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urbanclient said:
I do think Line 5 Eglinton is definitely underbuilt for future ridership 10+ years away. Might even be overcrowded sooner.

However, I am also a big proponent of "if you build it, they will come". Since we evidently did not build it, densification like what we have seen along Bloor and south of Bloor will likely never materialize to the same level (barring a rebuild of Line 5). Ironically, this will dampen Eglinton's future transit demand and capacity issues if any. The skyscrapers along Line 4, many of which were built nearly two decades after Line 4 opened, are evidence that rapid transit access can serve as the cause rather than just the effect of densification and growth.

The long-term ramifications of having a not-so futureproof transit line on Eglinton is that it will be relegated to having a lower limit on future densification, job growth etc... Midtown NIMBYs rejoice. Once the transportation infrastructure along Eglinton becomes saturated, further urban development will move to other corridors and nodes that may have higher capacity eventually (i.e. Sheppard with extensions, Lawrence Ave if it gets a subway in the far-far-future).

Just based on current density, distance from Line 2 and Ontario line, and the fact UofT campus has 100,000 people every day, College-Carlton should have a short subway, Dundas West to Gerrard station ~9km. But because the Carlton streetcar exists, among other reasons, the corridor will not see nearly the same densification as Bloor or North York Centre. The density is lower than subway corridors, so the city is content with anemic streetcars. The streetcar is anemic, so density won't increase much. Obviously zoning comes into play as well. Low density housing near College and Carlton is rarely seen in any other city's downtown with the same density as Toronto, and likely will stay that way for the foreseeable future.
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I’ve been saying this for years now: LRTs work great in mid-sized cities like Hamilton, Kitchener-Waterloo, Calgary, Edmonton, and soon Quebec City. In those cities, the scale, street layout, and density match what an LRT can realistically support. But Toronto is operating at a completely different scale, and that’s where the problem lies.

If people thought Line 5 problems will end when it opens, they’re in for a big surprise. I predict overcrowding issues within a year of opening.

The thing is Line 5 was always an awkward compromise. Eglinton is one of the city’s major east–west corridors, and building a half-subway/half-surface LRT on it feels underbuilt for what that corridor actually needs. When you compare it to what Toronto has become (the fourth-largest metro in North America) it’s easy to see the mismatch.

There’s also still this lingering mentality (especially among certain political circles downtown) that Scarborough, North York, and Etobicoke are somehow “less Toronto.” But history keeps proving that whenever you extend real rapid transit into any part of Toronto, density follows immediately.

Examples are everywhere:
  • North York Centre: basically nothing until the Yonge Subway ran through it. Now it’s a full secondary downtown.
  • Yonge–Eglinton: exploded along Line 1.
  • St. Clair West: major mid-rise and retail revitalization after ROW upgrades.
  • Davisville/Mt. Pleasant: steady intensification due to Line 1 access.
  • Scarborough Town Centre: now booming with proposals since the subway extension became real.
  • Finch West: already seeing development pressure even before the subway/LRT combo is fully stabilized.
  • VMC (Vaughan Metropolitan Centre): an almost absurd example — a skyline built practically from scratch because Line 1 was extended there.
  • Exhibition/Liberty Village: GO service + Ontario Line plans triggered a massive wave of proposals.

Toronto grows wherever you give it high-capacity rapid transit. That’s why Line 4 (Sheppard) is one of the most misunderstood examples in the city. For years people mocked it as a “stubway to nowhere” because it ends at Don Mills, but the reality is Sheppard East has densified heavily in the last two decades with continuous condo development from Bayview to Don Mills. And more proposals still coming despite the line being short and incomplete and with planning for the extension to STC.

If four stations can reshape an entire corridor, imagine what the full Sheppard East subway would’ve done if it were built out originally?

This is why I was never a fan of Transit City. It wasn’t a bad plan for a smaller, slower-growing city,,,,but Toronto already wasn’t that city by the 2000s. It was driven by a political generation at City Hall and Queen’s Park whose view of Toronto was still rooted in the 1960s–70s: low density, car-first, and spread out. Toronto isn’t that anymore.

And Line 5 (like Line 4 before it) shows exactly what happens when we keep building transit that’s too small for the city we actually live in.

I would not be remotely surprised in my lifetime (possibly when I’m watching re-runs of The Expanse in retirement) that they rebuild Line 5 into a subway.
 
LRT is perfectly fine in big cities as part of a larger transportation network. They exist in some of the biggest cities in the world, as does BRT. Not every transit line in big cities has to the be highest capacity.

What's giving LRT in Ontario a bad rap is the fact that we generally build it is a glorified streetcar instead of rapid transit.
 
Every couple of weeks, this discussion is restarted. I get it: short of real news, people discuss things. We will soon (within months 🤞) have real data about loads and capacity on Line 5. Saying it's undersized right now is speculation. I hope it is big enough for many years. I have concerns about the dwell time due to the layout based on the TTC Flexities.

Anyway, I always appreciate the discussion, but it definitely seems like people repeat the same things
 
I think its going to be a fine transit line. Yes a Line 1,2,4 technology subway or Line 3 technology light metro would have been much more suited for this alignment but it is what it is.

I think we should all move on and put our energy into making sure a metro-sized service is never again built with street running LRT technology. Or pushing the city to reconsider Line 7 for another downtown subway.
 
I find this to be interesting messaging over by Eglinton and Allen where the line is entirely underground. I guess they gotta fill those bus shelter ad spots somehow.

And yes, tbat is a dead bus at the stop, in the first snowstorm of the year. I think that's the better ad for Line 5!
PXL_20251109_192810137.MP.jpg
 
UntitledCyclist said:
I find this to be interesting messaging over by Eglinton and Allen where the line is entirely underground. I guess they gotta fill those bus shelter ad spots somehow.

And yes, tbat is a dead bus at the stop, in the first snowstorm of the year. I think that's the better ad for Line 5!View attachment 694587
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Oh no we got a little bit of snow! Somebody check if RSD is still ongoing! I heard these things can't handle winter! /s
 
Voltz said:
The funding was in place and the construction schedule was to start opening the line in phases from 2015 to 2021, including the western extension. The Liberals intentionally stretched out the construction phases to delay spending.
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That's right. Merely keeping the project in the hands of TTC instead of Metrolinx would not improve the funding situation. But, perhaps the TTC would make fewer mistakes in the project management, and spend less time on RFPs etc. The project would be completed one or two years sooner. Hopefully, in 2023.

Getting it done by 2015? That would take full and unwavering funding commitment from the onset. Then, maybe.
 
6ixGod said:
I’ve been saying this for years now: LRTs work great in mid-sized cities like Hamilton, Kitchener-Waterloo, Calgary, Edmonton, and soon Quebec City. In those cities, the scale, street layout, and density match what an LRT can realistically support. But Toronto is operating at a completely different scale, and that’s where the problem lies.
[...]
The thing is Line 5 was always an awkward compromise. Eglinton is one of the city’s major east–west corridors, and building a half-subway/half-surface LRT on it feels underbuilt for what that corridor actually needs. When you compare it to what Toronto has become (the fourth-largest metro in North America) it’s easy to see the mismatch.
Click to expand...
And yet there are those that are innocently ill-informed or even willfully ignorant of how Toronto compares to other cities. You can lead a horse to ̶w̶a̶t̶e̶r̶ a transit forum, but you can't make it ̶d̶r̶i̶n̶k̶ do their own cursory research. I say this as an avid driver—there is clearly latent demand for public transit. Case in point, Toronto has higher subway ridership per km than most, if not all Chinese cities; this is despite lower car ownership in China. London UK should not be directly compared to Toronto as it is both denser and larger, and yet even it has less ridership per km than Toronto (even if Elizabeth and DLR is included).

The high ridership/km in Toronto is not unexpected. Within the Toronto proper there are 1.1 million actively registered passenger vehicles for a car ownership rate of 35%. Which is very comparable to more transit-oriented cities. But spend time looking at similar sized cities outside of North America (density, metro area, GDP etc.), and see how woefully inadequate Toronto's rapid transit is in comparison.

Moreover, the trend outside of CANUSA is to adopt ever larger capacity on new lines. Only in Toronto and New York do we see Eglinton, Ontario Line, IBX with smaller rolling stock and platforms than the existing network. I am not saying there was no future proofing done. I am saying there wasn't enough done. It's not a matter of if Eglinton will reach overcapacity, but when. We can only hope future governments are less cash-strapped to deal with future transit needs. If needs are not met, the consequence is less productivity, less economic growth. The past decade should be warning enough.
 
Rainforest said:
That's right. Merely keeping the project in the hands of TTC instead of Metrolinx would not improve the funding situation. But, perhaps the TTC would make fewer mistakes in the project management, and spend less time on RFPs etc. The project would be completed one or two years sooner. Hopefully, in 2023.

Getting it done by 2015? That would take full and unwavering funding commitment from the onset. Then, maybe.
Click to expand...
If you look at the documents going back 15+ years, it is clear, in no uncertain terms, that TTC and the City of Toronto never had the money to fund construction of a single LRT line.
1762752012389.png
 
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6ixGod said:
There’s also still this lingering mentality (especially among certain political circles downtown) that Scarborough, North York, and Etobicoke are somehow “less Toronto.” But history keeps proving that whenever you extend real rapid transit into any part of Toronto, density follows immediately.

Examples are everywhere:
  • North York Centre: basically nothing until the Yonge Subway ran through it. Now it’s a full secondary downtown.
  • Yonge–Eglinton: exploded along Line 1.
  • St. Clair West: major mid-rise and retail revitalization after ROW upgrades.
  • Davisville/Mt. Pleasant: steady intensification due to Line 1 access.
  • Scarborough Town Centre: now booming with proposals since the subway extension became real.
  • Finch West: already seeing development pressure even before the subway/LRT combo is fully stabilized.
  • VMC (Vaughan Metropolitan Centre): an almost absurd example — a skyline built practically from scratch because Line 1 was extended there.
  • Exhibition/Liberty Village: GO service + Ontario Line plans triggered a massive wave of proposals.
Click to expand...

A correlation between good transit and growing density certainly exists. However, there is no 1:1 match. You can find examples of subway stations that existed for several decades, and did not prompt much density. Look at Dupont, Rosedale, or Summerhill. Maybe, zoning bylaws are the obstacle.

Conversely, there are growth zones with limited transit options. King West and to a lesser degree Queen West are building density, quite far from the Exhibition GO or any GO station, supported just by the streetcars. There are clusters of highrises at Steeles & Bathurst, and at Steeles & Weston, and along the north of Kipling, supported just by mixed-traffic buses (not even BRT).

I wouldn't venture to predict how fast Eglinton East gains density, based just on the ECLRT design. The truth is, we won't know until after the fact.
 
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Rainforest said:
Perhaps the TTC would handle it better, but riding starting ten years ago? not very likely. Only if the funding came ten years earlier.
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This thing was all tied to funding, the TTC way of building things could mean a 6 year project but Queen's Park wanted to spread the money out to 11.

They could have build it using the TYSSE delivery method. This meant that every station would be delivered by a different consortium with various progressing speed and repeated errors. The ML approach did have it's advantage by having one design copied across the board although they did have some unique excavation methods used on some stations. If the TTC was procuring this project, they'll probably stick with the same signaling system as Line 1 and a yard designed based on Leslie Barns. ML chose to be different.

Remember the 5 in 10 plan? https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2012/cc/bgrd/CC20_1_app3_3.pdf
The 2018 completion date was what ML originally was working with till they shifted to a downsized project.
 
urbanclient said:
If you look at the documents going back 15+ years, it is clear in no uncertain terms that TTC and the City of Toronto never had the money to fund construction of a single LRT line.
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True. It was always meant to be funded but the provincial government, or the province + the Feds. Failing that, the project would not even begin.

Funding is one thing, project management is another. It could be funded by the province, and the construction still managed by the TTC. My guess it would be completed somewhat sooner than in the hands of Metrolinx, but not dramatically sooner.
 
nfitz said:
If you look at the documents going back 17 years, you'll see that TTC's Eglinton Crosstown was fully funded from Pearson to Kennedy station.

Ontario Newsroom

news.ontario.ca news.ontario.ca
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The link you cited says no such thing:
"Cost
  • The estimated cost is 4.6 billion. All construction and completion dates are subject to receiving environmental and other approvals. Final costs will be determined in the coming months by Metrolinx and the City of Toronto"
I wonder why Metrolinx is mentioned...
 
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