In a report to City Council’s meeting on December 17, we learn that the cost of the five remaining “SmartTrack” GO stations has risen above previous estimates. See:

• SmartTrack Stations Program – Update
• Technical Program Update

This is not the first time a cost problem arose, and back in March 2023, the City faced a similar problem: See:

• SmartTrack: The Brand That Will Not Die

Here is a map showing the five stations that remain in Toronto’s SmartTrack program.

The cost and funding shares are shown below.

Date	Toronto	Ontario	Canada	Total
Original	$0.878B		$0.585B	$1.463B
June 2023	$0.878B	$0.226B	$0.585B	$1.689B

The Province has now discovered that the five stations cannot be built within the available funding, and the City Manager recommends that that three of the five be retained as City priorities: East Harbour, Bloor-Lansdowne and St. Clair-Old Weston. The rational behind the choice is:

• East Harbour will be a major hub linking GO Transit, the Ontario Line and future surface transit including the proposed Broadview-Commissioners link to the Port Lands.
• St. Clair-Old Weston will be serve an important node in the City’s planned revitalization and urbanization of that area.
• Bloor-Lansdowne does not have such a strategic significance, but it is already under construction and is likely a less-expensive station compared to others like East Harbour and Liberty Village.

For the remaining two stations at Liberty Village and Finch East, the report recommends that Council:

[…] request that the Province identify a funding solution, including exploring funding opportunities with the Government of Canada, to deliver the Finch-Kennedy and King-Liberty stations at no further cost to the City. [City report at p. 4]

We do not know cost estimates for individual stations as these are in a confidential appendix thanks to Metrolinx’ desire for secrecy. As of June 2023, the cost for five stations averaged $338 million, and is obviously higher now. Taking available funding and dividing by three, instead of five, yields a cost of $563 million. These are surface stations, not underground, although some of them involve work beyond the station structures proper. For details, refer to the technical backgrounder.

The report gives no indication of Metrolinx’ position on this scheme and whether they would simply drop the two stations, or proceed on their own with stations that originally were expected to be “free” contributions to GO’s capital program by the City.

A related problem is that from the Federal point of view, it does not matter whether their money pays for a new GO station, subway trains, or any other project. It all counts against Toronto’s “share”. This has bedeviled transit schemes in the past. Council always has its “priorities” and assumes that everything that comes along will get at least a 1/3 share from the Feds. This is not necessarily a valid assumption given competing Federal priorities, not to mention a possible change of government. If the Feds won’t come to the table, the Province may also hold back on funding as they did with the new subway car purchase making their contribution contingent on a Federal commitment.

If the Feds do kick in whatever extra is needed, what other Toronto projects will go unfunded because our share was burned up on SmartTrack?

SmartTrack’s History

John Tory announced SmartTrack as his solution for Toronto’s transportation problems in his 2014 mayoral campaign. Yes. A decade ago.

There were many head-scratching features including the use of GO corridors for a “surface rail subway”, but most importantly the western leg from Mt. Dennis to the Matheson/Airport Corporate Centre was, to be kind, impractical.

That leg would require a difficult link from the Weston GO corridor to Eglinton Avenue, and would plunk mainline railway trains onto a major street. That would have been a much more substantial incursion than the proposed Eglinton West LRT.

Worth noting here is that a consultant behind the SmartTrack proposal “surveyed” the line from his office in London, England, using out of date Google Street View images. The same consultant is at least partly responsible for Doug Ford’s subway plans including the Ontario Line.

SmartTrack would run from Unionville to a Corporate Centre. This was not its first incarnation, and it is derived from a scheme intended to improve commuting access to those terminals and increase property values. Some areas in the GTA already suffered from problems attracting employees because of poor transit service, and in theory, SmartTrack would deliver the young, urban King Street dwellers to suburban office parks.

Looked at from the reverse perspective, SmartTrack, with frequent service and TTC-level fares, would form an alternative to what was then called the Relief Line. One tiny problem was that it would also poach riders from the proposed Scarborough Subway which had to be shifted east so that demand models would assign trips to it. That’s why the subway runs east of Scarborough Centre rather than further west.

Metrolinx did not take this plan seriously at first, but played ball with Mayor Tory to avoid a public spat. Pieces began to fall off of the map as technical challenges became apparent, but SmartTrack did its job of giving Tory a veneer of credibility on the transit portfolio.

When Metrolinx announced its GO expansion plans with frequent all-day service on the Weston and Stouffville corridors, it was obvious that there would be no “SmartTrack” branded trains. There was lots of shilly-shallying to keep the concept alive by treating local trains as “SmartTrack” and express trains as “GO Transit”, but conflicting service plans presented at Council and at Metrolinx showed that the claimed SmartTrack service level would never be possible.

What was to be a separate service dropped back to City funding of five stations, a move that the Province would deem as a municipal contribution to the GO Capital Program. Now there are only three.

If costs have gone up on SmartTrack, they must also be rising on other projects, notably the massive GO infrastructure and service expansion. How many of Metrolinx’ projects will lose hoped-for elements in coming years? How much promised “congestion relief” will remain only lines scribbled on a napkin or on an election poster?

The Future of Transit Funding

We are now at a point where “SmartTrack” will contribute stations to two important future nodes, plus a notional link from the Barrie line to the Line 2 subway, albeit with a long walking transfer at Lansdowne Station. The same GO corridor already has a subway link at Downsview.

John Tory’s legacy was a collection of half-baked transit proposals and many delays including the deferred replacement of trains and automatic train control (ATC) on Line 2. Former CEO Rick Leary was responsible for these delays, but I have little doubt he was serving the Mayor’s agenda to reduce transit costs and leave headroom for Tory’s pet projects.

The TTC has just issued Requests for Proposals for these, and I will write about them in a separate article. We will not see the benefit of new trains and signals for a decade or more. The TTC has some headroom to improve service on Line 2 with the existing fleet and the constraints of the elderly signal system, but not much. While we agonized over how to pay for subway cars, Toronto was more than happy to spend on Tory’s vanity project.

SmartTrack might be something of a transit joke, but it is symptomatic of how Toronto’s transit plans were skewed to serve political interests and egos.