The express busway linking Kennedy Station to Ellesmere Road along the former Line 3 Scarborough RT corridor will open in late September 2026 rather than in 2027 as originally planned. This was announced jointly by Mayor Chow, TTC Chair Myers and TTC CEO Lali.
The idea of repurposing the SRT corridor was approved well before the premature end of service with a derailment south of Ellesmere Station in July 2023. According to an April 2022 presentation, design work would begin in 2022, and construction to convert the corridor would begin immediately after the RT shutdown scheduled for November 2023, and the busway would open in Q4 2025.
Yes, it should be open already, but delays in funding the project, acquiring property, gaining Metrolinx approval for co-existence of a busway with their rail corridor, among other factors, pushed design completion out to mid-2024, and the target in-service date well into 2027.
A common factor in many delays was a lack of urgency, and the idea that Ontario should pay for this conversion as part of the Scarborough Subway project. Council approved its expected share of funding in February 2024, but time was lost waiting for provincial money that would never arrive. Eventually the City decided to just get on with the work.
Major Projects Update April 2025:
The 100% Detailed Design of the Busway was completed in December 2024, along with the final cost estimates, which remain within the approved budget. The contract for the Busway was tendered in February 2025 and is expected to be awarded in Q2 2025 to commence the construction of the Busway.
Major Projects Update June 2025:
The contract for the Busway was tendered in February 2025 and closed in April 2025. Delegated authority to award the contract was approved at the May 2025 Board meeting along with a motion to report back to the Board in July 2025 on an acceleration plan.
The July report included:
As the contract was awarded on June 5, 2025, and the first kick-off meeting was held with the Contractor on June 13, 2025, staff are anticipating receiving the Contractor’s baseline schedule in the first week of July. We, therefore, expect to start the discussion with the Contractor on the acceleration plan in July 2025. The Contractor will need time to line up their sub-contractors and suppliers to develop a comprehensive acceleration plan that demonstrates ways and means of achieving the acceleration goal. We anticipate finalizing the acceleration plan by end of the summer and reporting back to the Board in September/October 2025.
Major Projects Update September 2025:
The contract for the Busway was tendered in February 2025. The contract for the Busway implementation was awarded in June 2025, and work commenced on July 22, 2025.
[…]
Awaiting an acceleration plan proposal from the contractor. Upon receipt of the proposal, negotiations to finalize the proposed plan will take place immediately over the following two to three weeks. A report will be provided to the Board at the October 2025 meeting.
No report appeared in October or since.
Major Projects Update December 2025:
“The contractor submitted a baseline construction schedule, and an acceleration plan to target an early revenue service is under negotiation.”
In other words, it was possible to get the busway open sooner, but that was not the original scheme nor was an acceleration plan required in the initial tender. No, it was not your imagination that this project could have run faster, it was actually planned to be long. As of a few days ago, a faster schedule was still only a possibility.
Now with political pressure, the Scarborough Bus Corridor project will speed up. However, the basic question is why was this option not on the table from day one especially after the time lost awaiting provincial funding.
Steve Munro 
This seems very similar to the staff work on the platform doors, where plans are overly broad and don’t look to accelerate or simplify tasks. Or even talk to the folks doing the work.
In that case we had a 0-5% design (almost useless) on the entire system (instead of say one or even a few high value stations) and the estimates were inflated, timelines significantly longer than reasonable…and the whole project just got shelved. Even with a push to try to do a pilot, there was clearly no work done to figure out if they could accelerate or reduce costs.
Almost like in both cases staff (or maybe management) don’t think it’s worth doing and try to get it scrapped on purpose.
The lack of board understanding and ability to really question or push staff to come up with solutions seems to be the main issue. But staff almost pre-emptively sabotaging things only for things to get fixed once things get going seems to happen frequently (Byford cleaning up the line one work is maybe another example). And then other projects just never get that kind of attention and move mind numbingly slow (5g, asbestos, station modernization, basically the entire streetcar system).
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Who are they kidding?
Tthis is purely damage control and political choices, which is not how public transit should be built. Neither the mayor nor anyone on the TTC board or the CEO truly cares about those initiatives, they just react based on the public’s mood.
We can’t have transit built for purposes other than serving riders, or they will fail. Line 6 which is not a subway and can never be considered part of the “subway system” because it is just a tramway is the tip of the iceberg. Both the Eglinton and Ontario line are being built only to give jobs and self-serve the corrupt companies and politicians involved in their construction.
If Chow truly cared about transit we would get priority signal for all streetcars in Toronto, not just for a this new LRT.
Steve: In fact Mayor Chow is doing just that. See this item on the coming Council meeting agenda.
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Chow is only trying to save face of her failed mayorship. After people yell that signal issues were a problem for year, now she does it just in time for an election. Again, she doesn’t care. It’s great that we are getting it but let’s not pat her or the ttc on the back. How was this not part of the ttc srt lrt plan from day one?
Steve: First off, strong signal priority was a part of the LRT plan from the outset, but it was watered down by Toronto Transportation Services while John Tory was mayor. Second, it is quite clear that nobody at Metrolinx, TTC or the City informed anyone far enough up the chain that this was seen as a red flag, a possibility that the LRT would fail. We know from comments at the TTC Board that the Chair, and by extension the Board and Council, did not know about the slow operation until opening day. Opponents of LRT could not have wished for better with two major projects with out of control budgets to fail. That Metrolinx accepted the line as ready for service and pressured the TTC to do the same (as they are now doing on Eglinton) shows that “completion” matters more to them than having a line that actually works.
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Looking at the Major Projects Update December 2025, why is the forecast completion year for the 55 T1 replacement trains listed as 2035, explicitly noting that this date applies only to the 55 replacement trains, not including the additional 25 for the SSE/YNSE? If 2035 is really the target deadline, hopefully the timeline can be accelerated by a couple years like it was for the SRT busway. The first 55 were supposed to be completed in 2033, with the additional 25 due by 2035. This should still be doable as long as the contract is awarded soon, and it seems highly unlikely that either the SSE or YNSE would open before 2035, making it highly unlikely that any of the first 55 trains would be needed for service expansion on either of those extensions.
Steve: Thanks for catching that in the footnotes. It does not make sense either in terms of lead time for building 55 trains, nor relative to expansion plans. Also worth noting that report implies that they expect growth to occur faster than previously expected which if anything brings forward the need for more equipment to reduce headways below 140 seconds. I plan to write up the Major Projects Report in the next few days as there are other troubling comments sprinkled through it.
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