of the Stouffville line is not a lot of additional mileage to add, and while the inner part of the Kitchener line is more, it has the benefit of a major upgrade program in the 2010s that prepared it for that.

The TLDR.

With the infrastructure we have today, and trains already being used in another city in Ontario, we could operate a basic bidirectional frequent regional train system (with snazzy new trains) in the next few years. This wouldn’t be Tokyo level, but it would be ~Athens level, and it would kick ass compared to the GO system we have today. I think the UP Express is a useful example to look at, it runs every 15 minutes in both directions (that can and should be more), it has multiple unit trains (those can and should be more modern), it has level boarding, and you don’t need to wait for the platforms to be announced on a screen, you just go to the UP platform. In many ways the UP is what modern rail service should look like, and does look like in other places. We just need to modify GO, and adjust exactly what UP looks like, and you have a solution.

Then assuming we stay the course with electrification, and signalling, we will get an almost Japan or Paris level service on Lakeshore in ~5-10 years, but with lots more trains in the meantime. This might sound like a long time away, but its not really in transit terms, and it will only be a couple of years after the Ontario line opens — lots of openings!

The only things that will require public and political pressure are commitments to electrify short additional sections of the Kitchener and Stouffville lines — Brampton, Markham, and Scarborough will hopefully demand this. Then all we need to do is make sure we have the right stations so 1) the network is maximally useful, and 2) it doesn’t collapse from the massive ridership it will surely get (looking at you, Union).

In some ways, this whole situation — as annoying as it is — is a good thing, because the barriers — silly or less silly — Metrolinx has put up in its own way to deliver this stuff can be actually looked at by the public and politicians, hopefully dismissing the silly stuff (minor suburban neighbourhood streets in Scarborough will be just fine with level crossings), and addressing the more serious stuff (Union station can be modified to enable better transit even with heritage concerns — it’s okay guys).

What You Can Do

I don’t want to pretend I have some special insights on this one. In all my years talking about transit — a huge political issue in Toronto, I’ve only ever talked to like three politicians (sadly). But, you can and should email your local politician and ideally all of them — city, provincial, and federal level. Tell them you are concerned with how this project is going, tell them how critical it is that Toronto has trains as good as Sydney or Paris if we want an affordable city and a strong productive economy, tell them electrification makes that happen, and it also hits our climate goals. Send them the Trillium article, send them this, send them a card with a train on it — be loud, be heard.

There’s been this long-running debate in political-transit circles about whether a multi-billion dollar project like GO Expansion flying under the radar is good, because if nobody knows about it, it won’t get canned. That is incredibly silly. The government knows how much it’s costing because it costs a lot! The only thing preventing it from being cut is their belief it will be valuable, and people saying they want subway-like frequency across the GTHA, and way faster commutes. Most people in the GTHA still don’t know what this project is, because of stupid rebrands and Metrolinx’s inability to articulate it (good thing for all my YouTube videos), which we now know wasn’t really just external. Making sure this project happens means making sure everyone you know knows that “GO RER” or “Fast Electric GO” or “GO but like a subway” is still happening, but has hit a rough patch because of bad management (a poorly-managed transit project in Toronto — who’d have thought!) and that they should demand more and faster from their politicians. If people are in powerful positions and would be likely to benefit — employers, developers, etc. — they are especially powerful advocates! Unlike the Eglinton Crosstown, the impacts of delays or this project being watered down will shake all of southern Ontario and possibly even the entire country given how important Toronto is to the national economy, and how bad congestion in the city is.

And so, that’s it. It’s a lot. It’s depressing. It frustrates me to no end. But, we can still have a great system. We love this region, we want it to be better, we know it can be better, and we know what better looks like. Let’s do it.