Toronto: Three Fascinating Tales from Woodbine.

A station re-announcement worth getting excited about.

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Just recently, politicians descended on northwest Toronto — including both premier Doug Ford and Toronto mayor Olivia Chow — to re-announce the construction of a train station (which is what I really should be calling “GO stations”) on the site of Woodbine Casino and Racetrack. This is, of course, a re-announcement: this station was announced at the beginning of Ford’s first term as an incredible example of getting developers to pay for stations. Years later, that doesn't seem to have fully panned out, but at least it sounds like Woodbine Entertainment is donating the land (they really ought to pay, and tightly coordinate their development around the station) and maybe some funds.

Now, despite all my squabbling about the way the station is or was meant to come to be, it's actually a very good and impactful project, and I've realized in thinking about it that there are really three interesting and distinct stories to tell here, so come along with me and explore them.

I should say, when I see an announcement like this, I really do feel like a kid opening a present at Christmas. I begin to assess how it's going to change my life and how it will play into various other broader narratives. What does this transit station mean for my personal transit use? Also, how it will change the transit network and the urban structure of the city? — Which is unironically probably how I looked at my Christmas gifts when I was a kid because I was a weird kid.

But briefly before I do that, let's look at the station itself. The facility will be located at the far southeast corner of the Woodbine lands on the opposite side of the racetrack (horse racing, for those not familiar) from the casino, adjacent to Highway 27. Right now, the site is fairly isolated, surrounded by barns and various other similar facilities, but eventually development will wrap around the east end of the Woodbine site and get much closer to the station. This is probably a good thing because it means that future denser, more progressive forms of development that better integrate with transit are still possible! Some preparatory work on the station had already begun before the announcement, and I remember seeing some pictures of land being cleared and the like; this suggests that the station is probably going to be built sooner rather than later — although it is worth remembering that this station was announced many years ago and so clearly it can't have been that much of a priority at least at that time.

The actual design of the station in the form it will be built isn't entirely clear. I think it can be assumed that it will mostly follow plans from a few years back (the render released seems to align with the drawing from years ago below — just with more shine to it), which, if it does, would be kind of disappointing. A great feature of the upgraded stations on the Stouffville line is canopies running the entire length of the platforms (and in Agincourt’s case beyond to the sidewalk on the perpendicular street), and yet previous plans for the station submitted to the city kind of reverted to the standard from the earlier Georgetown South expansion, which is to say, a decent canopy near the vertical access points, but also huge parts of the platform that are uncovered and will kind of suck to use in inclement weather.

You can see the raised 48-inch UP Express platform at the far right of the drawing above, and I’ve got to say I really hope they rethink this, because the UP will probably be the busiest part of this station for a long time, and a single tiny shelter like that is laughable.

Many people have noted that unlike most other GO stations, Woodbine features overhead bridges as opposed to the unusual pedestrian tunnels you see at stations most on the GO network. To be fair, this has been changing for a while: Many stations have overhead bridges when connecting to a parking garage, such as at Burlington, Pickering, and Rutherford, and you also see them being used as a temporary solution at Exhibition, on some of the expanded Barrie line stations, and for planned capacity upgrades elsewhere. I don’t think I personally would make a huge distinction between them: many railways use both solutions, however it does seem like an overhead bridge should be a bit cheaper and simpler to install (GO does manage to put in precast tunnels over the course of a weekend, but a bridge should surely allow installation with less time spent with the railway closed). I do sort of like how the bridges increase the visual presence of a station on the landscape.

The station will feature two island platforms serving four tracks, with one of the two featuring high platforms that can be used by UP Express trains. It’s nice to see that at least in the earlier drawing, passive provision for future level boarding is designed in, which is one of those things that if we keep doing should make the swap to level boarding much simpler down the road. Given the station won’t be surrounded by dense development for a while, there is a small parking area and pick-up-drop-off planned, as well as a bus loop. The station headhouse looks nice and rather large, with bike parking and a design that reminds me of other modern stations in the region like Agincourt.

The station itself will probably not be called “Woodbine” because there is already a Toronto subway station with that name. One friend mentioned the idea of “Pearson Junction”, and I really like that, especially since there is an actual junction and we currently have no station with junction (a most quintessential of railway words) in its name. This name would also make it at least a little more obvious to people that this is the station you go to to get a train to Pearson.

So now, let’s talk about the stories I think we can tell about Woodbine station.

The Airport Transit Story

The airport transit story here is pretty obvious. Right now, Toronto has good airport transit by the standards of this continent, and decent transit by international standards, but things will be getting a lot better, and Woodbine is a core element of that.

At the moment Pearson is served by a lot of buses — these are important and shouldn’t be discounted but are a topic for another day (airport area transitways for the airport area buses, please), and the UP Express, which is an express train to downtown Toronto (in the sense that it has a high top and average speed, and completes the trip faster than you could in a car), which utilizes high-floor diesel multiple units operating on the GO network, which is otherwise entirely composed of low-floor Bombardier bilevel coaches pulled along by a couple of types of diesel locomotives.

Right now, rail to Pearson is overwhelmingly oriented around travel to downtown Toronto (even travel to destinations along Line 2 is annoying because we have yet to complete the Bloor-Dundas West link tunnel), but this is going to change a lot in coming years, plus at the same time we should hope that the amount of people travelling to downtown increases (Pearson Airport’s growth is all but certain given the region’s rapid growth, high immigration, wealth, and the fact that there is a single major international airport), and the modeshare rail captures increases, and so rail service must both expand and broaden to service other markets.

UP Express and Kitchener Line.

Woodbine is critical, because it’s a key element in creating better connectivity to Pearson by rail. The biggest impact of it opening initially will be adding a new stop on the UP Express (Weston should be removed since otherwise the UP Express will have four different stops between Union and Pearson, which will be … not very express, and GO service should be up to UP levels by the time Woodbine opens) that allows for passengers from North York, Etobicoke, and areas to the north and west to more easily connect to the service on buses. In this, the UP will essentially serve like an airport shuttle, or American “Airtrain” that connects a remote transit hub to the terminal.

The rail hub itself is important too and Woodbine opening will mean two important changes. For one, since the station will take a few years to complete construction, we can expect that by the time it opens, rail service to Brampton (which by then will surely be larger than Mississauga and closing in on a population of a million) and other urban stops on the Kitchener line (as well as through to the Stouffville line) will be running every half hour in both directions all-day as it does today on the Lakeshore line, and potentially even better at every fifteen minutes for all or part of the day. I am also pretty confident that by the time Woodbine opens we will have all-day, hourly train service all the way to Kitchener-Waterloo. Woodbine will also mean that the best transfer point between all these GO services and UP is closer to Pearson itself. These factors combine in a virtuous way, many more riders will be taking trains on the Kitchener-Stouffville corridor, and there will be a new very convenient interchange point for these riders to connect to Pearson without the time spent going to Weston and the mental overhead of backtracking.

In what I would guess is less than two decades, the airport area rail network will expand further, because Line 5, which is currently being extended to just south of the airport, will finally reach the terminals themselves, bringing “subway” service to a Toronto airport for the first time, around roughly the same time I expect the Finch West line (Line 6) will be extended from its current terminus at Humber College down the road a few kilometres to Woodbine. I actually think the latter project might happen even sooner, given the very short length and the fact that it would be entirely built on the surface (okay, perhaps with an underpass under Rexdale Boulevard), and because it was mentioned at the Woodbine announcement. This will easily make Pearson the best rail-connected airport in the Americas, and the connection to the Finch West line will funnel even more passengers through Woodbine. I really hope by that point in time we’ve closed the airport rail connection to convert it for use by low floor height electric trains that are compatible with the rest of the network, because with all the transfer passengers from the Kitchener line, Stouffville line, and Line 6 I really think fifteen-minute UP service with the current trains would be overwhelmed.

I think at the point where Line 6 is connected to Woodbine, the station will probably need an expansion and renovation. I can imagine a desire for escalators which Metrolinx is extremely stingy with on the GO network, but also more and larger elevators for all the passengers travelling with luggage. The station will also probably need new and larger circulation spaces to handle all the traffic.

Line 5 and Line 6 Extensions.

Finally, at some point I expect two more big things to happen in the airport rail connectivity story. At some point, probably when congestion at Woodbine is severe enough, two more rail projects should be initiated because both the station and the UP Express will not have enough capacity.

It’s worth noting that Pearson is projected to arrive at 70 million yearly passengers in the next couple of decades, not dissimilar to Heathrow now. It’s notable that Heathrow has way more rail capacity than Pearson, and if we’re aiming for its great success in getting riders to the airport by transit, we are going to need to be bold. While Heathrow has the Piccadilly tube line and Heathrow Express/Elizabeth line, Pearson will have Line 5 (probably about half the capacity of the Piccadilly line) and the UP Express (maybe about a third the capacity of the heavy rail at Heathrow if we’re generous). So clearly these cannot be all of the rail to Pearson.

If congestion is mostly coming from Line 6, then it should be extended via Carlingview and American Drive to the terminals. This will probably be a slower, windier trip than riding the UP, but people dislike transferring, and so it will probably still reduce crowding by a fair amount. I imagine this project could be combined with some office and mixed-used development around a handful of stops on the airport grounds (where using the trams could be free like in Vancouver), as well as the potential additional of cycling infrastructure to make Pearson a bikeable destination, which most stakeholders agree is a good idea, but seem kind of overwhelmed with the idea of. Now, if congestion at Woodbine is mostly coming from the Kitchener line (a real possibility given the growth potential there), then I’d suggest GTAA replace the current Link people mover between the terminals with a proper automated people mover system, extending on the south side to the little group of hotels east of Airport road, and to the north to the International centre, which should be redeveloped into a serious airport convention centre in the style of a German Messe (future post on that so don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss it), and Malton station, where GO train riders from the west could be intercepted and ride directly to the terminals, avoiding the UP.

New Airport People Mover to Malton, and Line 6 Extension to the Terminals

So essentially, Woodbine station will be the key lynchpin in Pearson airport rail connectivity for the next decade or two, and then still a very important hub for airport travel. The station is probably even more important than Newark Liberty station in New Jersey, or Hayes and Harlington in London.

The Regional Transit Story

Then there is the regional transit story.

To a large extent, Woodbine will be so powerful because it will better connect what should be two major trip generators and destinations — Pearson Airport and the hugely redeveloped and expanded Woodbine site — to the GO and urban rail system currently being built in Toronto. When you look at great regional train systems like the Paris RER, part of what makes them great is that somehow (through planning) they manage to hit so many important destinations, from CDG airport, to Disneyland Paris, to Versailles.

A big element of this is just that Woodbine or maybe “Pearson Junction” will be a sensible junction station. There aren’t that many such stations that we need to build in the GTHA because we don’t have that many rail branches, but this is one of them. The whole point of a junction station is to take the three points that the railways at the junction serve, and connect them as well as possible — if a junction station doesn’t exist, passengers may need to backtrack significant distances, which discourages use both for travel time and mental reasons (people hate backtracking). Ideally, if the junction station is built right near the junction point, you unlock fast journeys between any combination of termini. So in the case of Pearson, passengers should be able to easily travel from Downtown to Pearson, but also from Pearson to Brampton or Kitchener. (Scarborough station should also be a station that all services passing through stop at for this reason — it would enable fast, driving competitive trips not only from downtown to Markham and to Durham, but also between Markham and Durham).

The other really big benefit of Woodbine station is creating a sort of complete rail network in northwestern Toronto. I’ve complained a lot about the Finch light rail line because it will be slow, but if it’s anchored at its western end by the Kitchener line, it will still be made much more useful. Passengers headed from downtown or Brampton to Humber College would suddenly have a great route travelling mostly on the fast Kitchener line before transferring for a short journey on Line 6. Connections to Brampton and Kitchener from North Toronto and Vaughan, and to places like York from origins to the west would also get a big boost. The connection just makes the network a lot better, and fixes the major problem of Line 6, which is that it’s anchored at a single point, and that point is on the far eastern end of the line.

So, Woodbine basically creates a great anchor point for the regional transit network in the northwest of Toronto that makes the Kitchener Line and Line 6 much more useful, while also aiding access to Canada’s largest airport. This will probably make it one of the busiest stations on the entire Toronto suburban rail network.

The Airport Story

Now, I thought about not including this, but I think that Woodbine should be a wakeup call to GTAA and Pearson management.

I am a big advocate of expanding non-aeronautical uses on airport grounds. While people often exclaim “who’d ever want to go to an airport, it’s so... loud, polluted, [insert other issue here]” these people have clearly not been to Singapore.

The best airports in the world are increasingly reducing their dependence on air travel and ever increasing passenger numbers. This can create a more resilient business in case of something like a global pandemic that reduces flying for years, but it can also get passengers, and even those who aren’t flying to spend more money at the airport.

Like many transit ideas, this is pretty common sense and widely-accepted around the world, but rarely seen in North America. Singapore is kind of the golden example, with its amazing Jewel mall which would be a legitimate destination even if you were not flying, as well as all kinds of other on-site amenities, but other airports have lots of stuff too. Seoul has a recreational area and Golf Course. Vancouver has an outlet mall. Amsterdam has a regular mall (which thanks to a weird security layout is available to everyone). Many German airports have shopping centres and the like too. And broadly, a lot of airports have convenient locations to rent a car (useful if we want people to own fewer cars, but if people still want to take road trips etc.), business parks for airport and international travel or just international businesses, and airport hotels which are easily accessible by transit and clustered together instead of randomly scattered among parking lots.

Now, Pearson has not done a great job at this stuff. Vancouver beats it handily on amenities, hotels, and even just having places to get food on the land side. What’s worse is that I could imagine Woodbine basically eating the airport’s lunch here. Without a good people mover and sensible development around the terminals, it seems pretty easy to imagine Woodbine ads saying: “Come to Woodbine for food, shops, hotel rooms and entertainment — one stop from Pearson Terminal 1 on the Express Airport train!”.

I really hope the airport steps up its game and Woodbine doesn’t eat its lunch, because while these amenities are obvious and in demand, putting them right at, or at least closer to the terminals would be a far better outcome.

So, Woodbine might also be the unravelling of Pearson’s non-aeronautical revenue opportunities!

And that’s the new Woodbine station: full of potential, and sure to be an interesting transit hub to watch in coming years once it opens; a reminder that while Toronto can often be deeply frustrating, we generally do build the right stuff, even if not in the ideal way.