A transit superhub lying in wait? Bloor-Dundas West
There's a lot of talk of TOD and a second downtown for Toronto, so here's the case that it should be at Bloor-Dundas West.
There is a lot of excitement about Toronto’s East Harbour development, and rightly so — I am super excited about it myself. Transit tends to actually be quite competitive in the Toronto region when trying to make trips downtown, and new major transit-centred developments have the opportunity to become far more transit-centric than the average suburban node by providing excellent transit connectivity.
One thing I love about Vancouver is the sense that the suburbs really have strong centres, and this embodies the polycentrism that’s helped Translink recover ridership rapidly as the pandemic wanes, because many trips — not just 9-5 commutes — are very practical on a system that lets you get to the local mall or movie theatre rapidly, rather than just the downtown office district. SkyTrain also benefits from this — it can provide more trips with less infrastructure while still running extremely frequent service.
All of this is why I think a strong case can and should be made for a major node of density, or even a second CBD in Toronto, around Dundas West station — which I refer to as “Bloor-Dundas West” because I believe that the language we use is important, and we should be using integrated names for major transit hubs — even if transit agencies don’t show much interest in it (to their detriment). That will need to change because the City of Toronto is renaming things with “Dundas” on them, and as a Twitter reply mentions — the names of this station have little geographic meaning.
Why Bloor-Dundas West isn’t more of a node today
One of the first things that confused me when I came to Toronto (and on a deep level still confuses me) is how an area like the one around Bloor-Dundas West station can exist in a city, much less one with a booming economy and growing population like Toronto. Despite being so well connected, there is very little TOD in the area, minor stations like Sapperton, King George, and Burquitlam in Vancouver all have substantially more.
As it turns out, a lot of the problems can be traced back to one of the only major developments in the area, the Crossways apartment towers, which would not allow a connection between the subway and regional rail stations to be established through its basement mall (super weird move because it would send tons of valuable foot traffic through, but alas). I think this has two very negative impacts: For one, there is no precedent for a direct station connection in the area, akin to what you see at the subway only stations at Eglinton-Yonge and Sheppard-Yonge; and for two, there is no good link between the subway and regional rail. Right now, to connect from one rail service to another, you need to ascend some stairs from the subway (headed away from the regional rail) and then cross the street, and either go around the block or through a parking lot to enter the other station — and climb more stairs. Ideally, the connection between the stations would involve walking down a short walkway and going up one flight of stairs, or even better — an escalator. The fact that a good connection does not exist here makes people much less likely to connect here, especially with baggage headed for the airport train.
Train service on the regional platforms also still has not recovered from pre-Covid. The UP Express used to run every 15 minutes all day and later into the evening (I personally think it should run 24 hours a day), and Kitchener line trains don’t run on weekends with midday trips that don’t extend as far as they probably should. There is no reason we couldn’t see 24+ trains per hour in each direction at the station off-peak, but at the moment we see about 3 - 4 at most (the subway underneath doesn’t connect to the centre of downtown and runs about 15 - 20 trains per hour).
The land use itself is also quite an issue, as it self-perpetutates the node’s low level of development. There is some density and intensification happening, but much of the land closest to the station remains parking lots and single family homes, creating a drag on the densification of the precinct. That’s not to say that interesting development is not happening, but a lot of it is away from the station site — for example near M.O.C.A to the south and up near Dupont to the north.
Why it still should be
When considering what nodes we should try and develop as major hubs, transit connectivity is always a major consideration for me, and among all the major nodes in Toronto besides Union Station, Bloor-Dundas West is arguably the best — with the streetcar, one subway line, and two regional rail lines, and with the ability to possibly add another with a platform for the Milton Line. There is also the West Toronto Railpath, which offers an active transport connection into the downtown core and many neighbourhoods in between. By comparison, East Harbour should also have a subway line and two regional rail lines, but the streetcars are not guaranteed (and the regional station hasn’t started construction for what it’s worth), the subway capacity is lower (albeit the subway service will be nicer), and the regional trains connect to less.
Line 2 of the subway also shouldn’t be undervalued. Right now it has older trains and signalling equipment than Line 1, but that will likely change in the latter half of the decade, at which point Line 2 will actually have better trains and signalling than Line 1. By then, it will also have additional connectivity to Scarborough on its east end.
That being said, if Bloor-Dundas West were to explode with growth, an extension of the Ontario Line to it via Roncesvalles avenue with less than 4 kilometres of tunnel would give it two subway lines and a connection to the Junction (a streetcar connection would make sense as well, and in theory could be built sooner at lower cost). You also will soon have another separate GO station at Bloor-Lansdowne on the Barrie Line, which is less than 400-metres away — a five-minute walk or so. There’s no reason that with sufficiently high development that these two stations (and Lansdowne subway) could not eventually be directly linked, and this would allow many GO riders to access the site without changing trains, and even more with an Ontario Line connection. There is actually a nearly symmetrical connection at Main Street-Danforth station on the east end of Line 2, but the likely long term lack of a connection from subway to regional rail as well as the lower value of the Lakeshore East and Stouffville GO services when compared to Kitchener and Milton lower its value.
The nice thing about all this infrastructure is that you already get quite a compelling service — one can travel to Bloor-Yonge at the north end of Downtown in just 10 minutes, and to Union Station at the south end in a little less than that. You can also get to the airport in about 20 minutes using express trains most of the day, and more slowly overnight with the Bloor night bus!
Another exciting element of the station site is that if the Crossways comes around, or we design the new connecting tunnel in a smart way, we can have a unique situation where there is an interesting commercial connection with shops between the trains and subway (there could always be multiple connections!).
The streetcar service is also a huge asset, since Dundas West is connected to the dense (and further densifying) King West, as well as Dundas West and College (via a short walk south). This means much of the old city is within easy local transit range of a node developed in this area. At the same time, as mentioned before, the West Toronto Railpath offers an excellent and fairly unique for Toronto urban greenway that connects a number of neighbourhoods, as well as the precinct around Bloor-Dundas West itself. This could perhaps be compared to the Martin Goodman trail on the Waterfront, but thanks to the position along a rail corridor benefits from full grade separation which is awesome — especially for cycling where momentum is key.
A reasonable retort to all this is that East Harbour is close to the lake and all of the new park land in the Port Lands, but at the same time the site also has a highway running right next to it, and Bloor-Dundas West is very close to High Park — which definitely needs improvement, but also does basically run all the way down to the lake.
Why it may still become transit’s biggest non-downtown transit node
Fortunately, a lot of good news is coming to the Bloor-Dundas West area. For one, a tunnel is finally slowly making its way through the approval processes, and so I would expect construction to start in the next year or two (and it should go pretty quickly as it is not super complex). That connection will instantly make using the station connection much easier and will also effectively add a new entrance to both the subway and the regional trains west and east of the main entrances respectively.
At the same time, the large site direct south of the Crossways on the south side of Bloor, currently home to a school and a Loblaws grocery store, is set to be redeveloped in a big way by Choice properties (whether the school is demolished and incorporated into a larger development depends on school board-developer negotiations). This project will bring a lot of much needed density to the area, maintain the grocery store in a new high density format, and will have a planned bridge connecting to the West Toronto Railpath — which is awesome. The renderings also appear to show some underground facilities with a light implication of a pedestrian connection to the stations. I actually think that even if not, the primary pedestrian link that direct underground connections to both rail stations would make a lot of sense, but we will have to see.
Not far away on the north side of Bloor, a number of sites are likely to be developed. The site directly north of the Crossways has had a tower constructed on it, and just to the north of that is a site with a large parking lot a Shoppers Drug Mart and a FreshCo grocery store that would be prime for development and could include a direct link into the regional rail station.
I also think there is a lot of potential for the corner of Bloor and Dundas West. A previous development was almost constructed her, but I like the idea of combining the TTC station air rights in a development, because the streetcar terminal and headhouse of Dundas West subway station as well as the mezzanine and platforms could really used a big reno and some love in general.
Of course, with the new Toronto city council in place, all of the single family housing around the station site is also ripe for intensification, with more triplexes and multifamily housing possibly entering the mix from the new housing action plan. This would be a really exciting way for a larger mix of housing options to become available to people in the area around such a major station, and that area is huge: The walkshed for Bloor-Dundas West runs west to Keele, east to Lansdowne, north to Dupont and south to Dundas — creating a lot of opportunities for urban change, which is only amplified by the high quality north-south and east-west bike infrastructure paralleling the area’s rail infrastructure.
What seems clear to me is that no matter the policy of development of today, serious intensification of this site in western Toronto is inevitable. The connectivity is second to only Union Station, loads of space is available for more housing, and commercial space and transit and cycling access is only going to get better.
Like Skytrain, the San Diego Trolley is also polycentric, which I believe is why it had the strongest post COVID LRT recovery in US/Canada. And SANDAG is only planning to make the system more polycentric.
Have you been to Mission Valley? Previously I've mentioned that SDSU's new $4B Mission Valley satellite campus is only 8 min away by LRT from SDSU main campus. But in the same neighborhood, on the same Green Line LRT, you have the biggest mall in the city and another under construction $4B infill TOD. Right next to Mission Valley to the West you have Old Town, which is a big transit hub with the Green and Blue Lines, and could get a TOD with up to 10,000 units and about 3 mil sq ft office space.
A couple stations down the Green Line, you have Middletown station, which will be the future transfer point to a Phoenix skytrain-style APM connecting to the airport and Downtown.
North of Old Town is the new Mid Coast Trolley, which already has the busiest bus line in the city feeding into it and is spawning TOD including 23 story tall student apartments and a 600K sq ft biomedical office campus. If the city has its way the area around UTC station will be upzoned for up to 300 units per acre.
Given enough funding, a circumferential regional rail line will connect UTC station with SDSU Mission Valley stopping by Kearny Mesa, another massively upzoned brownfield area along the way, then passing through dense inner city areas before ending at San Ysidro. It'll be almost completely along surface arterials instead of freeways.
All this TOD is happening in areas North of Downtown San Diego, which is a perfect rebalancing of the Trolley system, as currently the highest ridership segment of the Trolley is South of Downtown. And hopefully this polycentricity will make all day frequency even more economical to run. Not that the Trolley currently has high operating costs. In fact, as Alon Levy had noted, it has some of the lowest of any US LRT.
The streetcars have a real problem getting across Bloor and turning through heavy Dundas traffic to get into/out of the Dundas W station. Often wondered if the streetcar loop could be integrated into the Choice development on the SE corner, with ped passage under Bloor to the subway. I understood the UP/GO platform was to be moved south into the Choice development as well.