I really enjoyed our conversation; it was rather unbounded — though naturally we talked a lot about transit and “RMTransit”.

While I moved to Toronto because this city was building more (and more transit infrastructure) than any other in North America, and that’s a pretty good thing —

— unfortunately its also been a bad thing. This may change, and I hope it does. A big issue you see in places that build and operate low amounts of public transit (North American cities generally) and which have undergone a low-build period (Toronto through the 2000s), is that each project gets elevated to the status of grand civilizational program. The Eglinton Crosstown for example is a modest capacity subway-surface line: it’s not really that big a deal, but because it was delivered so slowly (still hasn’t fully arrived somehow), and because it was the last serious subway in the city since the 60s, it was treated like we had built our own Crossrail (a project which is at least an order of magnitude more impressive), instead of a midnight cram project before the Vancouver Olympics (and Vancouvers project was better).

This problem is not at all unique to Toronto: I’ve seen minor light rail extensions in the States open to the same fanfare you’d imagine you might have for landing someone on the moon.

Now, celebration is good, but the nefarious character who tags along is … public interest. A city proposes even a modest infrastructure project, the media acts like it’s a modern Three Gorges Dam, and next thing you know costs are exploding and NIMBYs are out in full force. People should be interested in projects, but the energy and attention we point at big infrastructure may not actually be helpful, especially because North American media is by and large at covering this stuff and more or less seems uninterested in getting better.

But, we just can’t help blowing everything into a massive thing — hyperbole sells I guess — and to some degree this is a loop of doom. Major infrastructure projects, especially progressive-coded and managed ones end up getting saddled with tons of requirements that are seemingly designed to solve all of society’s ills while strangling the project like an anaconda. There’s often a real sense — one that I have seen in Toronto and Montreal for sure (and which sometimes feels like a reality in New York) — that the current projects being built, particularly anything ambitious, will be the last project we ever do, before we fully accept death by cost disease, climate change, or depopulation.

The funny thing is, outside of isolated cases of really truly major projects, this really does not happen for roads. I remember the SR-99 tunnel project in Seattle got some serious continent-wide coverage, but mostly you never hear as we spend billions building and rebuilding roads.

A friend once pointed out the lack of engagement, and endless studies, and consultation, and “trying-to-solve-all-the-worlds-problemsitis” with roads, and simply said: “our society depends on roads in a way it does not depend on transit and people would never let road building get bogged down in the way transit building has been”. This is very sad for those who’d like more transit, but seems basically correct to me.

My point in all of this is that the way we engage with these projects is probably not healthy and also probably doesn’t make getting them done easier. Roads get built because we don’t make a big fuss about them, and because so much road work gets done in the background people often don’t seem to notice how much we spend on, and orient society around them.

For transit advocates, what this probably means is trying to talk about transit projects less, while making quiet (as much as possible) moves on funding and approvals. The truth is we need to stop taking a victory lap after nailing 5 steps forward and get on with the next thing, advocates are fighting a gruelling hard uphill battle and need to act like it, we can celebrate when we are at German-level transit, or when we’ve done more than paint one bike lane.

I think it helps to take it back to the title: sewers, light standards, fibre lines, and homes — things we need and things we actually build everywhere and constantly, things that happen in the background.

I get it, transit is charismatic (in the social sciences sense), but we almost need to change that. Imagine instead of a new subway or tram we are getting a new trunk sewer, and if you want to learn about it read the meeting minutes (all the marketing and comms around transit seems to have a reverse correlation to actually building this stuff cost-effectively, which sort of makes sense. In Spain, a dollar of marketing is a dollar not going to concrete, which is far less expensive because Spaniards are mysterious infrastructure wizards). In many places, transit is much more like this: do you think every resident of Guangzhou or Shanghai can tell you about all the transit being built in their city? They probably could barely tell you what’s happening in their neighbourhood, and observing JR Urbane Network’s own observations at Chinese metro openings more people than you’d expect are surprised. It also says a lot that serious technical drawings — which we treat like military secrets — are pretty available, and sometimes basically seem to be “the comms”.

At the end of the day, part of getting more changes to the built form of our city and streets, and transit infrastructure constructed is literally making change and building things for transit normal. To some extent that means that like sewers and roads, we should always be doing things; part of why people make a fuss about a new light rail line is because you don’t constantly see that, but we as advocates also don’t need to pour diesel on the fire by acting like this is something the NIMBYs and NIMBYs-in-waiting should be watching.

If there are specific topics you’d like us to cover in the future put them in the comments!

PS: I didn’t choose the title text.

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People are unfair in both directions. On one hand, it is the case that Toronto has a lot of head scratching problems: the lack of any serious road pricing, the unreasonable blowback to bike lanes in central areas, but also somewhat poorly-developed suburban road infrastructure (I'm talking quality not quantity here). On the other hand, Toronto is just honestly quite good by North American standards, which are ultimately the standards that we probably should be comparing ourselves to because the reality of this continent is that it exists within a different context than Europe or Asia. When you sort of do a pound-for-pound comparison, Toronto looks incredibly favourable when compared to a city like Los Angeles or Chicago despite being a much less affluent city and having less of a legacy of growth.

But I don't want to focus too much on other places, I want to focus on something that I was inspired to consider after a lecture last week — what if moving around Toronto was just universally excellent? What if getting here from around the world and going downtown and moving goods and seeing your friends and getting to work was just completely painless and even joyful? It's clearly just not the case that that's the experience today, even if I think we're closer to that than many people appreciate.

As it stands today, the GTHA has a comprehensive highway network that relative to the large cities of the United States does not scar the central city in the same way while also providing access to the central city — more Tokyo than London. Unlike other elements of our own transportation system, it also travels seamlessly across municipal lines. It's not excellent though because it's so often painfully congested and so travel times are incredibly inconsistent, not to mention the fact that the infrastructure isn't used to its highest and best purpose and just isn't generally super nice. I was recently using the highway system and a Google Maps travel time prediction actually told me that it usually takes somewhere between 50 minutes and 2 hours and 10 minutes to make a journey — that is complete madness!

And then there is the active transport network. We have some completely wonderful bike corridors from along the waterfront to various ravine trails, and we're increasingly seeing nice bike lanes. However, taking any space on the road for anything besides cars is seen as an atrocity here, and people are far too used to being able to drive everywhere even if it's a terrible experience; the city and especially the region does not have enough conversations about how driving just doesn't make a lot of sense for a lot of journeys and it's surprising how often people will totally ignore a far superior transit option because driving is just the thing that they do by habit. The walking experience in Toronto is actually surprisingly good and deeply underrated. Short cycle times within the city itself mean that you can walk great distances without having to sit at a lot of traffic lights; this is something you immediately appreciate when you cross a municipal boundary and need to start pressing the crossing button at every intersection and often waiting minutes to cross the street. It is of course also the case that walking isn't often a joyous experience: too often sidewalks look like highways down the middle of wide fields stretching between gargantuan thoroughfares and setback development. And in the Central city where there is a lot of interesting stuff to look at sidewalks are often far too narrow.

I get the people are often most intimately aware with the problems in the place they live and often enjoy piling on, but as someone who's been to major cities in most Canadian provinces and US states as well as in Mexico, I can tell you quite seriously that we have it very good relative to other major cities on this continent.

But I think what's more important is that we could have it similarly good to Singapore or Stockholm or one of those great global cities that people here dream of living in. I would ask instead why we don't simply make our city that good, because I really don't think it need be that hard and I think it's absolutely doable before the year 2050 — which perhaps sounds like a long time but really isn't in the scale of modern developed-world urban development and infrastructure.

Now, this document isn't meant to be a detailed plan, but what it is is an outline of what I think needs to happen to get us there. Of course all of this requires political will, but what would have a bigger payoff then taking us from where we are today to a region with the world-class transportation system that could go toe to toe with the best — fixing the mess of housing perhaps, but I don't see that as entirely separate from fixing our transportation problems. So often the issue we face is that our unified region really doesn't act like one because it just takes too long to travel from place to place.

On the road side, it just seems obvious that much of our infrastructure needs a serious redesign.

The 401 uses up an absolutely enormous amount of land, but the space hungry collector-express system seems to mostly exist as a nice idea rather than a functional design. Meanwhile, the highway does not have any consistent HOV or transit lanes — or express lanes that are managed to keep congestion low and thus ensure that they are indeed truly express. We are also building enormous amounts of housing right along the 401, which is a public health issue given the pollution from the corridor, so there are questions to be asked about mitigating impacts, not to mention the simpler impact of just crossing the route if you're not in a car. Similar issues exist across the 400 series Highway Network in the GTHA, and the reality is that fixing these problems won't be cheap, but pricing does seem like an obvious part of the solution. In fact, American cities often seem to have found a good solution here with tolled express lanes that could fund all kinds of other road improvements — you would also have the benefit of a guaranteed fast trip if things were urgent or if you deemed it economically rational.

When it comes to local roads, designs are often antiquated and intersections could frequently be improved with contemporary features like roundabouts. And while I think that some additional grade-separated expressways makes sense, these ought to be tolled (at a rate that should obviously be much lower than Highway 407 — in no small part to indicate to the public that that's a possibility, and actually the norm in many places). This actually makes even more sense when you think about our roads increasingly as infrastructure for freight transport which is what they really should be, with space for trucks to layover and designs that minimize conflicts between trucks and personal vehicles. A big reason our highways are so problematic is that they have to be unreasonably large and wide in order to fit a traffic volume that is in large part driven by the fact that the cost of that infrastructure is not sufficiently reflected to the public. Anyways, with tolls and road improvements, I actually think the arguments are very easy — they just need to be made in a compelling way to the public and the result could be a road system that is much more functional, particularly for freight transport.

Urban roads particularly in the regional are also a major issue. The literal built reality is that there is not space to expand roads and if anything roads should probably get smaller if we want to move more people using public transportation and walking and cycling — which meets the objective of better transportation overall. Congestion pricing is the solution for drivers, and it would be the solution for drivers even without more bus and bike lanes. For paying a modest fee, drivers can have very high certainty that they will be able to go from place to place at a consistent speed; sure, they will trade off the ability to drive without paying an upfront fee, but that's the reality that creates things like travel times that can vary by two times depending on the particular conditions on a given day. As someone who has spent a lot of my life driving, I would compare it to parking in a busy area: If all the parking is free, it can often be basically impossible to find a space, and sometimes your left wondering if your vehicle is going to be towed away or just frustratingly circling for half an hour. Most people who understand that experience would happily pay a modest fee if they knew that it would alleviate that experience, and I think the issue with congestion is that we just haven't shown people that it works in the exact same way. A big reason you'll find extremely little free parking downtown is because parking only works if you can get it, and if people can't consistently get parking they just aren't going to travel to a certain area; roads aren't fundamentally different and people who can avoid driving extremely congested roads often will instead of being able to make entirely rational decisions about where they need to go and whether a certain road would help them.

Of course, another major impact of urban congestion is just for air quality, which we increasingly understand leads to cardiopulmonary issues as well as conditions such as asthma. London and European cities have really led the way on this, and if we're going to do congestion pricing, we should definitely adjust the price based on the emissions coming out of a vehicle. EVs should pay less than gas cars and smaller EVs should pay less than larger EVs; this not only incentivizes reducing traditional CO2 and brake dust but also tire wear, while also making parking easier and the roads safer. It seems pretty clear to me that not pricing many of these externalities is a big reason that EV adoption is slower in Canada than it is in Europe. Driver training and getting licensed should also just be harder, the reality is we live in a region where by no means is driving essential for most roles particularly in the city of Toronto. We seem to still educate drivers as if Toronto is a minor provincial city, drivers often don't seem to understand basic rules of the road much less the modern signs symbols and infrastructure that we increasingly install to make the roads safer for everyone. And while the idea of being more restrictive on driving might initially turn drivers off, the reality is that most drivers probably would like to see the bottom 10% of drivers by skill required to do much more training.

In many ways, the biggest lift is needed for active transportation. And the reality of active transportation actually should be politically simple.

In suburban areas, bike lanes are easy to fit in, and an urban areas they are just an obvious use of limited space. Drivers have to be reminded that they're just isn't enough space downtown for everyone who could drive or wants to drive to drive, and that no matter what we do, those who desire to use limited space will need to pay some price — either directly or in their time (a market system is preferable because it makes the cost more legible and easier to plan for). In suburban areas, fitting in bike paths along large streets shouldn't be a major issue, though where possible we should try to put bike paths off of major corridors if they can remain fairly direct so that people cycling are kept away from heavy traffic and breathing all of the exhaust and tire dust. Meanwhile in urban areas, we are mostly on the right track, but the provincial government needs to get out of the way and stop engaging in what is ultimately an illogical and counterproductive populist battle over the reality of limited space, and the most efficient ways for people to get around a dense area. Bike lanes might feel like a political lift, but the reality is that they actually skirt our biggest infrastructure problem which is punishing costs and timelines — because we actually know how to do them incredibly quickly and cheaply and how to make them nice over time.

A real missing link for bikes is that we haven't made storing them as painless as it should be. Locking your bike up on the street comes with a high risk of it being stolen, and while many buildings to offer some form of bike parking, they sometimes require people to schlep their bike through various doors or down an elevator, which is such an unpleasant experience that people just don't use it. Clearly, new developments should be encouraged to make cycle parking very good, and much like we do it with car parking and to a much greater degree we should build public bike parking locations where people can keep their wheels for a long time or just for a few hours. Making cycling downtown as seamless an experience as driving in the suburbs is part of how we make more people get on a bike which as I'll remind everyone frees up more road space for transit and drivers.

Improving the pedestrian experience is the other half of this point. To some extent, that means universal pedestrian sidewalks and walkways, but it also means things like shorter cycle times, multi-stage crossings, pedestrian bridges and pathways, and where possible protection from what are often harsh elements. In the suburbs, allowing people to walk through quieter side streets while still efficiently crossing arterials could seriously mitigate the dehumanizing experience of walking along a pseudo-highway, while downtown we just have to have an honest conversation about how we allocate space. For example, on a street like Yonge, it seems we're waiting far too long to give the pedestrians that far outnumbered cars adequate space (and this is painfully obvious to anyone who isn't being intentionally obtuse by simply walking down the sidewalks of Yonge Street on a pleasant afternoon and frequently being forced into the roadway because the sidewalk is narrow and used not only for pedestrians but also for street furniture and utilities among other things). Having any system whether it be roads or sidewalks at 120% capacity guarantees that that system doesn't function the way it should, but the solutions are not always the same, we can afford more space for those walking because walking doesn't take much space, pricing tools are the obvious solution for roads because real estate in the GTA is obviously incredibly expensive! It's also clear that we should have more pedestrian-only streets (more is used generously here because we almost have none at the moment); pedestrian-exclusive streets would be a boon for retail and all kinds of other businesses, but are also seen (including by destination Toronto) as a potential huge draw to our city — perhaps so that other North Americans can see that they too can have cities that make movement effortless. Of course, having a number of very nice dedicated pedestrian streets would also probably lighten the load on some streets with sidewalks that would otherwise be too narrow to handle demand, effectively moving demand around in the same way that something like congestion pricing moves car traffic around.

Public transit is obviously my area of greatest interest, and to some extent, the solution here is to expand the level of service available in suburban Toronto to the entire region. But in doing that. we should also make improvements. Right now the City of Toronto wastes a lot of resources by just throwing buses at major suburban streets without diligently managing them; if headways and service with more-carefully monitored and less buses would be required to provide the same excellent service frequency. Of course, frequency isn't everything even if it is probably the most important thing — suburban buses are often slow because they stop far too often. Queue jumps and opportunistic bus lanes should also exist virtually everywhere and would help speed things up. Bus shelters should be omnipresent and should provide not only protection from the snow and rain but also the sun. Bus vehicles should be nice and modern and buying at least some of them from Europe would probably create a real incentive for everyone to up their game.

The streetcars and modern trams we've built across the region also need a complete overhaul which to some extent is frustrating given the modern trams are, well … brand new. Like with the buses, the vehicles should probably be about 30% nicer. But we should also look at standardizing stops at a wider spacing, operating vehicles more aggressively to shorten trip times, improving signal priority, and having the Europeans who consistently operate very reliable and quick street railways audit our systems and suggest road and rail redesigns. Done well, all of this infrastructure should be a huge boon for the region particularly in the urban core where all kinds of connectivity between dense development, public spaces, and then other modes of transportation can be enabled by the streetcar network. More major rethinks like the King Street project should be executed to both enhance active transportation and public transportation on key urban corridors. There should also probably be — if not overwhelming — strategic expansion of the street railway systems for example extending the Finch light rail to Pearson, the Hurontario light rail to the Mississauga waterfront, and the Toronto streetcar network to all kinds of neighbourhoods on the edges of the urban core.

Rail rapid transit, whether that be in the form of subway, or regional rail needs to be a major focus, because while buses are almost universally available across the region, they simply do not have the capacity, economics or pure speed offered by rail rapid transit — which more or less acts as the highways of the public transport system.

Before we even think of massive expansion to the network (and after all this is already happening) we really need to just operate our system better. The subway should have screen doors at the very least at the busiest stops, as well as modern systems, and higher levels of more reliable service. It's easy to go and look at the world's best subway systems and generate a list of things that we could and should do better. The regional rail network requires an even bigger lift but with even more potential payoff. The bones of the system are actually pretty nice but service levels are just far too low. Within the contiguous built-up urban area there's no reason GO trains should not have a default off-peak frequency of every 7 minutes or so, and I think the inevitable ridership and development changes that would happen from that level of service would take us on a path to even higher levels in the future. Electrification is not a nice environmental initiative but inevitable requirement for operating this level of service reliably. Beyond the core GTA, there's no reason that trains shouldn't run every half hour, and for major destinations like Hamilton, Kitchener-Waterloo, and Niagara, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to just show up to a station and get on the way in 15 minutes. Across all rail transport stations should constantly be up for improved accessibility weather protection and amenities and we need to better match these improvements to actual use. No station should be barren and miserable but it isn't a good use of resources to make very lightly used stations Cathedral-like.

Expanding the rail network is probably the biggest lift of anything I'm proposing here. To a large extent, a major expansion requires us to address our longstanding cost problems which mean that we build infrastructure for large multiples what it is built for in other developed countries. While this isn't a detailed plan of every policy we should enact and piece of infrastructure we should build, it seems clear that an East-West route across the north of Toronto, as well as a route from the north of Toronto to communities like Oakville and Burlington via Pearson airport (Pearson Airport should clearly be much more connected to transit, especially given it central location, though modes and exact designs are up for debate) are obvious. We should also probably build more rail to the core of the city so that dense communities are always near rapid transit, while also upgrading our busiest bus corridors. It's also the case that we should always be watching planning projects like the Ontario line that simultaneously address urban growth and congestion. To some extent, our next major round of urban rail projects should respond to new traffic flows from our last round, as well as new dense urban communities.

We also need to change the way we run our transit system. Delays and disruptions should be clearly communicated, and with a better network they will be less frequent and painful. The interfaces by which the public interacts with the transit system should also just be better: there's no good reason that a grocery store should have a better website or customer service or wayfinding signs than a public transit system. The fare structure also needs to be modernized: transit should always remain accessible to those on stretched incomes, but the reality that it remains far more affordable than the widely-adopted alternative of driving should be kept in mind when setting fares. The current hodgepodge system of different fares and operations in each city clearly needs to be tossed in the bin even if only from a public-facing perspective (bus operations could still be operated by municipal organizations even if the actual routes paid no mind to municipal boundaries), fares like virtually all transportation costs should reflect that more time and distance incurs more cost to the operator of a service — something which would also encourage compactness by reminding people of the cost of distance.

Ultimately, if our transportation system is to be among the best in the world all transport modes should be functional and allow people to go virtually anywhere in the region (this is already achieved for the car and to a lesser extent by transit) but different areas should obviously be tuned for different types of transport, when downtown drivers shouldn't expect to be able to move quickly and park easily without paying — and in fact, even identifying people by the mode of transport they prefer makes a little sense, in the ideal organization people simply take the mode of transport that makes sense. To a large extent, because we don't have cultural battles over them, cyclists and transit users already have to accept many of the the inherent limitations of these modes of transportation.

Intelligently combining transportation modes should allow people to move quickly almost anywhere, but not for free and that doesn't just apply to driving but also transit. We need to remind people that a better transportation system isn't free, but that it is a great value.

Is all of this doable in 20 years? I think much of it is doable in just a decade. To a large extent, pedestrian and cycling improvements can be made in a scrappy manner and then hardened as part of the normal infrastructure rebuilding cycle. More parking and new pedestrian bridges plazas and spaces aren't projects measured in decades.

Road improvements are likely to take longer, but even massive projects can be done in less than a decade. If we were to spend a few years planning aggressively, and a decade implementing, even at our current slow and unrefined construction pace we could make all the transformative changes without a problem in 20 years. Many changes like road pricing, improved driver training, improved the local roads, new lite-expressways, and facilities for trucks could be implemented even faster. Of course you're not going to rebuild every intersection or retrain every driver in 20 years, but I think people would be surprised what a large percentage could be done and how noticeable the impact would be.

Completely overhauling transit operations is a project that could be completed in 5 years, some things like more minor infrastructure improvements like screen doors and better switches on the streetcars would take longer and would probably be rolled out slowly tackling the biggest problem areas first not unlike various road or cycling improvements. Major transit projects are definitely the longest timeline thing in this vision, but even those should have no problem being completed in less than a decade if we work hard to improve our construction management and design for cost effectiveness. We are actually running a ton of transit projects in parallel right now, and it seems plausible to me that in the next 20 years we actually do less major projects, perhaps just continuing apace with improving the regional train system, and doing two very large rapid transit projects.

The reality across the board is that this need not cost very much. Road improvements could largely be funded by new road pricing, with the grand deal for drivers being that they might sometimes have the option to pay and by accepting that option they would get a lot of road improvements. Congestion pricing and slightly-higher fares could put a huge dent in improving transit infrastructure and service. But it's important to remember if it's so many of the improvements I'm proposing here really aren't that new cost but different philosophies and allocations for funding.

Of course, you can't comprehensively reconstruct the entire transportation system of the GTA in the next two decades. But what matters for people is trajectory. If every other bus stop is suddenly much nicer, the subway stations you actually use have screen doors, and major road work is occurring all across the region — people will understand the benefits and more importantly see the trajectory that we would now be on, to fit in a class of cities that we currently can barely imagine being named alongside.

And I mean it! The Island Airport is a neat vestige of the past, like when Chicago or famously Hong Kong had airports right near “downtown”.

The government of Ontario wants to expand the airport to handle jets and more flights and for other less clear reasons that I want to dig into, but one does have to ask from the jump: what exactly Chicago and Hong Kong — certainly excellent world cities — got wrong.

What feels clear to me, and what I think is the most obvious reason an expansion doesn’t make sense, is that the things that make the island airport cool mostly have to do with its smallness. Now, that smallness might not be economically sustainable anymore, but it would be good if we could just be honest about that instead of pretending that scaling up this cool small thing wouldn’t ruin what makes it cool and good.

On the face of it, the expansion for jets feels neat. I like planes as much as the next dude and planespotting A220’s from the waterfront would be cool. Unfortunately, a lot of things that don’t make sense, like a Waterslide from the top of the CN Tower, or a house with a big backyard at Queen and Spadina just happen to be “cool”.

Is a waterfront airport totally unprecedented in a developed world city with decent urban principles? Kind of. Vancouver does have its cute seaplanes after all — but that operation is at least an order of magnitude smaller, much more so than even the current airport. Perhaps more comparable, London City Airport does exist, but like a lot of London airport names, this one is a lie and the airport is actually like 10 kilometres from the city — like if Billy Bishop was at Long Branch or Woodbine Beach. This is still decently useful for London given the excellent rail links (imagine taking a streetcar from Woodbine or the West End — of course, adding a regional rail station would be deemed unthinkable), but at the same time as anyone in London will tell you, city airport is not really for the commoners, and as locals will tell you, it makes a real racket. Look, my point is that planes aren’t touching down on the Thames by Tower Bridge or in Sydney Harbour and anyone who proposed it would be laughed out of town (obviously it’s a bit different when the airport already exists, but those cities would 1000% be talking about winding it down).

I thought a lot about how to best frame this, and I think it comes down to four or five major issues, let’s look at those.

1. New York?!

One of the things that stands clearest in my mind is hearing the minister of transport talk about how the Island Airport expansion is about being competitive with New York ... what?

Toronto is actually much better situated than the big apple when it comes to airport planning, as it’s plagued with multiple competing, not quite complementary airports, which weakens their hub status because not all flights go to a single massive hub. This weakens connectivity, makes trip planning annoying, worsens connection and hub potential, and spreads resources inefficiently across multiple sites — duplicating all kinds of expensive things.

The outcome of these things is that connecting through these cities in not great, and the facilities are a real mixed bag, LaGuardia is nice now, (well besides all the delays and other issues, and lack of good transit) but only after years and years of being miserable.

And then theres the transit. LaGuardia has no rapid transit, Newark has a people mover to incredibly hit or miss service from commuter trains on the Northeast Corridor, and the New York Regions prime airport? Another people mover, albeit at least the JFK Airtrain connects to good rail service.

And somehow, our solution is to add another major airport where even when you put aside all the externalities will weaken Canada’s biggest hub airport (which desperately needs attention and investment), while simultaneously ruining what made that airport good to begin with?!

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It was a bit of a shock then moving to Toronto, where there is the Toronto Transit Commission, Mississauga Transit (now generally known as MiWay), Brampton, and York Region Transit (among others). It felt a bit like getting off a plane into a place where there isn’t a minimum wage, or road signs aren’t standardized, or people eat with their feet.

Cinq Personnes.

Swimming, Bad Trains, and the Allure of Tech.

This post is not about public transit; like other posts on Cinq Personnes, it’s about me, and about growth, and about personal struggles. As someone whose day job — besides being a dad — is blogging about public transit and sometimes writing on it in the media, and who retired from…

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3 months ago · 20 likes · 2 comments · Reece

The crazy reality of transit in the GTA is that it frequently just ends at the end of whatever city its operating in, so you can’t just keep taking the same bus down the same old street; buses are tied to cites, so want to take a bus in that city? You’ll need to take that city’s bus.

This totally backwards way of operating is representative of many things in Ontario, and is one of the reasons I find it hard to take some transit activism here seriously. Months will be spent so that transit riders can save a few dollars a month on a transit fare, but nobody bats an eye on the much greater cost of shuffling from one bus across a suburban intersection in the rain to wait 20 minutes for another.

A few years ago, we finally got a system of fare integration, so that you at least don’t pay a premium for an often crappy experience, and while that’s obviously an improvement, the screaming about not having a zonal or distance-based fare structure (like Vancouver) and a desire from cities and transit agencies to protect their (rather poor) fiefdoms, means that it’s a janky system of free transfers and inter-agency and government billing instead of a coherent, easily-understood system.

Now, what I am going to suggest is in the eyes of many here radical but, an entirely natural idea — a single regional agency modelled on Vancouver’s Translink.

Governance

While it’s super boring, unified governance would be huge and hugely important. Instead of important transport decisions that affect the whole region being made diffusely, these would be centralized and could draw on standardized best practice — so that every decision would be to the best standards of the bunch. Decisions being made in secondary parts of the region would no longer need to be so much worse than those in the core.

Region-level governance would also create a clear forum to highlight discrepancies. For example, right now, very little is made of York Region having less than half the transit service of Toronto, because those making the decisions in York only have their own mediocrity to benchmark against. In a regionalized system laggards would get a kick in the butt.

And yet, I don’t think the regional leader in the core — Toronto — would be reduced to some pitiful mean. For one, in the Translink model, Toronto would have disproportionate influence as by far the regions most populous city — it just wouldn’t have absolute power, but this already is the case — the province ultimately calls the shots in our system. Being in the lead would give Toronto outsized influence to set policy and standards, and it might be the motivator to fix its problems, like poor operations and maintenance practices — a detail it might learn from the smaller systems who have been able to maintain discipline and who have had to in a more hostile suburban environ.

Of course, as part of this, Metrolinx would likely be rolled into this organization, and the province would have a seat at the table, but this would just be acknowledging the reality of the coordination and funding role that the province already takes on and the province’s interest in the transportation system for its biggest urban region that encompasses half its population.

I guess my ultimate argument, especially to Toronto people (and in my eyes this is something the TTC turned away from leading historically, which is a black mark on that agency in my mind) is that it’s better to own a big share of something massive and full of promise, than to have total ownership of something much smaller and broken.

Operations

Of course, a huge benefit to transit regionalization is better operations. The scale of purchasing vehicles, parts, and all kinds of other resources would grow, while the actual things being purchased would standardize. Employees could be more rationally organized, and a larger organization that would combine subway, trams, legacy streetcars, regional trains and all manner of buses would have both a greater breadth and depth of competency.

Being able to operate regionally would also critically allow resources to be used more efficiently. Garages could truly serve a rational geographic catchment with less regard for invisible urban boundaries, and a unified agency could better take advantage of things like lower land costs in outlying areas. It could also formalize existing gentleman’s agreements, doing stuff like sending a bunch of resources to one part of the region for a special event instead of having to negotiate these things every time — an acknowledgement that the “city” is really a region.

A larger agency would support more internal expertise, which would have been a huge asset instead of relying so heavily on private external consultants as the GTA built and builds numerous inter-compatible, but not standardized tram systems from Toronto to Hamilton.

And while there would be “redundancies”, that doesn’t need to mean job losses. Instead of each system having a few sign guys, a large regional agency could have a world-class wayfinding department that does far more with the same resources — and which would inherently produce a regionally standardized system of signs, which obviously should, but does not exist.

Would municipalities lose a direct source of revenue in the form of fares? Yes. But fares already come nowhere close to funding the system, and creating a regional system of collection and distribution would likely be more fair and cost-effective. It could also finally be paired with a rational fare structure for users.

Ultimately, the case here in terms of resources is to stop bickering over the size of your slice and start baking a larger cake.

User Experience

All of this would come down to a better user experience. There are the basic things — like the fact that an agency maintaining twice as many buses is probably better at it, and is better able to field a working bus at any time, or that a bigger organization can both try more new things and try those things in more places, but there’s also the direct benefits to integration.

A regionally-integrated system would work across the region — the way people intuitively expect it to, not unlike roads. People would use the transit system, not a transit system.

Navigating would be made easier still by better, consistent signs and communication, but also by a fare system which provides a consistent and predictable price to riders that aims for fairness while also reflecting the reality of what things cost. The types of services offered would also probably be more clear, with local, express, and regional buses instead of the current mess of numbers, brands, and names that change wildly from one city to another.

If a rider had a problem or wanted an improvement, it would be entirely clear where they should go and who they need to talk to, instead of current transit governance being a mess of different agencies, government bodies, and buck passing.

All of this stuff is possible, but only if those in charge and with influence ask not only what they or their organization might lose, but what they stand to gain.

One of the examples they were showing was actually the Miami Central station (which because modernity, Brightline insists on calling Miami Central), which is actually a pretty cool facility up on an elevated guideway with high-rise condos built on top in what is basically the platonic ideal of transit-oriented development. I figured that the rail service — having been open for a few years now — was something I really had to check out given it's kind of the biggest thing to happen in intercity rail for North America in the past 30 or 40 years, so I recently took a trip with my family on Brightline from Orlando to West Palm Beach.

The idea of the line is pretty interesting, and I admit I was pretty skeptical when I first started looking. My experience growing up of Florida was one of suburbia and driving a lot, and so the idea of a train service in the state seemed a little questionable. But the reality is, it actually makes a lot of sense even despite the suburban car-oriented reality of most of Florida. For one, congestion here (because of the lack of alternatives) is really bad, and so a train that can provide you not only a quick but also a consistent travel experience is a big deal. On the other hand, there is actually some transit and Brightline links in with it pretty well. In Miami for example, you can take the metro and people mover system to Brightline as well as to the airport. In Orlando, the transit is not great, but the train at least lands you at the airport where you can get all kinds of tourist-oriented coach buses all over the place. Several of the intermediate stops actually drop you in pretty pleasant walkable urban areas, albeit ones that are bifurcated by an at-grade rail line that has a pretty high body count at this point.

One gets the sense that Brightline is pretty sensitive to the number of fatalities that have happened since train service ramped up. Its level crossings are pretty aggressively set up to try to prevent people pulling the sort of sketchy maneuvers that they probably wouldn't in most places but for some reason happen in Florida, with extra lights, signs, and barriers. On the other hand, the corridor is frequently wide open and you could walk right in front of a train from the sidewalk even where a fence could easily be put up, so it's not exactly clear to me that this issue is being taken super seriously.

Of course, the level crossings probably are the bigger problem, because they are where people are actually meant to cross the tracks. There isn't really an easy solution here: you could grade separate a lot of them, but Florida being Florida makes below-grade construction difficult, and so you'd probably be looking at either ugly road over rail crossings or an elevated viaduct for the train. This honestly probably makes the most sense just because there are such a high density of crossings in some places that trying to tackle them individually doesn't make a lot of sense — there are sections where there are seemingly crossings every 100 m as well as frontage roads. But this is the fundamental issue with a rail system like this in a place where people get up in a fuss about the idea of paying taxes (Florida has no state income tax): people don't like trains hitting people or cars, but you also hear again and again that it's mostly their fault and not a collective failure to create a safe transportation system. A service like this definitely wouldn't have so many level crossings in most other parts of the world, but that would require money for engineering solutions, and the whole point of Brightline is it's a private service and anywhere where public dollars actually enabled it to exist is something we mostly shouldn't be talking about. Another solution would probably be to close the almost countless minor level crossings with only two lanes and seemingly very little traffic, but Florida just seems like a place where compromise like that isn't allowed, and so while people will complain about the outcomes of a dangerous situation nobody's actually willing to compromise to fix that.

On a more positive note, as I said before, I think the service is actually quite well connected. You have some okay transit options, and where you don't you typically have an okay walking or cycling option (by Florida standards). At the same time, there is a lot of parking available, and rideshare has absolutely exploded onto the scene since Brightline was conceived; in fact, Miami even has Waymo now. I know there's a lot of ideologues who think that transit and cars can't really work together, and while it's perhaps not optimal, it certainly is better than a world where cars exist alone. Even if you have to drive to the station, it's nice to be able to relax for a few hours traveling a significant distance, and it's clearly a viable model because it's exactly how Toronto's very successful regional rail got its start.

The trains are quite nice. I'm not going to go and say they're the nicest trains in the world because they just aren't, but they're certainly up there with any new train you'd find in Europe. Seats are spacious with multiple table options as well as fold-down tray tables in more than one size, there are lots of amenities including a little bench near the washroom where you can take a call, you can easily stretch your legs and walk down the train, there are all kinds of food and snack options, and the windows are huge with really nice screens you can pull down if you don't want the Florida sun beating into your face. There is enormous amounts of room for small airplane carry-ons and a large luggage rack at the end of the cars for bigger bags. We took a stroller on our trip and had no problem rolling it easily onto the train, which had a big section for wheelchairs and strollers. This was especially easy because there is fantastic level boarding between the high platforms and the trains, aided by a pop out step which is fairly novel on this continent. The trains are pretty interesting, because they are book-ended by Siemens Charger locomotives which do looks snazzy and are fairly high-speed, and at this point they feel a little less silly because they are pulling eight passenger cars where previously they were pulling just four — a third of the length of the train was just locomotives.

Unfortunately, I get the sense the trains might have gotten a little less nice over time. Since again this is a private service, they are looking for any way they can grow their revenue (and to be fair it seems like this is pretty existential for them) and that means an ugly wrap that obstructs the view out of the windows, and wayfinding screens repurposed for ads. There's also something a little weird about seeing a train line have to advertise a stations on Google Maps (I've literally never seen a sponsored transit stop on the service and didn't even realize it was something that could be done). People who say the private sector often operates more efficiently aren't always wrong, but it's things like this that highlight that there are actually some inefficiencies to using that model as well. When the transit system is treated not as a private service but as the basic infrastructure of a place, the need to advertise is pretty clearly not there.

As you might know, Brightline is also capable of fairly high speeds. This isn't High-Speed rail in the sort of contemporary sense because that requires full grade separation and electric trains, but trains do travel at up to around 200 km/h (125 miles per hour) like you'll see in many places in the Northeast US and across the UK. It probably takes the wind out of the sails of rail fans to hear that it's not really high speed, but the reality is that the high-speed section of the line that runs between the east coast of Florida and Orlando along an expressway has trains traveling roughly twice the speed of traffic on that same expressway. Even when you're traveling through the fairly urban or maybe rather suburban-industrial areas with lots of level crossings on the East Coast of Florida, you are topping out at speeds that are around where speeding drivers on the nearby parallel interstate travel at, and on the train, these speeds are actually reached consistently — the average speed is actually a very respectable 110 km/h along the whole route. In terms of ride quality, I actually didn't notice a huge difference between the dedicated passenger line and the tracks that are shared with freight, and it's pretty smooth by North American standards (although a step below what you'd find in other parts of the world).

That high speed section between the coast and Orlando — which admittedly isn't very long — is particularly interesting to me because as I mentioned it was built along an expressway and yet manages respectable if not world-class high-speed rail speeds. It's quite interesting to see how the rail line sort of bobs and weaves around interchanges to maintain speed and also potentially space to expand those interchanges down the road. Tracks also often end up elevated off the side of the highway to fly over connecting and crossing roads. I guess the point here is that we now have a pretty good example to point to of a contemporary high-speed railroad built in North America which manages to use an existing highway corridor to deliver really good rail service, and a positive touch is that even while most of the line here is single track, it is all set up for future expansion with a second one.

Service on the line in terms of trains you can actually take is definitely more limited than one would hope. During peak periods (think commuting hours) trains run slightly more frequently than hourly, and then for much of the rest of the day trains seem to run roughly every hour and a half and sometimes a little less frequently than that. Running a service so focused on matching demand to service seems like it might be another private operation thing that introduces some inefficiency. because it makes it basically impossible to remember when any given train might show up. That being said, at least the infrastructure appears to be set up to allow service to run at an hourly frequency without too many problems and even more frequently if some simple improvements are made.

I'll also say that the ticketing process is pretty good: You can buy tickets online or using a well-made app or using pretty nice in-person ticket machines. The prices are definitely not cheap, but the reality that nobody wants to admit is that driving is also really expensive and so when you compare it like for like, it's not so bad (especially because there are a lot of toll highways in Florida). The prices felt pretty similar to Via Rail in Canada (which people complain about and are objectively high by international standards) but with better, more reliable, and faster service. Weirdly, despite having face gates to check your tickets and an incentive to have less huge numbers of employees telling you how to read signs and the like, the station was still absolutely packed with staff, including someone who is just standing there pressing the elevator button for people. I guess I would chalk this up to poor station design since there is also a sort of light airport-style security at the entrance and it was quite a mess with a bunch of fairgates jamming people into a single security queue that was somehow way too tight for people with their luggage despite the fact that it was entirely composed of movable retractable barriers. The operations definitely feel like they could use some tuning up, and this just provides a good reminder that just because the private sector does something doesn't mean it's going to be entirely logical or efficient. Often the same cultural problems that prevent a public sector organization from operating in a rational way are just going to transfer over directly to the private sector.

One positive element of the operations is that despite sharing tracks with freight trains for the majority of the route, Brightline operates fast, fairly frequently, and reliably. In this case it's because there are common financial interests, but it highlights the point that there are models that could allow North American freight operations to coexist with fairly good passenger service, and like with high-speed rail along an expressway this feels like something people should really be studying.

Now, putting aside the backwards operations, the stations are really nice, with cool mid-century modern designs, tons of lounge space (it was pretty nice having my ticket sent to my phone with a QR code and then actually being able to tag into the lounge via faregate with that QR code). If you get one of the nicer tickets, you are truly going to be traveling in style, and you get to board the train early as well (hilariously, this means that you also do have to line up for Brightline which is one of those dumb inefficient rail operation mindworms North Americans are infected with). The train stations honestly end up feeling a lot like what you'd find in most developed countries around the world but with particularly attractive architecture and nice amenities like restaurants and lounges and huge washrooms. The station at Orlando airport in particular kind of reminded me of modern rail stations in China. And of course you have all of the obvious things you'd expect, like a large pickup drop-off area and loads of parking to make getting to them actually practical.

If I had to complain about one thing, it would be having level crossings right next to stations, which would be the most obvious ones to remove because they are particularly high-impact. This seems particularly obvious at West Palm Beach where the main drag of the town runs directly north of the train station over a level crossing (it is nice that you get super easy access to the main street from the train station).

So then, where do things stand? Well, I think Brightline is definitely a net positive for the whole continent. It's clearly having a very positive influence on Amtrak and VIA rail, which is and hopefully continues to push up the quality of those services. At the same time, the service levels — while not amazing — is better than most intercity corridors on the continent. It seems like a real possibility that Brightline dies, after all they shut down during COVID and looming debt problems are bearing down. At that point it will be pretty interesting to see whether the government of Florida buys the infrastructure up and rolls it into a bigger public rail system. It would be a mistake not to, after all you would be buying surprisingly good infrastructure (that benefits everyone including drivers) at what would likely be a discount price — but again, the ideology of not being seen to support a public service seems to run pretty broadly here.

Assuming an adult is in the room and the right decision is made, then I think Brightline will basically become one of those corridors in North America that has maybe not world-class but passable rail service, along with the Northeast corridor, Quebec City-Windsor, San Diego-Los Angeles, Portland-Vancouver, and a few others. Given the train frequencies offered and the higher speed on the expressway section, it might actually slot in right after the Northeast corridor as being the most impressive service, which would be funny given eastern Florida's history being built along the railway.

In the future, I would like to see the system expand. Extensions to Jacksonville and Tampa via Disney are totally obvious and could potentially allow you to tie in with some more transit systems. The network also obviously ought to be electrified when the trains come up for replacement, and you could probably do that piecemeal with battery trains advancing as quickly as they are; that might mean slightly faster service but also ideally much more frequency. More stations should definitely be added, with Cocoa being a particularly obvious one at the junction between the line to Orlando and a potential branch to Jacksonville. There should also be combined public transport tickets offered with your Brightline ticket to make the last mile feel a bit easier (this might already exist, but if it does, I don't think it's being particularly well communicated). The last and perhaps most obvious thing is that some level crossings really need to be removed. I think it makes sense to start with the ones that are the most dangerous and closest to stations and work out from there, but it also seems obvious to just close a lot of level crossings where the traffic levels are low enough, especially because in many places the crossings are incredibly close together, so closing a few near a major street and then investing in making that crossing safer or removing it seems obvious.

Overall, Brightline is pleasant and effectively a modern rail service operating in North America. The frequency isn't amazing and there are lots of little nitpicks I could make, but it's clearly had a positive impact overall and probably will continue to do so for quite some time.

The system — a line, really — is in effect a roughly 5 kilometre, 5-stop rapid transit line running through the city, along the Monongahela River and to various buildings of West Virginia University.

To a sort of uneducated observer, the system basically would look like an automated people mover you’d see at an airport: rubber-tired cars run up and down a concrete guideway that runs grade-separated from traffic, often on elevated structures. But to someone familiar with such systems, the oddities are impossible to ignore.

The cars are just that: single cars the size of mini-buses which sometimes run alone and sometimes in packs, queue up at stations.

And those stations are unusual. Most have bypass tracks, but there are also numerous platforms at each (somewhat surprisingly without screen doors), sometimes with as many as a dozen vehicles sitting at them, and periodically arriving and departing. The tracks at the stations also point every which way, and flyovers and ‘unders abound.

When you go through a turnstile (the line was free when I tried it, which is sure to excite some, even if free transit remains a dubious prospect, though I suppose if the alternative is needing exact change in coins in 2026 then free might be less crazy), you select the station you are heading to, and then a vehicle arrives to take you there … directly, and quite possibly by yourself. That’s really what makes “personal” rapid transit unique — you choose a destination and a trip is provided specifically for you, not stopping at intermediate stations.

Riding the system, which turned 50 last year, is absolutely remarkable; it’s quick, automated, and feels efficient — I can only imagine how much it must have felt like the future in the 1970’s.

Unfortunately now, it mostly feels like the past. The stations as I mentioned don’t have screen doors, and they barely have wayfinding either. I hope you like stairs because there are no escalators to be found. And the ride quality is shockingly bad for fixed guideway transit, especially without a driver to press stop if the rocking and bumping throws you off your feet, or honestly, out of your seat (yeah it’s that bad, surprisingly so even with rubber tires often giving a system a “bouncy” feeling). I’ve certainly seen guideways that look worse, but this system had multiple sections where two bits of guideway came together where the vehicle had to basically slam into (or drop off of) and bounce over a visible vertical alignment gap between sections. While the vehicles seem to be in decent condition, the guideway alone makes me think this system might not be around long; ride it while you still can!

That this thing isn’t exactly the backbone of transport in the city was apparent from when we arrived: traffic was bad, parking was plentiful and free (and I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many massive new parkades in such a small city), and while at first I was impressed by the throngs of people using the Medical Center station, upon closer observation the reason I wasn’t seeing more vehicles operating is because while I saw about five people use the PRT, the throngs were actually just passing through the station from the hospital to get to the parking. At least I did also see some public buses (albeit serving a transit “center” with no benches or schedules) which were wrapped with PSAs suggesting some sort of transit funding ballot was passed semi-recently.

And I don’t entirely blame them: while the system is cool, it doesn’t seem like its really gotten all that much better in the last 50 years, in fact it might have gotten worse!

Meanwhile in that same time …

The reality is, putting aside the rough shape the system is in (kudos to those keeping it running at all, it seems like a small miracle), the whole PRT aspect doesn’t even make sense. Some of the time the line runs fixed routes between major stations based on historic demand, and at other times it runs like a conventional rapid transit line, stopping and picking up passengers at all stations.

It does feel smart that stations are designed as to enable sort of conventional and personal operations, but this also makes the intermediate stations ridiculously gigantic, with bypass “tracks”, numerous platforms, and lots of turnaround routes.

And this hits on the painful reality — there is just no good reason for this to be PRT. All of the stations are connectedly linearly so the only “benefit” of PRT is 1) not forcing you to stop at intermediate stations and 2) allowing you to get on an empty vehicle at an intermediate station (so long as the system is in “PRT Mode” when you ride).

The issue is, these “benefits” are not real: the services take corners so slowly and have to run so slow in sections to navigate complicated tracks that I think a “smoother” alignment with regular trains stopping at all stations (which would have screen doors) would be at least as fast — probably faster. This would also ultimately be way higher capacity than the “terminate and begin journeys at any station option. The benefits of PRT are mostly about vibes and denying the efficiency of conventional mass transit so people don’t have to share space with someone different from them or look at a map of a line. Even the supposed immediacy is questionable, because on several of my and others journeys I observed a five minute timer start when passing through the turnstiles to try and “batch” trips. And half-decent rail or people mover service would come frequently enough for you to never wait like that, and the stations would probably also be smaller even with additional capacity.

Now, Morgantown was in some senses only the first major PRT system, and later systems have come along and made major improvements that address some of the issues here.

The most obvious of these is the ULTRA PRT at Heathrow Airport, which people love (probably because it’s much more accessible to a large number of people, as anyone in London can go to Heathrow Terminal 5 and try it for free).

ULTRA for one is way lighter weight. The Morgantown PRT is powered by subway-style third rail, and has cars with a loading gauge (profile) not far off a light metro, so the structures are big and the curves are relatively wide. ULTRA vehicles are truly personal and closer to the size of a golf cart (with a small onboard battery); this means the elevated guideways needed for them are also much simpler.

The stations are also quite different. ULTRA’s might be a tenth the size both because the vehicles are smaller and because they are more manouverable, meaning they can simply back out of a “platform” at a station (they are angled at roughly 45 degrees like some street parking you might have seen) and onto a “mainline”. This cuts the need for bypass tracks and redundant station tracks.

And then everything is just nicer, the UI at stations is good, and the vehicles are more pleasant. Oh, and the PRT thing makes some sense because there are multiple interconnected destinations that are not in a line.

There’s bad news though. Despite improving on literally everything from Morgantown by being clever and using modern technology to drive down costs, only one ULTRA system has been built and I doubt it gets more use than America’s mountain pod system.

And I mean, those are the balance of operating PRT systems in the world. It’s usually not a good sign when most of your kin are on the brink of shutting down, or were just never opened.

There is maybe hope though. The technology never really seemed like the problem here, it was the scale and application. Done wrong, PRT is just a parking lot shuttle or a glorified bespoke automated people mover, but that could change. Large tech, medical, or academic campuses, airport terminals, or giant malls or convention centres all seem like prime candidates — but these are different clients than cities with different needs and constraints, and so looking at PRT like conventional transit is probably a bad idea. This also isn’t replacing transit, it’s augmenting it, like a 3D elevator.

Whether these systems ever reach escape velocity is yet to be seen. The most likely contender to pull it off appears to be Sillicon Valley based Glydways which has projects on the books, money and seemingly another round of technology refinements. Watch and wait.

The media covers minute details (albeit rarely important ones) so regularly that I’m surprised they don’t have someone on standby to race out when any random bus catches a flat.

Unfortunately, this love of talking means that once the right people get a project on the roadmap, it gets a lot of talk, whether or not it is a good project. I think this is part of why Toronto just keeps developing mediocre stuff: a bad project gets on the roadmap and then well, we just have to build it right? This is more or less the path the Eglinton East LRT is on: if it ever made sense, it no longer does with the new projects we are building, and yet onwards it goes, with the city using what little transit directing energy it has left to try to push it forward. I talked about this more last week.

There are — interestingly — some fairly compelling projects that we do not talk about, and so don’t move forward because nobody thinks to include them (don’t get me started on how obvious projects somehow often don’t arise to folks responsible for plotting out future projects) — I talk a lot about examples of this, such as a proper Spadina station, Sheppard subway extensions (westwards in particular), and the topic of today’s post: extending Line 2 to Mississauga City Centre.

A Subway to Mississauga.

It's really crazy that we aren’t currently planning a subway to Mississauga City Centre. Right now, we are building subway lines to Richmond Hill Centre, which looks like this …

and Scarborough Town Centre …

North York Centre has long had a subway …

and Vaughan has developed a lot since it got its subway (most is recent and not pictured, so it looks at least as dense as Scarborough) …

And yet, Mississauga City Centre is getting a typical Toronto suburban streetcar, with development like this …

To be perfectly clear, I am not saying that the subways we are building, or have built were not justified. I love North York Centre, Scarborough Town Centre has major densification plans (and tons of buses), Vaughan has actually done huge TOD at their main subway station, and Richmond Hill Centre gets oodles of current subway terminus at Finch.

But, it is straightforwardly nuts that this absolutely gargantuan cluster of homes, employment, a huge shopping centre, government offices, and amenities is only currently planned to be served by a pretty mediocre tram (literally the same vehicles as Finch West) and some buses. The density is at least at the level of North York Centre which has three subway stations!

Now, the sort of technocratic way to solve this problem that gets talked about to death is a diversion of the Milton line. I do not disagree that in a sort of “impossible sane world” this would be the way to go, but the issue is it’s just super contingent. You need to get frequent trains on the Milton line, and they need to be electric, and they need to be high performance to make building a diversion cost-effective, and I think that we’ll be lucky if some of those things happen in a decade or two. If getting dedicated tracks and frequent trains on the Milton line was something we were going to do, I just sort of think we would have done it by now.

The Hurontario “LRT” streetcar is not a solution. The capacity is equivalent to a few bus lines and only half that of the Eglinton Crosstown when it’s running at grade in the golden mile; it’s a small fraction of what a subway could handle — 10% maybe. The streetcar also does not solve the issue of rapid transit, or linking this dense node of development to the region’s densest node of development — downtown Toronto. Sure, it will be nicer because now you’ll be able to take a tram to a GO train instead of a bus, but the trip will be slow, and many people will need to transfer multiple times. It’s the kind of transit solution that is common in the US, and it won’t change the reality that in Mississauga even in these dense environs most people drive.

There is, however, a solution to that — extending the subway. Right now, we are taking the subway network up to Richmond Hill Centre and Scarborough Centre, and while a lot of people complain about subways to the suburbs, these lines will be well-used and will shorten a ton of commutes, getting people off of buses so that those buses can bring new riders into the system. I think these projects would basically be impossible to criticize if it weren’t for the outrageous prices, which are multiples higher than what the French build through Paris for (that’s something I’ve long-discussed though).

So more or less, what I’m suggesting is just to do something similar to what we are currently doing on the Danforth and Yonge lines, a ~10 kilometre, ~4 station subway extension that brings a ton of density, but also a ton of single-family home dwellers who could hop on a frequent bus or a bike, onto the subway network. It really does not compute that this isn’t on a radar given Mississauga is bigger than Scarborough (and outside of Toronto — so where is the “Toronto … and its burbs … gets all the transit?” dynamic), and even more lacking for transit since it has one less GO train line.

Now, the project is not perfect. Line 2 already takes a long time to get to Kipling, almost 40 minutes from Bloor-Yonge so getting from Bloor-Yonge to Square One would be a one hour trip. By comparison getting to Richmond Hill Centre will be more like a 40 minute trip. Speed could obviously be addressed to some extent with better maintenance, and there are some lightly-used stations that could be turned into stops that get bypassed by every other train, speeding up some trips. The reality though is that even with a somewhat long travel time, the alternatives are not particularly better: a bus to Kipling isn’t very quick, the streetcar + GO combo has the same problem, and while the Milton Line is fast, it’s only fast for like 8 trips during a 2 hour period of the day!

Still, this is less of a problem than some suggest. For one, if you’re going to the financial district, the new connections to GO train lines at Bloor-Dundas West and Lansdowne give lots of capacity and a very fast trip. For two, there is still a lot of office space and the University of Toronto on Bloor, so for some people from Peel this will be more direct than some alternatives.

Cost is the obvious question, and honestly while I think our costs are outrageous, to some extent if we are going to build these other subway extensions for the prices we are, then extending Line 2 to Mississauga is just as sensible — in fact, I’d argue it’s better. For one, the first ~5 kilometres of a 10-11 km overall alignment (basically straight over to Hurontario and then up to some site around Square One, maybe two if we get fancy) can be built elevated or at grade. The environment around the Milton GO line (which the end of Line 2, and the extension would run along) is super industrial and if anywhere was the place for not digging a tunnel it would be here. The cost savings could even enable the line to swing down and serve Sherway Gardens and the Hospital - which is another mark in the “elevated” column. In fact, given how much of this line could be done above ground I think you might have a total cost similar to one of the shorter current extensions, just because in this case you can do 50% of the track and stations above grade.

Making this happen really should be simple. Mississauga should just start demanding it. Make it about housing, make it about fairness with Toronto, make it about shifting people out of cars — there are no shortage of reasons why this project would make a lot of sense. Scarborough wanted a subway, people spoke up about it and it happened, this project makes even more sense.

While for many years many Toronto transit watchers convinced themselves that replacing a bus route with a median-aligned surface tram made planning rapid transit easy, I was never convinced because I had seen how a similar “LRT” project where I grew up — the Surrey Langley light rail line — would only have improved travel times over buses by 1 minute.

Similar data didn't seem to be made widely-available in Toronto, cynically because this would have made the projects we were developing look much worse. However, now that they're open, we've kind of learned this the hard way. Eglinton to be fair does seem to be performing much better than Finch, but still, even just simply beating the bus doesn't feel like a great value when you've spent billions of dollars on a new transit project.

As has been heavily covered, a lot of these problems come down to weak transit signal priority. What I think has been appreciated less is that the extent to which we can have good transit signal priority is limited because of the way we've designed our projects.

And speaking of design, even if everything was working well and perhaps more so if people didn't have the big issue of the lines not working well to think about, they are just pretty ugly. These lines might have looked okay if built 20 or 30 years ago, but Europe has been building more attractive infrastructure for over a decade now and it's disappointing that our brand new line lacks many features that were commonplace in other cities long ago (for example, the trains have low-fidelity LED screens which would be acceptable 20 years ago but now feel very dated).

And then downstream of the weak priority and design decisions made on these lines, the speeds just aren't great. Beating traffic feels good, but it's not special when you have an entirely dedicated Lane in front of you with no other vehicles in it to block you. The thing I've been repeating for years is that Toronto doesn't have a problem with transit availability, it has a problem with the availability of fast transit, and at the most generous, these lines are quick some of the time — they are not transformatively fast in the way subways have been.

I think we could have predicted a lot of this, and I've talked about this at great length over the years as well. Suburban Toronto is certainly covered and served by transit, but it's still a car-oriented locale with conservative-leaning politicians. I'm not sure how we thought we were going to nail things like transit signal priority here when we can't even get the downtown streetcar network working properly where the politicians should theoretically be much more supportive, and where we already have the rails laid!

So the natural question is, how could we be deluded into thinking another project like this is a good idea, and that's more or less with the Eglinton East light rail line is.

I’ve heard someone previously try to sell the project a connecting so many destintions, Malvern, UTSC, GO stations, and the like! But the issue is that these are just random destinations, Guildwood GO and Eglinton are somewhat redundant with one another, it's not clear to me that this is the best way for most people to get to UTSC, and Malvern residents might benefit so long as their destination is on this route, and as long as it’s actually much faster than the bus — there are a lot of big ifs.

Now, to their credit, the city and mayor have been talking about grade separation (it makes me really frustrated after talking about this for years that the riders of Finch West need to be trapped on a slow tram before leaders would listen). However, the issue is that the ground has shifted, and this is why you have to interrogate your ideas today and not years down the road, if you don't present great ideas, people might not entertain them and so you won't get the chance to adapt them later.

The Scarborough transit version of this is that the Scarborough Subway makes the north-south part of the Eglinton East light rail line much less relevant. For a large quantity of trips, it will be faster to take a bus to or from the new north-south subway; sure, you will have to get on the bus, but because the subway is so much faster than the tram, and because the tram is at best only slightly faster than a bus, bus-plus-subway still ends up being the fastest option. Furthermore, it seems like there's a very good chance that the shepherd subway gets extended at least to McCowan, and if it gets extended further east, perhaps along elevated guideways, then you eliminate most of the remaining trips where the light rail line might have made sense because now you can go both east-west and north-south much faster on these new subways, connecting to final destinations with short hops on buses.

What's funny about all of this is that there is definitely a bias against buses, and while politicians obsessed with subways always get treated like elitists, I don't really see a difference between being obsessed with the subway because you think buses are for poor people and being obsessed with the tram because you think buses are for poor people. There has been so much language over the years and decades about how Scarborough needs transit, but anyone who's actually been to Scarborough will know that it's absolutely laden with it — again, fast transit is what's needed not transit.

I guess my point is, the city should have recognized that when the province wanted to get much more involved in transit in Toronto that it needed to pivot, but it's pivoted late and the pivot is about 1°. And I'm just not very sympathetic — the city of Toronto doesn't actually seem focused on what makes transit and mobility best for residents, but instead building political plans that city politicians and I guess some city staff believe elevate the status of the city. A good example of this is GO: there are already in north-south and east-west GO lines in Scarborough, and if the city of Toronto didn't have such a strange attitude that treats GO as if it is exclusively for suburban residents outside of the city, it might have spent the last several decades creating great bus connections and pushing the province to enhance service on these lines sooner. I can totally imagine a world where much like with the subway network, there are stations at the major arterials with big bus terminals that let people from almost anywhere in a place like Scarborough get to a train station that lets them get on a train that helps them get places quickly.

What's funny is that to some extent, the city is doing the right thing by creating a sort of master plan, the issue is that it doesn't seem like the city of Toronto realizes that the GTA isn't just the city of Toronto anymore and that it doesn't really make sense for one single city to plan things in a vacuum. Funnily enough the whole “we have a master plan!” thing, while not actually acknowledging the realities of funding, population dynamics, and changing priorities takes me from sympathetic to irritated with the city's efforts.

So to just reiterate, what we end up having is a bus that is more or less turned into a bus on rails along Eglinton East. And with the biggest trip generator along the route, the University of Toronto Scarborough campus instead sending most of its trips to the new subway being built via buses. This means that this project basically just exists as a rail replacement of the existing local bus for local trips. Maybe that would make sense in Europe where they're good at building trams and they can do stuff in expensively, but it doesn't make a single lick of sense in Toronto, because we haven't picked so much of the low-hanging transit fruit.

But I don't want to rant for this entire post, so like I mentioned from the front, I want to talk about five conceivable things the city of Toronto could put its efforts into that would provide better transit for Scarborough that I think would be better plans (more benefits, more reach, lower cost) than the current Eglinton East light rail line.

Idea 1: The Scarborough Express

My first idea is one that’s been kicking around for many years. It's essentially a BRT-lite grid that would serve Scarborough, and if I'm being honest, ideally the service could continue up north to Highway 7 so you end up getting seamless connectivity into York region as well. I get that that's an absolutely insane proposal if you are used to the way Toronto does things, but as it turns out, people living north of Steeles also need to get around, and it's absolutely ludicrous that suddenly when you go into York region the buses run every 40 minutes. Part of this is obviously conservative York region politicians not wanting to spend money on transit, but I think it's also partially a sort of Toronto attitude that the city doesn't need to lead the surrounding region and can instead exist on a sort of island separate from it.

Anyways, the point of this network would be to cover basically the whole eastern part of the city with 12 different routes: 6 east-west, 5 north-south, and a short route connecting Malvern to Scarborough Town Centre. These routes would connect Scarborough's major hospitals, numerous GO and subway stations, York Region’s Viva on Highway 7, and the University of Toronto and Centennial College.

Now, these routes would not be over-the-top like VIVA with massive glass structures, and more importantly would not be like VIVA because they would probably each have buses every 8 minutes or so from early in the morning until late at night and then 15 or 20 minute service in the overnight period. The stops would also still be nice, with larger canopies, bike lockers so that people could actually get to a stop more easily, next bus screens, and designs that make them visible on the landscape so that people can easily actually find the nearest stop.

In terms of actually making them Express, the key detail is extremely limited stops, but of course you would also do transit signal priority, queue jumps, and dedicated lanes where they would actually help bypass traffic (saving cost where you don't actually need them).

In terms of the bus vehicles, I would suggest all articulated electric buses; it would be especially nice if we could manage to get some nice European buses, and extra points if we protected for bi-articulated buses if that is a road we decide to go down. In terms of propulsion', electric is obvious, and I really think in-motion charging makes the most sense especially because you can determine easy sections of each suburban arterial to put up wires on, leaving tight underpasses and other stretches of the route without wires to the extent that the battery capacity of the buses allows.

I've written out roughly what routes I would implement, though if it's of interest perhaps I could do a follow-up post where I go through this in more detail. While I mentioned specific arterials, The routes would likely turn onto other streets at the ends to connect with nearby stations and the like, and they would also divert off of these arterials to serve major destinations where applicable.

• North-south

  • Birchmount (SX2)

  • Midland (SX4)

  • McCowan (SX6)

  • Markham (SX8)

  • Morningside (SX10)

• East-west

  • St. Clair-Kingston (SX1)

  • Eglinton (SX3)

  • Lawrence (SX5)

  • Ellesmere (SX7)

  • Finch (SX9)

  • Steeles (SX11)

• Connector

  • Malvern (SX12)

I think if we actually did this stuff properly, then these routes would be just as deserving of being on the TTC map as the streetcars. And I'd actually think a Scarborough-specific transit map showing all of the subway and GO stations and the grid of new express bus routes would be valuable.

Idea 2: The Scarborough Liner

The Scarborough liner idea is inspired by the automated people movers widely used across Asia, especially in Japan. The concept here would be to connect Scarborough Town Centre with Centennial College, Centenary Hospital, and the University of Toronto-Scarborough. Most of such a line could be built elevated above ground, which would seriously reduce its costs, and the yard could perhaps even be built where the old Scarborough rapid transit yard was. This system would be automated and would use small trains, which would mean along with the elevated construction, costs would be very low. Service could run every 4 minutes and stations would have platform screen doors.

As a second phase, you could extend the line south — albeit with some tunneling — to Guildwood GO station, creating direct links to Scarborough's most important destinations from the east south north and west.

Idea 3: SmartSpur

The SmartSpur idea would sort of be a variant of the Scarborough liner idea, however it would substitute the automated people mover technology for a spur off of the Stouffville GO line. This would likely cost more money, as stations would need to be larger and you would probably need to do more tunneling, however it would create more direct links across the region.

In order to facilitate this project, GO would need to have finally started rolling out EMUs (ideally also in a shorter format because we do not need 300m platforms at Scarborough Town Centre and UTSC), and would also need to have all trains stop at Scarborough to facilitate connections to the Lakeshore east line that would not be available at Guildwood.

Idea 4: Accelerate Sheppard Subway to Pickering and Line 2 Extension

Another option would be to strengthen the subway “cross” within Scarborough. Line two is already going to extend fairly far north, but could go all the way to Steeles Avenue or potentially beyond if York region wants to kick in funds and build a ton of housing along McCowan and near the Markville Mall site. This would add new interceptions to the finch and steals bus routes.

At the same time. the Sheppard Subway could be extended further east, reaching McCowan at Scarborough Town Centre and then roughly continuing on Ellesmere past the hospital and Centennial College to the University of Toronto.

Obviously with this solution you don't get rail transit a short distance from most people in Scarborough, but the reality is you also don't do that with the current Eglinton East plan. On the other hand, a Subway “cross” would mean short bus trips to get to the subway for many people, and the ability to get across Scarborough quickly, with many destinations not requiring a bus on at least one end of the trip.

Idea 5: Just Better Transit

The last idea I'll put out there, is just spending the money on making transit in Scarborough nicer. That could mean screen doors at all of the subway stations, enhancements to the GO stations that haven't been enhanced yet. Proper bus exchanges akin to the ones that have been built in York region (to serve like one or two buses an hour as opposed to the one or two buses every minute you see in Toronto) could be built in locations that aren't on the rail network. You could work to aggressively upgrade and electrify buses across Scarborough. You could build new affordable housing and TOD sites, and you could also build out a fantastic bike Network.

My point in saying all of this is not that we shouldn’t build and improve the transit ofsScarborough, but just that I know we can come up with better ideas than what we currently have, which admittedly was a plan created long ago.

Recently, I’ve felt pretty down about public transit in Toronto, and I think this feeling is probably pretty comparable to what someone living in Washington DC, or LA, or Seattle probably feels: A decent amount of transit initiatives are being undertaken in all of these cities, and yet …

1. Washington is getting an overhaul to Union Station, and the new Purple Line … but is now shamefully notable for shutting down a modern American streetcar line.

2. Seattle is opening up more and more light rail infrastructure connecting its region, with a recent link across Lake Washington being the world’s first-ever railway (not to mention mass transit) on a floating bridge. However, it feels increasingly clear that it undersized its buildout by choosing light rail, and will be paying the price for that in perpetuity — costs are also particularly crushing.

3. LA is building a lot of transit, from subways to new (more sensible than most) high-floor light rail, and future automated metro, and yet the effort feels shambolic in the face of the enormous and comprehensive road network — with things like the collapse of the Inglewood People Mover plan meaning the enormous and very cool-looking SoFi stadium will not be accessible by rail for the FIFA world cup or Olympics, if ever, which feels pretty sad.

4. And then there’s Toronto. We are getting a substantial new city centre subway line, and subway extensions in three directions, as well as two new trams in the suburbs, on top of all kinds of small initiatives. Yet it feels like just as fast as we build conventional rapid transit, we pump the brakes on regional rail improvements, let the streetcars fall into irrelevance, and totally miss out on improvements like bike lanes that would synergistically improve the transit experience.

It all leaves one feeling rather exasperated, like the fight with the car is truly hopeless, and it’s impossible to even imagine what success might look like. Here, I think it can be instructive to look at São Paulo, which I covered in a video on my YouTube channel years ago, see below:

São Paulo to me feels like a city worth aspiring to for those of us in North America.

It’s far from perfect, but its comprehensive rail system, and sprawling high rise-filled skyline offers an image of an American city that is notably more rationally organized.

This built form and rail network combination produces a clear result: More riders on mass transit per unit of population than any of the North American cities I mentioned before.

In some ways, this puts things into perspective for Toronto. Its daily mass transit ridership as a fraction of population is closer to that of São Paulo than any of its American comparators, which are also making major transit investments. But still, if Toronto had rail ridership comparable to São Paulo, it would have two-and-a-half times the ridership it does, which is an enormous increase (although LA would need ~24 times more ridership to be comparable).

Now, I’ll largely leave the issue of discussing urban form to others, but suffice to say São Paulo is sprawly, but also dense, and like Seattle or Los Angeles is surrounded by mountains, albeit more closely. São Paulo, while lacking the many of the super tall towers you see in other cities (its tallest tops out just a little over 200m), does have enormous quantities of shorter apartment towers, which I think probably leads to it surprising a lot of skyscraper data-obsessives with its density. Looking at the picture above, you could confuse the city with Tokyo!

Lets dive into the mass transit …

Scale of Network

The first thing that I think may surprise you is that São Paulo’s metro network is actually shorter than Washington DC’s Metro, and only slightly longer than Toronto’s. (I won’t compare Seattle and LA, which are both light rail-heavy).

Washington DC has 98 stations with 208 kilometres of track.

São Paulo also has 98 stations, but on only 110 kilometres of track, barely more than half as much.

And then Toronto has 81 stations, on 71.1 kilometres of track.

You can actually see that Toronto and São Paulo are closer in scale than you might imagine, with Washington having a much larger network than either. Of course, since the regional or suburban trains in Washington or Toronto are basically not mass rapid transit you wouldn’t consider them in the numbers, but adding São Paulo’s suburban network takes its kilometer-age up to nearly 400 km.

Read more

As part of a federal-provincial-municipal deal to unlock housing (as if you somehow can’t build housing without one of Toronto’s dysfunctional streetcars?), the three levels of government have each committed almost a billion dollars to fund what is in effect the mirror image to the 509 Harbourfront streetcar: A new route going from Union station south to Queens Quay and then east along the waterfront through and to new development areas. Doug Ford (who is the one with all the actual power to actually get housing built) clearly gets that this is a streetcar because everyone kept saying the words “Waterfront East Transit” instead of the usual language “Waterfront East LRT”, which is just another thoughtcrime in the Toronto doctrine that somehow LRT is a meaningful term and not just applied at will to whatever streetcar project is currently a priority.

People have asked me how I feel, and if you couldn't already tell, my feelings are quite mixed. I'm genuinely and earnestly quite happy that this project is going to be built because there really is a gap here, however as is so often the case, we are stumbling into doing the right thing (building new transit infrastructure for the eastern waterfront and Portland's) in the wrong way.

There is a genuinely enormous quantity of density particularly on the eastern waterfront (a pretty significant amount of density was planned for the Portlands but that seems likely to be cut back so that we can have a second major airport in Toronto with jet aircraft, which of course is much more important than more housing!) and it does make sense to provide mass transit infrastructure for this development.

But, I can’t help but notice that at the exact same time this “city priority” project is getting built, advocates have to ask nicely that the city and TTC get their act together and run the network they already have like they aren’t trying to actively sabotage it, by doing things like trying to make it fast and using technology from this century.

Putting aside my sass, what does this project actually consist of?

Well, starting out in the Portlands, it will include a new and fairly-large, around-the-block loop on Villiers Island, before traveling north off of the island on the dedicated streetcar bridge that was placed when the other bridges connecting the island were. There will then be a minor section of track going north under the rail corridor to connect to the Cherry Street streetcar tracks and likely replacing the loop there. There will also be a more substantial dedicated right-of-way traveling west on the south side of Queens Quay to connect with the existing streetcar infrastructure and tunnel at Bay Street. At the south end of the tunnel, there will be a wye with switches constructed, allowing movements either East-West along Queens Quay, or from Bay Street to either direction on Queens Quay. Finally, the Union station streetcar facility will be totally reimagined, getting rid of the curved platform along the loop and building four straight platforms, with bypass tracks sort of akin to an expanded version of what exists at Exhibition station, allowing different routes to serve dedicated platforms and potentially lay over without having to quickly leave the station. This expansion will also come along with new entrances the TTC station through CIBC Square and further south at Union station.

Using this new infrastructure, I would expect three new services, or really one new service and two realigned services. I assume that King streetcars currently running down Cherry Street will continue to the island to turn around, then I expect the Harbourfront streetcar route will be extended straight across the waterfront no longer running to Union station. Finally, I expect there to be a new service running from the island to Union Station.

Fortunately, it seems like we're getting at least the basics right: all the new stuff is going to be in dedicated right-of-way (except possibly the loop around the island), and there's even been talked about green track, which we've had some limited success with on the Eglinton line but which ought to be rolled out much more widely in the city given all the dedicated streetcar right-of-ways and the fact that we refuse to run buses on them anyways.

Unfortunately, we are doing oh-so-typical things wrong.

For one, the project is ludicrously expensive. We can talk all day about the underground expansion near Union station and the price still doesn't make a lick of sense. Of course that's exactly what makes so much sense, Toronto lacks cost discipline and so we get expensive projects. And what's so frustrating is that we don't get at least the nicest projects in the world despite spending the most money. This is doubly frustrating because we actually set aside the space for the streetcars in a number of different locations. I can imagine perhaps part of what's driving the cost is infrastructure that isn't really needed for the streetcar like street and utility upgrades and the like, but we probably will never really know because we don't believe in transparency in this country.

The natural follow-up question is, given we're spending so much, did we at least take this opportunity to modernize the standards we build streetcars to? As far as I can tell, unfortunately, no. It does seem like we might end up getting some green track — maybe, but other things that would have been good to see, like a subfleet of bidirectional streetcars that would simplify the terminus at the island, double-point switches, totally rethought stops, and wider curves that would require less maintenance and wear on the vehicles less seem unlikely, if not entirely guaranteed to not happen.

I'm obviously going to advocate with others as part of FastTrackTO (an advocacy group we spun up to help push to fix and perhaps in some cases enhance the streetcars) to do this stuff, but given it hasn't happened historically, I'm not very confident. This is of course frustrating, because a big expansion like this (relatively speaking) offers the opportunity to do things differently. I like to think of when Amsterdam built its new tram route to the islands built in the Ij and how, while compatible with the existing tram network, it incorporated new things like faster operations with a more rapid transit-like right-of-way, and coupled-up trams. I'm not exactly surprised that Toronto wasn't open to the Japanese way of doing waterfront transit, but I'm pretty disappointed that we couldn't even manage the Amsterdam way.

And of course, the planning doesn't feel all that integrated. While we set aside space for the streetcar along road right-of-ways, it's not exactly at the level of France where they might have designed the loop at the island (if it had to be a loop) to go through a development block and potentially under a structure, probably as part of a less car-centric road layout. We just cannot imagine transit and development not being separated like church and state.

Of course, the lack of integrated planning goes further. The Ontario Line is going to swoop past the area, however the new streetcar isn't going to connect to it despite overlapping with it at Cherry street! In part, that's Metrolinx's fault for not building an oh-so-obvious station at Cherry Street (which they could still build albeit in a less optimal way, and for greater cost), but it's also the city's fault for planning this thing to not connect to East Harbour from the start, which would let it connect with the Ontario Line and GO trains. This means that, in effect from a connectivity perspective, the Waterfront East LRT might as well just go straight south into the lake, since it will be hard for those from the east of the city and east of the city to easily access it without going all the way to Union station.

These integration problems are of course intertwined with cost disease. If not for the super high costs, we could build more trackage in the first phase of this project. I would personally like, for example, if we completed tracks down the Cherry Beach (streetcar to beach!), east to the Leslie Barns (redundancy!), and north to East Harbour along Broadview as part of this project; instead, people are going to have to fight for these extensions one by one, and maybe they will not happen.

The design of Union station also feels questionable: sure, if you assume nothing can change about the way we run the streetcar network or the way we design our infrastructure this is the only way, but given how much we're probably going to spend on this underground station I would have liked us to look at a few more options (and look at the more seriously) than we actually did. One friend mentions that given that CIBC Square didn't start construction all that long ago, we really should have considered having the streetcar tracks loop under the old GO bus terminal, potentially connecting with a stop to the new office complex, and then heading down Yonge Street, connecting with the absolutely gargantuan developments there. This would actually be a way of using a loop that would provide more connectivity and interesting operational opportunities, but we aren't even willing to consider slight modifications to the way we do things, so loops mostly have to immediately connect back to tracks going in the other direction as opposed to being wider (there are exceptions but they are not common). Other options would obviously be opened up, if we were willing to acquire double ended streetcars, which could be used on the new trackage as well as on routes connecting to Union station, which would probably allow at least a modest shrinking of the size of the Union terminal complex.

My point in all of this is, well this is a positive project, it is so typically Toronto, and despite costs continuing to escalate in perpetuity, we haven't seemingly decided to step up our own game, changing the way we operate legacy infrastructure and systems and taking advantage of situations like this to pivot the way we do things.

Basically, this is progress for Toronto, but it’s progress in the Toronto sense, fiddling at the margins instead of changing things which we really ought to change. And I wish we had a better story for why we were building it, and how we were planning it, instead of just “well, we put a streetcar in new Waterfront development areas!”.

The Liberal government —which is still in power today — started off with a plan called High-Frequency Rail many moons ago, which was a sort-of sensible, incrementalist plan to get VIA trains between Toronto and Montreal, which were growing in popularity onto their own dedicated tracks, possibly with electrification. This was meant to be a rational, cost-effective plan that would make trains more consistent, frequent, and ultimately fast — a triple threat for intercity trains that could already be compelling if they weren’t so expensive, unreliable, and infrequent.

Now, I've talked a lot about the problems with this project, from questionable assumptions about which cities should be served to the actual alignment, but what's absolutely clear is that we could make high-speed rail make sense — particularly from Toronto to Montreal. We've got huge density, fairly-big subway systems, major demand evidenced by the busy trains and numerous flights everyday. We also have population numbers and distances that makes sense. High-speed rail used to only exist in highly-developed and wealthy countries like Japan, France, and Germany, but these days it's also something that peer countries like Spain and Korea, not to mention developing nations like Indonesia and Morocco have, not to mention China. It's just one of the things that developed countries that aren't tiny all seem to develop, like public health care, and national highway networks. It’s just something the good places have.

The project — which, again, does have many problems — does have an emerging NIMBY problem as rural dwellers recoil at the idea of a train going anywhere near them.

A friend which closely follows NIMBY movements has been tracking this one, and suggested it was the largest and fastest growing he had seen.

Fortunately, all of Canada’s major political parties support high-speed rail, even the Conservatives who referred to it as “innovative high-speed rail” (it’s been around for decades so … alright, but at least the policy is sensible).

But, oh wait, actually their leader Pierre Poilievre, clearly channeling the energy of a small number of NIMBYs between the nation’s largest cities has just come out against the project. He says it should be cancelled. (Of course, he can’t cancel it because the party he leads lost the last election, and he didn’t even win his seat, needing to have an MP resign so he could drop into their safe seat).

Now, when making the case that it should be cancelled (a weak one, as you might imagine), Mr. Poilievre talked about it taking a long time, and about being expensive and pie in the sky. He talked about how Canada had built the CPR from coast to coast in four years (which feels a bit like saying that I built a new pipe to my backyard in a weekend and so obviously my city’s new sewer project taking five years is outrageous), which is true, and goodness it would be great if we didn’t sell our railways off so we weren’t starting from zero here. We might be able to build a little better had we not …

The issue is this all feels like the Poilievre who lost the last election. “How dare you try to do a big thing?” “The Liberal mismanagement is outrageous!” but then “we must cancel this project”. There is an admission of our incompetence — note the CPR comparison, as bad as it is — but then a tacit admission that they can do no better. We won’t fix the project or do a better job than the Liberals, we’ll just cancel it.

The issues here are many-fold. People actually want their governments to do things, even the most strident-free market Conservatives want a serious military, but then guess what? If you can’t competently build a big infrastructure project, you think you’ll be able to procure a complex military program? It’s remarkable how well-correlated cost and timeline blowouts on things like rail projects and military projects are, because they suffer from the same fundamental issues, and are founded on the same problems. Even with the Conservatives apparently pivoting 180-degrees from their position on this issue circa a year ago, they surely do want infrastructure to get built — highways, pipelines anyone? A government whose solution to a hard project is canning it isn’t going to suddenly grow capable on other types of projects.

And even if you think somehow that governments only ever have to say yes or no, and not actually action things — several people do point out that private companies have sometimes wanted to build stuff like pipelines themselves in the past, you still need to coordinate and do things like expropriation, which is a pretty key thing governments in the modern world need to do. Which is of course why Polievre came out against it on Alto. The issue is, if you take that attitude now, you really aren’t going to like what all the people in BC have to say about your pipeline: “What happened to no expropriation Pierre?!”

The other issue for Polievre is that Canadians seemingly didn’t elect his party because they wanted nation-building and big projects, and probably most importantly centrism (ok, I don’t think many people want actually some point in the middle of the political spectrum, but moderation ... ). The Liberals won not by appealing to the progressives, but because an NDP collapse let them appeal to lots of people who would be open to voting for the conservatives. The conservatives clearly have not learned the lesson. Winning votes from disgruntled farmers to kill a project serving cities which individually have millions of people each (Toronto and its suburbs have more people than BC, Ottawa more than Saskatchewan, and Montreal more than Alberta!) makes no strategic sense! Trying to code infrastructure as somehow a left-wing thing is exactly how you don’t moderate, when I hear someone online yelling about how high-speed rail through a corridor that includes more than 50% of the nation’s population is a “vanity choo choo”, it sounds roughly like when some progressive says something like “ban all pickup trucks”. The obvious actual move for a conservative party that wants to win votes from those who live in cities (most of the country) is to recognize that getting around, and congestion are problems (not to mention housing, which anyone who knows anything knows railways generally come with when done right!), and note that while the Liberals have failed to deliver better intercity rail in the past 11 years (which is true!) that they would actually tackle this problem expeditiously. Instead, it’s more or less, “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas”.

Another thing I haven’t mentioned is that polling apparently sponsored by some of the NIMBY groups (ironically called AltNo) actually showed really broad support.

I point this out because we can see what a Conservative who cares about these things looks like. Doug Ford in Ontario, for all his problems, has been elected again and again. For his faults, Doug has been pushing infrastructure through at a crazy pace, and essentially nobody across the political spectrum on the whole thinks the new train lines, subways, and the like are a bad idea (even if they’ll quibble with the details). A friend has also pointed out that he actually does talk about actually getting things done and the incompetence of past projects — even if things don’t entirely seem to be improving. I can already imagine people saying “he’s not a real Conservative”, and all I can say to that is that it should probably really concern the “real” conservatives how effective he’s been at getting elected!

Now, I don’t want to give to much oxygen to silly arguments, but I think it is worth addressing the opposition I saw to the project online.

1. It’ll never happen! (From several Conservatives, including MPs … )

   1. Not really confidence inspiring that your pitch to voters is that a technology that nearly every other major developed country — and several developing countries — has managed can “never happen” here. People have spent a great deal of time looking

2. It’s a train most Canadians will never ride, the west is funding another project for easterners! These provinces should fund it themselves!

   1. Most Canadians live in Ontario and Quebec (>50%), most Canadian taxpayers live here as well. The project is national in scope, not provincial.

3. A pipeline is good for the economy, not some subsidized train!

   1. Canada is a service economy, enabling larger agglomerations and people moving around is part of how we enhance that, and boost things like productivity. There’s a reason we are the only G7 country without high-speed rail, and might soon be the only G20 country in the spot!

4. Look at the Eglinton Crosstown!

   1. Yeah, Ontario screwed that up badly. Fortunately the high-speed rail is being built by the people who built the REM, which went from idea to construction and operation quickly, and for a fraction of the price of Eglinton.

5. If it was a good idea the private sector would build it.

   1. Ha.

Now, what may not come across here it I want the Conservatives to be better. I don’t think the current political monopoly the Liberals have in Canada is a good thing for anyone. However, when you live in a developed, urbanized country, where people are well-travelled and have often been to or are from countries with high-speed rail, coming out against high-speed rail is a completely daft take. Especially because it just generally gives off vibes of “we don’t take infrastructure seriously”.

The best of politics are when you’re able to reach into different political camps, take good ideas, and show how you can do it better. Instead of doing this, the Conservatives are playing to their base, which clearly hasn’t been delivering electorally.

Of course, maybe this time it will be different, but in the long run of history, being the people that robbed the nation of something that all the other developed nations have, or are developing, is ... not a good look.

Right now, the entire world is being squeezed by high oil prices that are downstream of a war in the Middle East that is in the control of a small few. This, when you think about it, is really unfortunate (obviously any war is much more incredibly sad and unfortunate, but this is a transportation blog): people’s mobility has suddenly become massively eroded because of forces completely out of their control. Even if you don’t drive, the things you rely on like groceries get to stores on overwhelmingly fossil fuel-powered vehicles, and so you’ll be affected to.

All of this makes me think of China. The nation obviously is massive and uses huge quantities of fossil fuels, but its economic fortunes are rapidly being decoupled from these resources over which it does not have control. Over half of new cars in China are electric, and electric freight innovation is in large part taking place in China as well - from electric trucks to ships. Those pushing these policies, despite their obvious problems (EV overproduction and involution) are clear eyed that dependence on a very unstable resource for all of modern society to function is untenable. Of course, to some extent China uses the fossil fuels it imports to generate electricity (which for what its worth is way more efficient than direct use), but enormous dams in western China, among the largest in the world, as well as massive nuclear and renewable build-outs are increasingly meaning the entire energy system can be without fossil fuels.

Of course, China also has an enormous, domestic and urban transport system that is entirely electrically powered, in the form of high speed rail and massive urban metros. This means that the drag on China’s economy from high oil and gas prices is significantly reduced. In the US, Canada, or Australia - higher oil prices mean intercity transport with flights, and much urban transport, still heavily reliant on diesel for buses and trains, and gasoline in cars all slow down.

I’ve thought a far amount about whether on balance Canada does better or worse because of our significant energy exports as prices rise, but the lack of infrastructure for moving energy domestically makes this largely irrelevant. We can’t really strategically stop exporting to feed our own demand. And whats worse is that there is an obvious and major political divide between a place like Alberta, which benefits handsomely from high oil prices, and places like Ontario and Quebec which pay the price.

I have two main comments here.

For one, it is absolutely insane that any jurisdiction which does not have its own fossil fuels is not speed running infrastructure and transport electrification. And two, public transport in particular is possibly the most obvious place to invest.

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I specifically say jurisdiction, because this applies on provincial and frankly municipal levels. Obviously global markets influence everything, but you can blunt the blow if once goods cross your borders they can be inexpensively transported using electricity. Its also a real competitive advantage in places like Quebec that unlike in Ontario the price of heating a home has not exploded, because they heavily rely on electric heat, and generate the electricity with an enormous fleet of dams. People want to live in places where heating their home isn’t something they have to try and seriously reduce because of a war on the other side of the world. I guess ultimately for what its worth Ontario and Quebec both kind of get a pass on this, though obviously Quebec is much better, and there are better places still.

Thats obvious to me most clearly because while Quebec leads Canada in EV adoption (or at least battles with BC for it), it doesn’t seem to be scaling generation at the speed it should be to fully electrify that which already can be electrified, despite the fact that Quebec is actually competent and cost effective at building new generation. The other side of this coin is just that Quebec ought to have more like Norway levels of EV adoption, and a large electric vehicle industry, and to be clear that doesn’t mean Quebec needs to try to woo passenger car factories with huge subsidies or tax breaks, as a friend mentioned recently, there seems like a lot of room to be the best at electric commercial vehicles, or even a master of electric mining and other specialized vehicles - think garbage trucks, snow plows and the like.

But, whats most perplexing to me is just that these places - and places around the world, are not taking China’s lead in not only massively scaling personal and industrial electrification, but also electric public transit.

The case for electrifying public transit should be obvious, while building new industries and driving massive EV adoption (that governments aren’t funding huge quantities of fast chargers along major highways is unbelievable, and presents another opportunity to create a best in the world industry designing and install this equipment) is cutting edge, and potentially economically valuable, those are risky propositions. Meanwhile the fundamental mechanics of electric public transport were determined over a century ago. Trolley wires, third rails, sometimes even distributed and cogeneration - this stuff is not complicated.

A major barrier of course is costs, which are average-ish globally in China, and waaaaay higher than average in a place like Canada. But, part of how we get costs down is by scaling this stuff up. Its actually the case that in the (at this point very limited) cases where governments have institutional capacity to build stuff, Vancouver will trolleybus infrastructure, Calgary with light rail extensions — costs are much more reasonable.

Imagine our largest cities made it possible for a significant quantity of their populations to get around entirely on electric public transit. That would mean more metros, trams and trolleybuses, and finally upgrading and electrifying regional rail. Suddenly people in these cities would not only have great transit, but they would have the ability to to some extent opt out of the insane price fluctuations that at this point feel inherent to the oil market.

Even smaller cities could build out trolleybus and (in some cases) tram networks (this would be much easier if we had an RATP style organization from one of the large cities that would go around and detail how to design, procure and build such systems - Translink for example), you could imagine every city with over 2 or 300,000 people building out a system in such a country, sort of like what you see in central and eastern Europe where these systems are everywhere. They could even be used at the margins for creating basic intercity transport routes, and in some cases freight transport.

This stuff should be obvious, but our classic human tendency is to forget about recurring problems when they go away, and only go “ah if only we did X” when they reoccur. Keeping stuff like this in the public, and political consciousness at all times going forward seems sensible, so that the next time an oil price firestorm emerges we can weather that storm a little better.

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To be clear, these buses had a good run: they were introduced in the lead up to the Vancouver Olympics, and now the fleet is averaging close to 20 years in age, this is a lot older than conventional buses last, if a bit of a surprisingly short lifespan for a trolley — which benefits a lot from its electric architecture.

There also just aren't that many of them. Vancouver has about 260, with about 70 of those being articulated trolleybuses, but on the whole that’s substantially less capacity than is available on the Toronto streetcar network, despite the trolley network being significantly longer.

This problem of a comprehensive network and a decent but dated fleet has an obvious solution — a fleet replacement program, but what's great is that it's been timed such that there has been a real transformation in what is possible with trolleybuses, and so this is starting to look a lot more like a total network overhaul rather than a simple like-for-like vehicle replacement.

Last time around, New Flyer sort of made sense: the company had a number of trolleybus customers all at once, since in addition to Vancouver there are a number of networks in the United States, and their product was fairly compelling. However, it sounds like when TransLink went to them this time, what they found was a very long order backlog (largely of electric buses meaning that spinning up a parallel line to jump the queue seems less likely), high prices, and a product which probably just wouldn't justify that.

So the agency did something a bit surprising to me, something which you sometimes see happening in other cities but which is pretty uncommon in Canada: They called up the Europeans and had them bring out one of their best — the Trollino 12 model, from Polish bus manufacturer Solaris — which is actually part of Spanish train manufacturer CAF.

Solaris literally brought one of their vehicles to Metro Vancouver to test it out, it sounded like it was a real hit, and so when the time to pull the trigger on a fleet overhaul came, Solaris ended up winning the contract.

That contract is initially for about 100 buses, but what's so exciting is that there are options on it to expand to roughly 500, basically doubling the fleet.

My sort of initial fear was that Solaris would sort of North-Americanize their buses, which I've used in Europe and are great. For the record, it seems that they are entering the North American bus market because some of the other manufacturers (okay we basically have two, with “Gillig” as a third-producing what are apparently not amazing buses exclusively for the American market — mostly it seems for cities that don't run their buses very frequently and so don't need very good buses) like Novabus have been on shaky legs, and with the high prices and fairly-large volumes (this continent famously does not have a lot of trains!). This was something I was concerned about even looking at early renders as part of Solaris's marketing effort to North American agencies.

Fortunately, my fears have been assuaged.

I was reading a thread on Reddit, and while some people were loudly complaining that the above bus doesn't look as good as other European buses, which I don't have a strong opinion on, what I do know is that this prototype is already way better than most buses on this continent, and in my personal opinion this looks more like Solaris’ European models.

I think the styling looks great: it’s sort of technical — less like a smoothed out rectangular prism, and looks just like Solaris's European buses (the fenders and the front and the roofline), although as some have noted, a bit of a weird policy in Vancouver around having the rear bus door in a particular location in order to be compatible with bus shelters and the like (this doesn't really make sense to me since the accessible door is at the front and the shelters don't go right up to the curb because the entrance is on the front unlike in Toronto) while in Europe it would be centred between the front and rear wheels.

And to be clear, this is just the first prototype 12m bus, of those 400 options TransLink has 200 would be 18m articulated buses, nearly tripling the number of articulated trolleys the agency currently has.

Three Doors

Probably the most exciting thing to me besides the fact that the styling looks closer to a European bus than a North American bus with some European styling, is that there is a major functional improvement here — a third door! 12m buses with three doors (articulated buses all have three doors) in North America are basically unheard of outside of super weird edge cases like Denver's MallRide and airport buses (which I think might be bought from Europe directly anyways). A third door is pretty common across all varieties of buses in Europe and is useful for the same reason that subway trains have more doors compared to intercity trains: If a route is meant to operate frequently you don't want to have a vehicle sitting at any stop for very long so that you can get moving and the next vehicle can arrive; Reducing dwell time is a lot easier when you have a whole extra door that people can board and alight from. The fact that Canadian cities which operate bus service that's much more in line with European standards than American ones, have basically handcuffed themselves to American bus designs which aren't really fit for purpose for so long has been infuriating. There are numerous bus routes in cities like Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver that move as many people each day as entire light rail lines in America, and so seeing European-style buses with far more door capacity made an option for these routes is extremely exciting operationally, and for improving service speed since if you're not getting off at a particular stop you would like the stopping to actually take as little time as possible! Presumably, if the 18m variant is ordered this will, like with many 18m buses in Europe, have four doors.

Battery Range Extension

The other major innovation is that these buses have a substantial internal battery that allows real off-wire use. The current trolleys have a very short off wire range, which is really only enough to quickly get back to overhead wires (some later versions of the same model used in cities in the US — some of which are abandoning trolleys altogether have slightly more range). By comparison, these buses are meant to have a 20 kilometre off-wire useable range.

There are a bunch of ways this could be used. For one, existing routes could be extended beyond the edge of the current network, for example taking trolleys on Hastings onwards to SFU — which doesn’t currently have trolley service, or taking trolley service along 41st to Marine Drive and the current UBC trolley loop. You could also create new radial services such as by extending the Victoria trolley to the rather underserved River District.

You also could probably simplify a lot of the network: complex junctions could be travelled through on battery, and the downtown core could have a lot of its wires removed based on charging demand and what the state of charge of buses on various routes might be. This would let you have overhead lines where they are simplest to build and maintain as well as operate buses under.

The ideal scenario is that these trolleys function so well that this becomes how bus service in the region is electrified in large part. Buses with longer range like current e-buses, and trolley poles for in-motion charging mean that with a little bit of electrification along a major street — say King George Boulevard in Surrey, or No. 3 Road in Richmond — you could electrify a wide range of routes that touch that corridor. It’s sort of like the opportunistic charging some agencies are already investigating at bus exchanges, but such that buses can keep driving a bit before “unplugging”. Buses like this could also let the Rapidbus routes easily go electric. This makes a lot of sense because Translink already has internal expertise with trolley infrastructure, the region is really serious about its climate goals, and perhaps simplifying the network in Vancouver proper would free up some resources.

I honestly did not cover (or appreciate) Vancouver’s trolleybus network enough over the years, and I hope to do a more fulsome examination of it in the future, in the meantime please enjoy this diagram of the network by Richard DeArmond and Matthew Walker.

Now, I’d like to spend a bit of time reiterating what a problem it is that the bus market in North America is not competitive. For serious transit buses, you only have two options, and since the two companies often have specialties, in many cases you really only have one option. This is good for the companies, and politicians might say it’s good for workers, but the issue is it’s inefficient, and puts a small number of jobs (which would not necessarily be lost in a competitive market!) at current companies ahead of the best, most cost effective vehicles, and the public transit systems and rider experience. That so often transit projects (housing is similar) are used as a means to a achieve non-transit means, is very frustrating, and is a big reason of why transit itself is not as good as it could be.

In most of the rest of the world (like with elevators and fifteen other things), the market is quite globalized. Many firms, from Mercedes, to Man, and Volvo compete with a wide range of designs. Since more companies want the business, and more features are offered you get more reliability, better pricing, and better features.

There have been exceptions. A few transit systems in a few systems have ordered buses from European manufacturers. York Region’s VIVA “BRT” system for example kicked off service with very nice Belgian Van Hool buses, which are notably nicer than the regular buses we see on this continent.

What’s exciting about this move from Translink is it shows us what a future where Canada is part of a global transit ecosystem (which we could then also sell into) could look like. It means dramatically better transit domestically of course — especially in places like buses that don’t get much attention in Canada but are real workhorses, but it could also force our domestic bus makers to innovate and compete, meaning their workers would learn new skills and to make more competitive products, which would make them more employable in other industries as well! Now, obviously we aren’t going to compete with China on bus pricing, but there’s no reason we couldn’t buy some buses from Poland, and sell some to Norway or Spain. This is how the global economy works.

All of this leaves me feeling quite happy. Vancouver of course is going to have a fantastically-upgraded trolley network, and maybe transformed buses regionwide. But, the impact will be wider than that. Other cities might experiment with Solaris, and perhaps other manufacturers.

This is an obvious move for Toronto. Already, the New Flyer Buses we have been getting as of late have been a big step up from the Novabuses in terms of quality. And I think the TTC has appreciated them being quite reliable, the agency, which moves so many people on buses would probably be ecstatic at the improved efficiency, reliability of nice European buses — and the passengers would love the experience. I can just imagine how fantastic the Finch Express could be, operating slick, articulated buses the likes of which we might see in Denmark today.

As a parting note, a few years ago I actually got to check out the main maintenance garage for the trolley network in south Vancouver. It was a very cool experience, and everyone seemed stoked on the new trolleys.

Transit systems need to exist in the real world. And I am growing concerned that the wave of transport disruption unleashed by Uber (which, to be clear, had its positives!) is going to be tiny compared to what we will see from robotaxis. Recently, someone online said something to the effect of “Waymo isn’t able to move significant numbers of people”, but the service is already moving almost half a million a week. That’s only the same as a single moderately-successful American light rail line, but that’s the same as a moderately-successful light rail line — and we are clearly in the early days.

To be clear, as I have said before, I do not think all of public transit is at risk, metros and regional train systems for example should see minimal impact. This is largely because the the investment in the right-of-way and electrical system means not having to worry about other traffic or inconvenient and expensive power delivery — it’s a sort of hard-to-replicate trifecta of capacity, speed, and efficiency; this is something we mostly cannot conceive of creating for cars.

My point here is that I am a fairly paranoid person, and pretty bullish on this technology and I don’t think we need to worry about the subways this century!

Transit is much more than subways though, and I am fairly concerned about any transit that runs on the street — buses and trams, and in places like the US, poorly-operated subway and rail systems. These forms of transit are likely to often be slower, less available, and a worse experience in many cases, and I think their (often overrated) cost advantage may even erode.

It’s cliche, but the technology as it stands is the worst it will ever be, and remember there are several competitors all vying to win this market. Waymo is rapidly expanding across the US (including to cities with snow, which people foolishly seem to think will be somehow harder to engineer for from where things are now than creating self-driving robotaxi services was from the ground up), and is also set to begin expanding internationally starting with London and Tokyo — two cities with famous and excellent rail systems and also a lot of taxis.

And we have seen this before! Uber was hugely disruptive! Almost anywhere you look, you can find reports of Uber pushing down ridership, sometimes in a big way. And I would expect robotaxis to be even more disruptive, so it seems like a huge mistake to not try to get out ahead of this!

Why do I think they will be more disruptive? Well, because they do everything Uber did and more. Robotaxi services virtually all use fully-electric vehicles, which are better for the environment and shrink the environmental gap — particularly compared to a fossil fuel-powered bus. And long-term, it seems plausible they will be significantly less expensive than Uber as well, both because of the electric architecture, but also because the driver is the most expensive part of the actual Uber service delivery.

At the same time, several of the major issues anyone can see with Uber (and with Taxis) are improved upon with an autonomous vehicle. For one, it’s just less awkward — you are in a vehicle by yourself, can listen to whatever music you want, can take a call without being overheard, and can turn up the air conditioning. Not having a driver who is under the gun to drive fast and the desperate need for robotaxi services to show they are safe means pretty mild driving and a lot of caution, which is not only more secure, but also more relaxing with little in the way of sudden movements. Importantly, at a system level, having no need for a driver also means you can move more actual passengers.

In many ways, I actually think robotaxi services resemble transit. There is no personal engagement with a driver, vehicles are low emissions, movement is controlled and cautious, the vehicle is not going to try to pull a fast one on you by running up a meter, and internal screens feel like wayfinding!

But, the fact that these services are likely to be quite compelling, and over the long run super affordable (once you have the vehicle, you want to be driving around taking people on trips so long as the fare outweighs the minor cost of electricity and mileage). Waymo is currently more expensive than Uber and Lyft in San Francisco, but apparently this is just to control demand — because if people were offered the choice at the same price, they would overwhelmingly pick the driverless car, no doubt largely for the reasons I mentioned above.

So then … how do cities get around this? One person I was talking to suggested that cities (like Toronto — which even has banned electric scooters, which is nuts!) might ban robotaxis. This seems unlikely. Of course, some cities banned Uber, at least for a while, but eventually the public wants access to useful services that people in other cities have access to. Instead, I actually think this ought to just be treated as an accelerant for a lot of obvious policies that should have been happening anyways, and which are particularly relevant in dense urban environments.

For one, there should be less space for cars! Robotaxis are — at the end of the day — just cars without drivers, and so the extent to which they can take over a city really is limited by the extent to which a city is dominated by roads. There is after all a reason why this technology is the most compelling to Americans, because Americans have lots of roads and few transport options.

But, what’s actually amazing about robotaxis is that sort of by design they are good drivers, and in practice the difference between a good rule-following driver and a typical driver in the US, and to a smaller extent Canada is enormous. Speeding, not obeying signs and signals, and doing things like edging into bike lanes or ignoring one way signage on neighbourhood streets are all common with human drivers, but should basically never happen with robotaxis. The fact that signs and lines on the pavement suddenly might be quite strictly adhered to actually makes the value of the stuff much greater. Bus lanes and bike lanes should both be widely-deployed, and bus lanes in particular should be supercharged by fewer and fewer cars on the road not respecting them.

Of course, you also can just have less road space. As the constituent for downtown car lanes is increasingly not voters but instead international corporations, hopefully the popular decision will increasingly be wider sidewalks and even pedestrianization. Parking also will be less important as the expansion of robotaxis — like Uber — probably will push down personal car use, potentially helping supercharge the dominos falling for parking minimums. Of course, this is a double-edged sword, and probably makes the case for more and better defined taxi stands at major destinations, and even just cuts on the curb in busy areas.

This is also probably a good time to double down on rapid transit. With fewer people needing to use a car for virtually all of their travel, we will need more trains and more lines connecting busy areas in a way that cars — driverless or not, just can’t — certainly not at street-level. This would also help transit systems transition to a model that requires more upfront investment, but also reduces the month-to-month operating cost-per-person moved (assuming service levels are actually good).

Transit agencies also desperately need to look at fare policy, again for similar reasons to Uber. Transit and ride services operate on kind of inverse fare policies: Typically with transit, each rider must pay, whereas it’s a sort of step function with a ride service where you are effectively renting the car and driver. This means that while transit is rarely not the most cost effective option when travelling alone, groups of people can tilt the calculus, especially if the rideshare only costs a little more, but is much faster. To some extent, transit agencies (in Canada at least) have begun to implement policies which help here, like free rides for under 12s, who probably aren’t riding for a 9-5 commute and instead use up spare capacity that gets their paying parents onboard on weekends and in midday periods.

But we really ought to go further. In many cities, there are truly a smorgasbord of fare options, from cheaper, short-distance fares for hopping a few blocks on the subway quickly, to a variety of passes, and obviously also group fares, which are particularly relevant here. It also seems like cities that stubbornly refuse to implement distance-based fares should also just ... do that, given increasingly everyone will recognize the reality that going further costs more!

Now, it may surprise you to hear this, albeit a bit less at the end of the piece, but I think we ought to embrace robotaxis, assuming there is rational regulation. That’s because they can’t and will not replace good transit, might create a new incentive for transit agencies to level up, and will ultimately mean more of the drivers on the road are conscientious and respectful, something which is good for everyone!

Cities really screwed up with Uber, because instead of rationally regulating it and focusing efforts on making sure it was a positive thing, they mostly battled to ban it and then mostly eventually ended up leaving things laissez-faire. What should have happened is a measured approach, allowing the service but creating dedicated pick-up and drop-off zones, background checks and the rest — some of this happened later, but it could have been what happened right away.

All of this is important to me, because fundamentally I think these technologies are good for cities. They move more infrastructure out of personal ownership and make living without a private car easier. Most people who don’t have a car will use Uber — and someday a robotaxi some of the time, but most of the time these people can walk, bike, or take transit.

The most frequent comparison I have heard in recent years is that Canada has a lower GDP per capita than Alabama, one of the poorest states in t…

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London has a large number of rail terminals in its city centre, and with both Thameslink and the Elizabeth line, it also has a number of central through stations built underground that carry these services. A similar pattern can be found across numerous European cities, where at the very least suburban and regional trains tend to run through the city centre, usually in tunnels, often with just two tracks. This is the setup in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Milan, Oslo, and many more.

Toronto, on the other hand, has just Union station.

The issues with this are many, but the main ones are capacity, coverage, and resiliency — something highlighted last week when a train derailing, combined with our “flexibility” oriented rail operations — where trains coming from any track are able to get to many tracks at the main train station, sort of like a plane being able to freely taxi around and airport — caused huge havoc across the entire Toronto regional rail network for days, as well as on the airport rail link. A single track having a problem in most of the cities I mentioned above would not have that effect. In some cases, it might shut down one line, or set of lines, or even all through traffic if it was in a critical location, but trains could fairly easily terminate elsewhere.

Resiliency

Unfortunately, the way things are set up in Toronto, our city centre station and its supporting infrastructure are an obvious single point of failure, at the centre of an interwoven and codependent network of trains that circulate throughout the region.

And while last week the single point of failure was in an important bit of track, the reality is it could be numerous other things: an impact to the station structure, or even some untold thing which renders platform space unusable.

You might expect that in such a brittle setup we would have supremely strong signalling technology to prevent a train derailing or going overspeed, but we do not. The entire GO network lacks positive train control, and instead of creating provably-safe electronic systems, we have created high-redundancy and high-cost human systems that still fail.

More or less, at every level, we have a system which is not resilient.

Capacity

Capacity is another huge issue. Both because its location, and the concentration of development, Union Station is superbly located with a huge number of jobs and destinations within a 15-minute walk of it.

Unfortunately though, the station itself only has so much capacity. The building feels large, but actually doesn’t have much space dedicated to passenger circulation, certainly compared to other major hubs in the developed world. The major expansion project that was undertaken in the 2010s was helpful, but it mostly added new amenities instead of improving the pure flow and function of the facility — this isn’t helped by dysfunctional policies that abound in the station’s operation, like numerous doors that need to be opened by passengers, and escalator banks that are not adjusted to best serve demand patterns throughout the day.

These issues will be mitigated somewhat with major future construction projects, which will widen platforms (creating more space at track level) and increase vertical circulation from platform to concourse level. However, these measures can only do so much. The concourses end up becoming the limiting factor, and there just isn’t that much real estate here. Crowding at Union is already severe at certain times of day, and even if this is made marginally better by additional space and operational changes, the reality is that every other factor is pushing us towards more congestion — significantly more development in the immediate area and waterfront (office towers have increasingly moved south to the area around Union Station — CIBC Square basically forms part of the station at this point), regional and urban population growth, massive increases to rail service, and mode shift.

These issues are already also becoming real problems for the subway and streetcar. These services already play the role of getting the vast majority of people arriving at Union, but not travelling to within a short walking distance (relieving these by improving, say, cycling options, would be a rational and cost-effective thing to do, however our government at the provincial level is instead driven by ideological considerations first on this issue). Unfortunately, as you can see most any day, the subway and streetcar platforms at Union are very crowded. There is a plan to expand the streetcar portion of the subway station with a series of straight platforms, meaning the current platform would function solely as a loop, and this should significantly increase capacity here (as well as improve circulation with a new direct connection into Union Station). In theory, we could also add one more subway platform for a Spanish solution setup of boarding for northbound University trains only from the island platform with exiting passengers using a new second side platform, and this would be made more practical with screen doors. However, these interventions only allow us to unlock the full subway and streetcar capacity through the station, which pales in comparison to that of the other rail services, which I would approximate as having the capacity of at least 7 directional subway routes, and up to 9 during peak periods, several times the ~2.25 available through the TTC station between the subway and streetcar (obviously cycling, buses and walking can absorb some number of passengers, but not the difference).

Coverage

Then we come to the final, and perhaps least critical issue — coverage.

Right now, regional trains have a single landing point in downtown Toronto, and the reality is that many major “downtown” locations like the hospitals, Queen West, UofT, The Eaton Centre, the sort of Bloor-Yonge and Bay offices, the AGO, and the ROM are not Union Station-adjacent.

To some extent we are solving this, and our plan is a bunch of new regional rail to rapid transit connections (along with new rapid transit that we can connect).

If you look at the “GO RER” network as consisting of five radiating corridors — Lakeshore West, Kitchener, Barrie, Stouffville and Lakeshore East, which correspond with west, northwest, north, northeast, and east — then we have planned connections between all five corridors and rapid transit, three of those connections are integrated in-station, and two are fairly high-capacity.

For the Lakeshore West line, we have the new Exhibition hub station, a massive structure south of Liberty Village being built as part of the Ontario line.

Then for the Kitchener line we have Bloor-Dundas West, two existing stations that are currently being connected by a new (not particularly high-capacity, and so likely to need upgrade sooner or later) underground walkway. These stations already exist and lots connect between them, but a direct connection makes that connection faster and weather-protected, which will encourage more transfers. It’s worth noting that if the King-Liberty station ends up getting built, this will effectively act as a sort of northern annex for Exhibition station on the Lakeshore West line, as it is a short direct walk on a local street and a pedestrian bridge to connect (this would be very useful and would mean some connections between these services could happen here instead of Union, or optimistically Spadina).

Currently, the Barrie line has no station in central Toronto, with the first station after being Union being at Downsview Park near the city’s northern edge. A new station is underway at Caledonia to link to Line 5 (which already connects to the Kitchener and Stouffville lines, meaning it captures the northern three RER lines), but more importantly for our purposes, another new station is moving ahead at Bloor-Lansdowne, which, while, not in-station, will involve a very short walk down a multi-use path over Bloor street, and then turning onto a minor side street to access the subway.

Then, at the southeast of central Toronto, we have East Harbour station, which is similar in scope to Exhibition, but on the east end of the core, and which is also being built as part of the Ontario line to cement a new district near the waterfront. East Harbour’s design is less impressive than Exhibition despite some pretty incredible conceptual renders over the years, and like with Exhibition (and Bloor-Dundas West for what it’s worth) will bring together subway and eventually also streetcar services — which will provide additional onward trip options.

So basically, when you look at it, the five “GO RER” corridors all end up connection to an east-west rapid transit line across central Toronto, with the Lakeshore and Stouffville lines connecting to the Queen Street corridor and the Ontario line, and the Kitchener and Barrie lines connecting to the Bloor Street corridor and Line 2. There are also other “interceptor” stations further out, including Mt. Dennis on the Kitchener line, Caledonia and Downsview Park on the Barrie line, and Kennedy on the Stouffville line.

A real missed opportunity is that there isn’t a better, high-capacity connection at Danforth station (where the Stouffville line ought to stop, if only to connect with the Lakeshore line much further east of what is likely to be a very busy hub at East Harbour), there was even a news video highlighting congestion at this station recently, highlighting how little thought the powers that be have been, and have given it in the past decades.

This connection would allow Stouffville line passengers to save time by transferring to Line 2 further to the west, and also properly connect the Lakeshore East line to the subway system east of the core, also making it so that all but the Lakeshore line are connected to the Bloor Street corridor (if we had King-Liberty, then all but the Barrie line would be linked to the Queen Street corridor).

NOT THE RIGHT STATIONS!

Now, all of these very useful stations are what seems to come to mind for people when I say “We need more downtown train stations!”, which is both funny and a bit troubling: funny because somebody — who seems like they must live in Calgary or something, considers East Harbour or Dundas West to be “downtown”, but troubling because what I’m trying to get across here is stations serving the “central business district”, which is a term we just don’t use much in this country.

So let me be explicit …

When I say we need more downtown train stations, I explicitly see this as two new stations (it could be more, but at least two seems like the bare minimum) roughly one kilometre east and west of Union station — likely around Spadina Avenue and Sherbourne Street.

These stations play a very different role from the ones I just talked about. The stations I just talked about largely solve the problem of “centre city distribution”: instead of having everyone go to Union and ride Line 1 back north, many trips in the future can involve folks taking GO trains getting off early and taking a different subway line to their final destination. For example, someone from the Lakeshore West line taking the Ontario line to the Eaton Centre, someone from the Kitchener line taking Line 2 to the ROM, or someone on the Stouffville line taking the Ontario line to Queen West. These stations are very useful for these connections, and they can also be useful fallbacks when Union has a problem (they should be set up to act as termini, which they currently are not) — trains can drop passengers off here, and they can use the subway network, and some streetcars to get to their final destinations.

The issue is, this is only sort of half of a reasonable solution to central city distribution. That’s because Union is such a key hub right in the centre of downtown, that a lot of density is clustered around the density which is clustered around Union, meaning that there is a lot of density one kilometre east and west of the main station — the huge The Well development for example. There is no subway super close to The Well, but a large station there for regional trains would more or less provide the same access. In fact, passenger riding Line 2 from the west could get onto a Kitchener GO train (filling the seat of passengers getting off to go to UofT for example) to ride here.

Such a station would also just be useful because as anyone travelling will tell you, backtracking is psychologically annoying. For many people, riding GO trains into Union every day they need to watch with frustration as they roll past their final destination, only to turn around on foot at Union and head back.

For example, for people working at the offices at 320 Front, or at The Well, or at CBC, getting off a GO train approaching Toronto from the west and then walking to their final destination on foot would both likely be faster (plus these places don’t have Path access anyways so that doesn’t make a difference) and less crowded. You can imagine similar situations coming in from the east.

While these stations would not have last-mile subway connections (Spadina has streetcars, which if I can do anything about it will be much better), people often forget that pedestrian infrastructure is actually very high-capacity, and that a lot of the places you’d be serving are already places people walk to from Union — for example the SkyDome.

These particular locations need not be set in stone, but seem like the best bets to me, because of the good connections to major north-south streets and the proximity to Union. If Union isn’t operable for some reason you can easily walk to that general area from Sherbourne or Spadina in 10 minutes, it’s a much longer walk from Exhibition or East Harbour, much less Bloor-Dundas West.

These stations are also importantly located on the Union Station rail corridor where all services on the network run on the same corridor; this lets you build platforms connected by concourses that let passengers change between lines on regional trips — say, Markham to Oakville, or Brampton to Scarborough. Passengers can do this at Union, but changing trains right before the main station means you’re more likely to get a seat as people start standing up to disembark, but also that these stations can be purpose built for huge transfer capacity with big concourses and wide platforms, as well as natural light, which is sorely lacking at Union.

That the need for these stations needs to be explained is super weird, and given how unusual this suggestion is in Toronto, despite something like this being widespread in basically every city with a competent regional rail system, I’ve been giving thought to why that is.

For example, in London ,Crossrail has Bond Street,Tottenham Court Road, and Farringdon, in Berlin the S-Bahn has Hbf., Friedrichstraße and Alexanderplatz, and in Paris RER A has Charles de Gaulle-Etoile, Auber, and Chatelet.

I think in part, people’s psychogeography hasn’t really updated to both recognize that there is a crap-ton of density east and west along the Union Station rail corridor, but also that these places — Spadina and Sherbourne — are actually decently far away. People sometimes act like this is close to Union for more stations, but at one kilometre, it’s more than twice the distance east and west of Union as the next stations north of Union on the subway (which is what we are very roughly trying to emulate with GO — thus 1 km centre city station spacing and not 400 metres). We are also blessed with through-running as a given which means the obviously missing thing is a little less obvious. For Paris and London it’s “the trains don’t run to the actual city centre!”, in Toronto it has to be “the trains don’t run to these places adjacent to the city centre where the main train terminals would probably be in most European cities!”. There’s also the issue of speed: the Union Station rail corridor operates at a snail’s pace, and so the idea of adding stops seems torturous.

So let me paint you a picture. What we should hope for is something like these European cities. GO trains don’t go particularly slower between Spadina and Union than they do between Bloor and Spadina, and we are making progress on this by simplifying the track work and resignalling (slowly) the Union Station rail corridor. With three stations here, we ultimately should hope for a subway-like experience: does the train go at regular speed to King before crawling to Union? Well, there is a super tight curve, but not really. People sort of accept a slow crawl into Union because they mostly all get off at Union right now, but that will be less and less the case as more trains through-run and carry passengers through the city. Part of why passengers don’t ride through right now is that most people are obviously going to the Central Business District, and there are not other stations you could ride to beyond Union that would get you closer to your destination.

Part of the reason people on the GO rail-side seem to have a mental block on this is because of the series of slip switches east of Union, and the huge flyunder to the west, both of which would be done away with when such stations get built. We have an extremely conservative and non-adaptable and change-averse railway culture, and so even the suggestion that something else for passengers might be used to take space for operational convenience (really operational convenience designed for a railway decades in the past) seems absurd. While we have “passenger” trains in Canada, the fundamental attitude is not passenger-centric — this is just human freight.

This is all so frustrating, because to back up the huge value these stations would provide in terms of coverage, capacity, resiliency, encouraging slightly less centralization, encouraging more TOD, improving speed by spreading boarding and alighting load and the like, they should also be trivially-easy to build. Sure they are a lot more work for GO than some beetfield station in the greenbelt, but compared to the caverns we are currently digging out under skyscrapers, this is by far the easiest conceivable way to add more rapid transit to the core of the city — by moving some tracks around, filling in an underpass, and building some above-ground structures.

I get that Toronto is not exactly a curious place, particularly when it comes to transportation infrastructure, but surely at some point when we reckon with the fact that 5 billion-per-kilometre for more downtown subway trackage (if we stay on our current trajectory!) is not tenable. At this point, maybe someone will have listened to that weird dude from Vancouver who made sure to put this idea on the shelf to build new downtown rapid transit infrastructure, directly adjacent to tons of density and destinations, and crucially above-ground, and get us started on something we should have built 20 years ago (and would have if we were Australia).

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!

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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!

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.

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 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.

  

  

  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,

  

  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.

  

• 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.

  

  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.

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.

  

  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.

  

  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.

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.

You’d be forgiven for mostly associating the Eglinton Crosstown with Metrolinx, the storied provincial agency tasked with completing the line. Metrolinx was created to act as a region-wide agency for building and operating transit, which is a common function in other big cities from New York with its MTA to London with the iconic TFL — Transport for London. The reality is that most people in the region no longer live in Toronto, and the TTC’s mandate doesn’t really extend beyond the City of Toronto, even if they do operate a handful of services beyond the city’s borders.

Metrolinx itself is a complicated agency. While on paper, it’s an agency focused on building and planning new transit, much of its staff are dedicated to the much larger function of running and maintaining the GO train network — potentially dividing the agency’s focus.

Back to the Crosstown, it won’t actually be run by Metrolinx, but by the TTC, and the plans for the line that had to be carried out by Metrolinx — the province — were originally drawn up by the city. So we have a line that was planned by the city, implemented by the province, and will not be run by the TTC, but ah — not so fast. The line’s construction might be managed by Metrolinx, but the actual construction has been undertaken by Crosslinx, which itself is a group of companies — a consortium including the company formerly known as SNC-Lavalin and Spanish Dragados. And as Crosslinx has built the line, to the specifications determined by Metrolinx, to then be operated by the TTC, it’s had to work with the city to deal with everything from disruptions to utility work. Oh and also, the TTC won’t actually maintain the vehicles or line: they just supply the drivers and Crosslinx is responsible for the actual maintenance.

Confused? That’s kind of the problem. P3s have certainly had mixed success in Canada, but what’s for certain is that probably no transit project in Canadian history has had the absolute morasse of stakeholders that the Eglinton Crosstown has had. An entire network of people trying to avoid stepping on toes, gunning for approvals, and trying to figure out who decides what map to put in the trains — which were bought by the province, to be run by the city, and maintained by private companies.

And the reality is, this confusing mix of organizations is not unique to Eglinton. Just look north on the subway map to Finch West: The line is again overseen by Metrolinx, but with operations by the TTC, which has been the left hand trying to get the City of Toronto right hand to provide the trains with actual priority at city-owned traffic lights. The line’s switches have problems, but are they from the Metrolinx and city plans, or from the company that built the line? Sorry, it’s not a company, but a consortium again — this time Mosaic. Or the separate operating company also called Mosaic? Which needs to make sure they are melting ice day and night.

Ontario has a real crisis of responsibilities. The province has cities, which are creatures of the province that can seemingly not even install a bike lane without provincial blessing these days, which themselves have departments that sometimes don’t see eye to eye. Then there’s the province, which has a Ministry of Transportation responsible for presumably transportation, but then also Metrolinx — which is just responsible for transit in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area — except the agency also runs GO buses as far afield as Peterborough, and briefly ran GO trains to London, and is also going to be taking over ... the Ottawa LRT? And then there’s Infrastructure Ontario, which is responsible for procuring various infrastructure — something Metrolinx has also done.

The point is, the whole transportation landscape in this province is a mess of different governing bodies, with overlapping roles and responsibilities, as well as cities that come with their own baggage. Instead of doing the hard work of rationalizing and integrating these various bodies, we keep adding new agencies and shuffling responsibilities in a way that mostly seems to lead to confusion. And this confusion and sometimes paralysis has national implications: Toronto forms a massive portion of the national GDP, so when its streets are clogged and commuters can’t get around, the whole country takes a hit. New federal high-speed rail plans look great on paper, but who exactly is the Federal Crown Corporation – which is not VIA Rail nor Transport Canada — supposed to talk to about rail access to Toronto?

Other regions and nations have over decades done the painstaking work of creating organizations that coordinate public transit nationally, usually with separate organizations tasked with building out and maintaining infrastructure, and this has paid dividends. Whether you’re on a suburban train out of Paris, or on a high-speed TGV travelling the Riviera, it’s all SNCF. In the Netherlands, a single Presto-style payment card works for the whole country. And in Switzerland, local bus timetables are integrated with the intercity trains down to the minute.

If Ontario — and indeed Canada — wants the public transit of the places we take vacations to and marvel at, then we need to sit down and hammer out everyone’s jobs, and probably reckon with the 11 different transit systems, and two different urban rail systems in Toronto, because the status quo is not working.