In a recent thread on X/Twitter (and no doubt other venues) there has been some controversy about the relative speed of 6 Finch LRT versus the bus service it will replace. Writers have based their arguments on speeds published in the Scheduled Service Summaries, although these are not always reliable for various reasons:
The speeds shown are over the full route. For the 36 Finch West service west of Keele Street (Finch West Station), this includes the portion south of Humber College to Humberwood Loop.
Actual speeds vary from the scheduled ones, and there is a fair amount of scatter around these averages. An important factor in any reserved lane implementation, regardless of technology, is the hope that, as on King Street originally, better reliability can be brought to travel times and hence to service quality.
The purpose of this article is to review actual travel time data on weekdays for selected months between 2017 and 2023. The specific months were chosen both for variety, but also within the limitations of data that I have been collecting for several years. 36 Finch West fell off my radar, so to speak, in 2022 and I was not tracking it, but began again in 2023 in anticipation of the LRT opening to get some “before” data.
The data are shown in two formats.
Weekly average travel times by hour together with the standard deviations in data values, a measure of the scatter in the data.
The raw data points to give readers a sense of the range of travel times that can occur on a day-by-day, hour-by-hour basis.
The challenge for the LRT line is to both reduce the averages times, and to narrow the band in which these times lie.
The section measured is from west of Keele Street to Humber College. This is chosen to ensure consistent data for departures from Finch West Station in the post-TYSSE era, and coincides roughly with the LRT portal from Finch West Station. This also eliminates station time which can vary considerably, especially for the bus service, due to the station’s location.
Data for October 2017 and April 2018 precede the opening of the TYSSE and the start of construction on Line 6, and they are included as a stating point against which any improvement might be compared.
Westbound and eastbound data are shown side by side, and the charts move forward in time from top (2017) to bottom (2023)
On December 5, 2023, Toronto’s Executive Committee will receive an update on the Eglinton East LRT project. Readers with long memories will recall that there was a time when a “peace in our time” solution to the Scarborough Subway debate would have seen both an extended subway and at least part of the EELRT built with the monies already earmarked for the Scarborough projects. This claim was a work of creative fiction, but it got the subway extension’s approval through Council.
We are still waiting for the LRT, and Scarborough will be lucky to see it until the late 2030s at best.
This set of reports keeps the ball rolling on the EELRT, albeit slowly. Until the Provincial aims for extension of Line 4 Sheppard are clear, the degree of conflict with the LRT plans and the scope of the LRT will not be known.
The most recent proposal has a U-shaped line running from Kennedy Station east and north to the University of Toronto’s Scarborough Campus (UTSC), and then north and west to Sheppard and McCowan with a branch to Malvern Centre. These shadow the original Transit City proposals for a Scarborough-Malvern line and a Sheppard East line, although the latter would have run west to Don Mills Station.
The cost estimate for the full EELRT project sits at $4.65 billion based on construction in the 2027-2034 period. This is a class 3/4 estimate with a potential range of -20% to +30%. This excludes key items including: property, procurement, vehicles, lifecycle maintenance, and future operations and maintenance.
With Ontario studying potential expansion of the Sheppard subway west to Downsview and east to at least McCowan, any Sheppard branch of the LRT has an uncertain status.
The map on the left shows the City’s version of the EELRT while the one on the right shows how the Metrolinx study area extends to Meadowvale road.
Metrolinx claims to be reviewing a range of technologies including subway, “light metro” and LRT, but it does not take a genius to figure out that any true extension of Line 4 Sheppard would use subway technology just as extensions to Lines 1 Yonge and 2 Bloor-Danforth already do. This would be especially important for a westward connection to Downsview which would not make any sense as a short, free-standing route.
Work on the Waterfront East LRT crept forward with the approval by Toronto’s Executive Committee of funding to continue design work, and of a tentative project plan. This must be endorsed by Council at its meeting of November 8-10, 2023.
Updated: Shortly after this article was published, the City of Toronto replied to questions I had posed about their report. The replies are integrated with the text of the article.
A combination of several factors push the completion date of this project, assuming that it receives full funding from provincial and/or federal sources, out into the 2030s. There is a danger that a so-called transit first community will actually see much of its redevelopment occur before adequate transit is in place to support it. Conversely, absent the transit service, some planned projects may simply sit as empty lots because they are not viable without it.
Segment 1 (red) contains the Bay Street tunnel and the portals at Queens Quay where streetcars will surface. The existing west portal will be renovated and the new east portal added. Plans for decorative canopies have been dropped from the plan as a cost saving measure. This segment is under the TTC’s control for design and construction.
Segment 2 (blue) consists of the surface running on Queens Quay East to a revised intersection at Cherry Street which is realigned to the west. This segment primarily involved the reconfiguration of Queens Quay East similar to what already exists on Queens Quay West. (For details please refer to previous articles.)
Segment 3 (yellow) includes the southerly extension of trackage from Distillery Loop under the GO corridor, along a realigned Cherry Street, and east on Commissioners St to Villiers Loop (which is actually an around-the-block terminus, not an off street loop).
There are impediments to the work on segments 1 and 3 that dictate the timing of various works. The many delays in actually launching the WELRT project put other works in the same area in conflict that might otherwise be avoided notably the Ontario Line and the Gardiner/DVP realignment. The Bay Street tunnel has become more complex due to updated fire codes and the need to serve many more passengers than the Union Station Loop does today. Still outstanding is the redesign and expansion of Queens Quay Station and a link to the Island Ferry Docks which has been dropped from the project, as of the last update in April 2023.
The recommendations approved by Executive Committee are that:
Council approve the alignment shown in the report.
Council approve advancing design for the entire project, except segment 1 (underground), to 60%.
Council approve
completion of environmental approvals,
undertaking of a traffic management plan to address interfacing the WELRT an other projects’ construction, and
design and coordination of the scope for the WELRT at the Cherry Lake Shore realignment, the Inner Harbour Tunnel at Jarvis, and the Hydro One relocation project at Cherry Portal.
Council authorize an increase to the Transit Expansion Division’s Capital plan of $63.6 million in 2024-2026.
Council direct the Executive Director of the Transit Expansion Division to report back at some point, unspecified, in 2024 with an update.
The estimated cost of the full project is $2.57 billion over a ten-year period assuming that full funding comes in Q1 2024, and the design work proposed in this report starts immediately. Any delay is a notable concern in an era when construction material and labour costs are rising quickly. It is not clear whether the figure cited is in current 2023 dollars, or includes inflation to the point the money is actually spent. I await clarification on this from the City.
Updated: The City of Toronto advises that:
The City is using as-spent dollars with future escalation included to the anticipated year of the expenditure. The cost estimate relies upon timely funding to meet the implementation schedule which is used as the basis for these inflation numbers.
Email from City of Toronto Media Relations, Nov. 2/23
The reason that the underground segment is excluded from approved design in recommendation 2 above is that this segment is proposed to be executed with a design-build contract where the detailed design will be undertaken by a contractor who is familiar with work in an underground environment.
Updated: This also keeps the design cost off of the City’s expenses for the moment. The City of Toronto advises that:
As noted in the staff report, staff are not recommending advancing the design of Segment 1 to 60% due to the City’s current financial pressures.
Email from City of Toronto Media Relations, Nov. 2/23
The project is subdivided into three parts:
Union Station Loop, $932 million.
Remainder of project except Cherry North, $1.3 billion. Includes East and West portals on Queens Quay, Queens Quay Station, Yonge Slip infill, Queens Quay East track from Bay to Cherry, Cherry Street south, Commissioners Street and Villiers Loop.
Cherry North connection to Distillery District, $337 million, to be completed as a separate future phase.
The scope of work planned at Queens Quay Station is unclear because at the last update, much of this work had been dropped (platform expansion, link to adjacent building, link to ferry docks). I have asked the City for clarification of this.
Updated: The City of Toronto advises that:
The current scope for Queens Quay Ferry Docks Station is related to the station access upgrades (upgrade of the west entrance to improve accessibility) and it is part of the Segment 1 scope.
Email from City of Toronto Media Relations, Nov. 2/23
For the benefit of latecomers to the Waterfront East project, I have included a history at the end of the article. The idea goes back at least to the 2003 Central Waterfront Plan, and has languished without strong political support ever since the Ford era when all focus shifted to subways.
The greatest challenge was and remains that waterfront transit is not “important enough” to many on Council and lacked key leadership from the Mayor’s office through the John Tory era. Under Mayor Chow, it will compete with many other projects for priority and funding both for transit and in the wider context of City projects.
Three decades after the Central Waterfront Plan and a 2011 target opening date, we might still not have good service to our “transit first” neighbourhood by 2032.
The City of Toronto, Waterfront Toronto and the TTC held an online open house on April 5 to present the current status of the Waterfront East LRT project.
The presentation video and slide deck are be available on the project website. All illustrations here are taken from that deck.
Updated April 9 at 8:15 am: There is also a FAQ addressing many questions about this project.
Because this session fell on the first day of Passover, there will be a second Q&A session on April 11, 2023.
There is an online survey available to provide feedback on the project. Please note that although members of the project team almost certainly read this blog, comments left here will not be part of the formal record and might be missed by the team. Do not treat the comments section here as an alternative to using the survey.
The WELRT project has taken an extraordinary amount of time to reach this point, and only part of that can be put down to the pandemic. Indeed the last public session was conducted in 2021. The biggest problem is that the waterfront is nobody’s top priority. Even former Mayor Tory, who talked a good line about waterfront development, did not push the project until quite recently, and his momentum, such as it might have been, has now vanished.
Recently, many on Council and in the wider community have worried that residential developments along Queens Quay East and on Villiers Island (the new island to be created as part of the Don River rerouting work now in progress) would all be for high-end buyers or investors, and would not address Toronto’s housing needs. With a move to increase planned densities in the eastern waterfront, there is an even stronger need for much better transit. The area is now served by the Bay, Sherbourne, Parliament and Pape buses, but service can be quite unpredictable.
For the record, the AM peak service planned for schedules coming into effect May 7, 2023, is:
every 20 minutes on 19 Bay,
every 7 minutes on 75 Sherbourne,
every 7 minutes on 65 Parliament, and
every 19 minutes on 72 Pape.
Each route serves a portion of the waterfront and, depending on your destination, not all of them might be useful. Notably the two which link to Union Station are infrequent and unreliable. This is hardly a “transit oriented” neighbourhood.
In spite of the poor transit service, the eastern waterfront is hardly at a standstill. Many condos as well as commercial and academic space have appeared, and much more is planned. How a projected 50,000 workers/students and 100,000 residents will get around for the next decade is a mystery.
This project has been underway for a very, very long time as the chart below shows.
The current study is subdivided into three segments, plus future extensions into the Port Lands east of the Don River (dotted blue lines below).
Segment 1 (red) includes the Bay Street tunnel and the portal area on Queens Quay.
Segment 2 (turquoise) runs from Bay Street to New Cherry Street (which will open later this year).
Segment three includes the link via Cherry from the Distillery District south to Commissioners Street and east to an around-the-block loop just west of the realigned river (yellow).
At its meeting on February 28, the TTC Board will receive a report summarizing the status of most of the rapid transit plans in Toronto. This article condenses the TTC report and reorders some sections to group related items together.
Dominant among many projects are, of course, the “big four” provincial projects: Ontario Line, Scarborough Subway, Yonge North Subway, and Eglinton West LRT extension.
Project Status Overview
The effect of major projects elbowing everything else aside is clear in the table below. Some projects do not have in service dates because they are not funded, and the timing of that (when and if it occurs) will determine when various lines can open.
Not shown in this table are several major projects that pop up from time to time:
Bloor-Yonge Station Expansion
Waterfront West LRT from Dufferin to The Queensway
Bloor West subway extension
New Line 2 fleet and yard at Kipling (Obico yard property)
Sheppard East subway extension
Platform Edge Doors
Of these, only the Bloor-Yonge project has funding, and some are only a glimmer in various politicians’ eyes.
Prologue: When I started to write this story, John Tory was still Mayor of Toronto and the dynamics of City-Province relations assumed he was in charge. The context for these discussions was soon to change.
The Toronto Region Board of Trade holds a yearly “transportation summit”, and on February 8, 2023, this focused on the Greater Toronto Area’s transit, plans for the future, and the aftermath of the covid pandemic.
The TRBoT is no wild-eyed radical institution. The regional economy and businesses are at the heart of causes it advocates.
Both in the introductory remarks and in comments by speakers sprinkled through the day, the economic effect of traffic congestion was a mantra. This sets the framework for the importance of both transit and road projects, depending on who is speaking. The latest factoid describing Toronto’s problems is that we have the third worst congestion in North America and the seventh worst in the world.
A problem with this hand-wringing is that there is little acknowledgement that some particularly bad locations are related to major infrastructure projects such as the Gardiner Expressway rebuild and various rapid transit lines. Moreover, goods movement has severe problems in areas that historically have poor transit and show little chance of seeing any in the near future. No single project will solve the problem of many-to-many trips patterns that now depend almost totally on roads and private vehicles.
Design of the Waterfront East LRT is still underway by Waterfront Toronto and the TTC. Whether this project will be funded in the near future and built remains to be seen, but one issue is now settled, pending public feedback and formal approval.
The question has always been “where will the line end”, at least in the interim configuration before the full buildout of trackage in the Port Lands.
Here is an overview map of the area. Note that it shows the configuration the rerouted Don River, and the new alignments of Cherry Street and of Queens Quay.
Starting at Union Station, the segment in red south and east along Queens Quay to the portal west of Yonge is a TTC design task that is now underway.
The blue segment along Queens Quay east to Cherry is a Waterfront Toronto design project. Note that it crosses a partly filled Parliament Slip (purple) rather than dodging north to Lake Shore Boulevard as Queens Quay does today.
The yellow segment is on New Cherry Street and Commissioners Street. It will include an extension of the streetcar network south from Distillery Loop and east via Commissioners Street. For those who are familiar with the area, New Cherry and the transit right-of-way will cross the Keating Channel on two new bridges (the red ones for those who know them).
Various extensions (dotted black lines) are proposed:
South via Cherry to Polson Street. This will take the line over the new Don River and will require twinning the existing yellow bridge where New Cherry makes the transition into Old Cherry as it crosses the new Don River.
East via Commissioners to Leslie Barns making a second connection to this major TTC site and a possible service through the eastern Port Lands. This will require twinning the double-span orange bridge which will carry Commissioners Street over the new Don River.
North via an extended Broadview Avenue to connect with GO and the Ontario Line at East Harbour Station and thence north to Queen Street.
Updated January 6, 2023 at 2:10pm: Of all the tables included in this article, I realized that I had not included the full budgets showing functional breakdowns, as opposed to individual line items. These have been added at the end.
The annual budget cycle is always a challenge because the document comes to the TTC Board at the last minute before it must be passed and forwarded to Council. This year, the situation was complicated by the election (normally we would see the budget reports in December, not January), and by the new “strong mayor” system in which the Mayor effectively dictates the budget by setting the City’s proposed subsidy ceiling. We have many new Board members most of whom have no experience with TTC budgets, and who will not know “which rocks to look under”.
Even worse, the Mayor’s press conference announcing the budget made no mention of planned service cuts coming in Spring 2023 and gave the impression that this “core service” was defended. That can, at best, be called “misdirection” in the hope that nobody would notice what was happening and focus on the “good news”.
Here, in much more detail than I had time for in the first article, is the budget information distilled from the TTC’s 55-page report.
Key points (the TL/DR version):
The City will give the TTC $53 million more in subsidy in 2023 than 2022. This is pitched as being in support of more security, safety and cleanliness on the system, although the cost of those changes is less than 10% of that amount.
The same argument is advanced for proceeds from a fare increase (10 cents on single fares for adults and youth/students) projected at roughly $16 million.
The effect is that new funding is advertised for a politically unassailable purpose even though it will mainly pay for other aspects of TTC operations.
The year-over-year increase in City subsidy is lower than in some past years and should not be seen as a generous windfall. This is in part possible because of underspending in 2022 which leaves headroom for 2023 without as much additional City money as would otherwise be required.
The cost of beginning operations on Lines 5 and 6 will eat up over $40 million in 2023 and even more in 2024. At the same time, the TTC proposes service cuts elsewhere that will save about $46 million nominally in the name of matching service to demand. What is actually happening is that most of the network is paying for two new rapid transit lines through service cuts.
Crowding standards for off-peak service will be substantially changed to permit more riders on buses, streetcars and subway trains. On buses, the off-peak standard will be only slightly less than the peak standard. Combined with chronic unreliability of service, this will lead to more full buses and will discourage riding during the period when recovery to pre-pandemic levels is strong.
Headway maxima will be raised so that rapid transit service could operate as infrequently as every 10 minutes during periods of light demand. For buses and streetcars, there is no guarantee that the existing Ten Minute Network will be preserved.
The changes to Service Standards (crowding and maximum headways) are notexplicitly listed in the report’s recommendations and would be missed by someone only browsing early pages, a not unusual situation for TTC Board members and Councillors.
The TTC has not published any details of planned service changes even though, for April 2023 implementation, they are certainly in the early stages of planning. The TTC and Council were clearly expected to approve the changes sight-unseen, possibly without even realizing they were buried in the budget. TTC management must be forced to reveal the details of what they plan.
The budget provides for additional operators who will be used to fill open crews to reduce or eliminate the incidence of service gaps caused by missing buses and streetcars. This is a change and improvement from using “run as directed” vehicles to the extent that operators are available to drive them.
Even this austerity service is possible only with additional subsidy of $336 million which the City/TTC will seek from the provincial and federal governments.
Ridership recovery is stronger on weekends, and among concession fare groups (seniors, youth, students). This type of riding is less affected by work-from-home.
Projections for future budgets in 2024 and 2025 include no provision for additional service beyond that which will be operated in 2023.
The TTC claims it will pursue a ridership recovery program, but its budgetary plans suggest that service will remain below 2022 levels for 2023 through 2025. This, coupled with chronic service reliability problems, is not a recipe for winning back riders.
The Province of Ontario is not exactly transparent when it comes to reconciliation of announced project costs and actual spending, let along the changes that might occur along the way. A project, or group of projects, might be announced with a value in then-current dollars, and without necessarily including all future contract costs. There are various reasons behind this approach including:
The government does not want to tip its hand on the amount of money “on the table” to prospective bidders who might tailor their bid to the perceived level of funding.
Some contracts include future operating and maintenance costs as well as capital costs. In some case the announced cost does not include the O&M component, only the estimated capital portion.
Provincial projects are typically quoted in then-current dollars with future inflation to be added as it occurs, at least to the point where there is a contract in place which includes that provision.
This approach hides the likely as-spent costs and makes provincially run projects appear cheaper, at least in the short run.
This is fundamentally different from the way the City of Toronto tracks projects and how TTC requirements are reported. Specifically:
City project cost estimates include inflation to completion because this is factored into future funding requirements.
City projects do not bundle future operating costs with capital, but report them separately.
Note that cost estimates shown in the Infrastructure Ontario market reports do not necessarily match values shown by Metrolinx because IO shows these values on a different basis. Future operating and financing costs are no longer included in IO estimates so that a project’s value reflects only design and construction costs, a value that gives potential construction bidders a general size of the project’s scope.
Infrastructure Ontario notes on the November 2022 Market Update that we have modified the methodology used to calculate the estimated costs as presented on the chart. In May 2022, and for Market Updates prior to that, we used the Estimated Total Capital Costs. For the latest update, and going forward, the costs listed only include Design and Construction costs.
These changes were adopted after feedback from our construction industry partners found that including only design and construction costs provided them with a better sense of the scope of the project and would assist in determining if they wished to participate in the bidding process.
Email from Ian McConachie, Infrastructure Ontario, Manager, Media Relations & Communications, November 24, 2022.
This can be confusing with “bundled” projects such as the Ontario Line RSSOM contract which includes both provision/construction of vehicles and infrastructure, as well as future O&M costs. This is probably the reason, or a good chunk of it, for the very large increase in the RSSOM contract value between the initial estimate cited by IO and the contract award. However, the way these contracts are handled generally makes it impossible to know how much of the change is simply due to inflation in materials and labour costs, and how much is due to underestimates or scope changes.
This is the second round following preliminary sessions in June-July. The planners reviewed overall goals in light of changing demand patterns and system-wide rerouting associated with the closing of Line 3 SRT and opening of Line 6 Finch West. (The network changes for Line 5 Eglinton Crosstown were dealt with in the 2022 ASP, although there has been slight tweaking.)
Some of the 2022 Plan’s proposals have not yet been implemented, although they remain on the books as “approved”:
8 Broadview: Extension south from O’Connor to Coxwell Station
118 Thistle Down: Extension northwest to Claireport Crescent
150 Eastern: A new route from downtown to Woodbine Loop (on hold due to potential construction disruptions)
In 2023, there are considerably more proposed changes than in 2022, and for the purpose of consultation the TTC broke the system into segments. Each of these is detailed later in this article.
Consultation is now underway with the following planned schedule:
October-November: Public consultation. (See schedule above.)
Late 2022/Early 2023: Councillor briefings
February 2023: Final report to the TTC Board
Spring 2023: Implementation begins
Through 2023: Five Year Service Plan “reset” continues
The 2023 Annual Service Plan web page includes a deck of panels that will be used for the consultations. In this article, some maps are taken from that deck, and some from presentations to community groups.
One key point we will not know until late 2022 or even early 2023 will be the TTC’s budget target. How will this shape service changes, be they additions, re-allocations or cuts? Mayor Tory talks about supporting transit, but we will see just what this means when he tables the City’s 2023 budget.
Note: I have not included all of the information posted by the TTC here, and I urge readers to review the presentation panels and any other information the TTC publishes as this process goes on.
Although this article is open for comment, is you have specific concerns and wish to participate in the consultation process, be sure to complete the TTC’s survey or otherwise communicate your feelings to the TTC. I am not the TTC Planning Department, and grousing to me, or proposing your own maps here will not feed into the process.
Steve Munro 