Analyzing Toronto's new Urban Regional Rail Stations: King-Liberty
This station near Liberty Village holds immense promise, let's dive in!
I am incredibly excited about a number of new urban GO regional rail stations being built in Toronto, and it’s something I intend on talking about a fair bit about in the future.
GO Transit currently fights uphill to gain riders in Toronto, despite the city being massively underserved by rapid transit, and GO having a lot of capacity to provide just that! This fight to gain riders can be broken into a number of categories:
A lack of logical integrated fares.
Transit fares in the Toronto region are a mess, with different systems using different models. Getting on a GO train from Scarborough or North York to Downtown from a bus or by just walking up is more expensive than taking a subway train from these same places, even though (or perhaps because of this...) GO has loads of surplus capacity, while the subway does not.
Some progress is being made on this front, but outside of Toronto proper. Of course, you *can* just roll with the punches and tap your Presto card, but given we don’t have capping, zones, or co-fares, it could get ridiculously pricey. The more harmful effect here is perpetuating the idea in the public that GO is for people from the distant suburbs rather than those living in Toronto.
When GO options exist, they are often inferior to local transit.
GO transit options do exist in Toronto, and in some select cases they are better than local transit, but a combination of too infrequent and too irregular service means that even when GO should be the best option it’s not very attractive.
The whole backbone of the “GO Expansion” (bad name I know) project is to massively increase service frequency across the network which should fix that part, while construction for expansion has been a big part of reduced regularity which should also go down over time. GO does seem to be a bit overly eager to shut services down for maintenance and the like, but hopefully that becomes less attractive with more people using its services (optimistically at least 4X).
Connectivity to GO is bad, in service and in infrastructure.
Right now, GO and local transit are not super well integrated in Toronto. To some extent this is a historical problem with infrastructure: GO used to be less important and still isn’t nearly as important as it will be someday, and thus those designing stations didn’t take high ridership from the GO portion, or transfers between GO and other modes seriously: This needs to change. If we were building Line 2 of the Toronto Subway today, we would have direct connections to GO stations at Main Street-Danforth and Bloor-Dundas West. At the same time, service integration is also a problem: An example I personally love is that Steeles Avenue Express buses do not stop at Milliken GO Station, despite it being a rail station!
Connectivity between GO and local transit (as well as rapid transit) is improving a lot: all new stations where lines come close together have indoor connections. That said, existing station pairs need to get retrofitted connections (Bloor-Dundas West is taking wayyyyyy too long), and the quality of connections need to be improved too to minimize distance. I’ve seen much less progress on the front of service integration, but I figure operators will feel the need when passengers begin to complain en mass.
GO stations do not exist where they would be most useful.
So many growing and otherwise important areas of Toronto exist near GO tracks but don’t get any service. Examples of this include: much of the area around Toronto Pearson, Liberty Village, West Queen West, Cityplace, the Port Lands, the Distillery and Canary Districts, and more. Most of these places also don’t have alternative rapid transit access, and so serving them with frequent rail service seems like low hanging fruit.
Fortunately, this is the point of SmartTrack, which has morphed over time into providing some new Toronto GO stations, which is still really quite useful. The biggest issue is probably that we aren’t seeing enough urban GO stations, half because Metrolinx isn’t using multiple units and feels it should discourage dense station spacing (even though it has local and express tracks), and half because almost nobody gets how valuable these stations are going to be (though developers are catching on). Unfortunately, only building stations where they are demanded or where a development calls for one leads to a lot of inconsistency that could be avoided with better planning, some of which will probably lead to effects similar to a misplaced BRT I previously discussed.
All of these things come together to make people feel like GO isn’t meant for them, because if there are so many barriers to using something, clearly you just aren’t meant to, right?
So yeah, let’s actually talk about what’s starting to happen to fix that! I’ll probably do a number of articles breaking down the SmartTrack stations (without the preamble), beginning with one of the most consequential, King-Liberty.
King-Liberty station will be located just north and west of where the Georgetown South corridor carrying the Milton, Kitchener, and Barrie GO corridors crosses King Street West. The station is located just north of Liberty Village, thus the “Liberty” in the name.
Island platforms at the station (of which there will be two) will run parallel to Sudbury Street to the north and Joe Shuster Way to the south, which you can see in the diagram below. They are quite curved as with East Harbour, which, while not ideal, is also kind of cool.
These platforms are placed to serve the four tracks which are dedicated to trains on the Kitchener corridor, which matches other stations up the line such as Bloor and Weston. Two tracks for the Barrie Line and one track for the Milton Line pass through with no platforms. When you consider the actual architectural design of the station, it’s okay if a little bland: some inspiration could be taken from a London Station like Abbey Wood. The station itself has pretty good access. One bridge over the tracks connects the platforms to Sudbury and Shuster, with a ramp that heads north towards Queen where you can grab the Queen Streetcar, and another links the platforms south to an existing pedestrian pathway behind a development pictured below.
Moreover, there is King Street itself where you can catch the very popular King Streetcar, and the King High Line across the tracks directly into Liberty village, and further south to Exhibition Station, which is going to become an even more important transit hub with streetcar, subway, and regional rail service in the future. The King High Line will also tie back to the West Toronto Railpath, which will be extended to this location in the not so distant future. This access is quite comprehensive, with connections to the north and south of the tracks at multiple points, and universal accessibility from day one. Metrolinx has produced some really nice renders of what this will look like in the future.
Now, I actually think the station has a few issues, mainly to do with how the service pattern through this pinch point in the corridor looks, but before I talk about that I want to finish with a few random musings.
The first is a bit Geoff Marshall inspired, but I think given Metrolinx’s purported desire to name stations after the local area the name “King-Liberty” is unlikely to stick, which I am happy about since I find it quite clunky. So, in a new, and probably continuing tradition, I’ll give you my prediction for what this station might eventually actually be called: Well… “Liberty Village” seems like a pretty obvious choice, something which I’d appreciate given that it’s certainly a neighborhood whose name is already well known in the city.
The second thing I want to discuss is what the effects on the city of this station might be. If you’re a bit confused, I think transit infrastructure can often be quite serendipitous: it changes the city in positive ways you might not have expected. The upshot of this station for example could be:
Lamport Stadium just 100 meters away on the south side of King becomes a much more valuable location and more people can attend sports games there.
Liberty Village and West Queen West becomes an even better place to meet with friends at a pub or to rent a condo, driving more density.
Access to the Canadian National Exhibition, Ontario Place, and maybe most of all BMO Field dramatically increases for passengers on the Kitchener Line (many of whom might be Toronto residents getting on at other new stations!).
Office spaces in Western Liberty Village become even more popular and high value, perhaps driving some more office density?
CAMH becomes much more transit accessible on a regional level: its main campus is a short walk from the station.
The King and Queen Streetcars gain more users shuttling people to and from the station (fare integration would help a lot here!).
Liberty Village becomes a place where connecting passengers are walking through even more than today given Exhibition Station to the south of it. A quick walker could save time on a commute between the Kitchener and Lakeshore West Lines (or potentially Barrie Line) by alighting here. Maybe this turns it into a more popular place for street retail, which would be cool!
Now, this piece would not be complete without a critical look at the service availability at the station, and in this case, I do actually think there are quite a few issues. Now, to be clear, the current design is one way this station could be designed: it would definitely “work”, but I am just not convinced it’s the best design.
The issues present here are multifaceted, because somewhat uniquely for sprawly Toronto, the site of King-Liberty is constrained by high-density development. On both sides of the site, the corridor is sufficiently wide for 8 tracks, allowing for 2 tracks to Barrie and Milton, and 4 for the Kitchener Corridor nominally for local and express service. Because of the site constraints, Metrolinx has reduced the total track count through the location to 7, while also employing two island platforms which are narrower than what seems ideal (diagrams I have seen do not speak of platform width).
This feels like an odd middle ground compromise: You have an uneven number of tracks which isn’t great for service (the Milton line, which has massive promise and finally seems poised to get more service, will get just one track for service in both directions, which is bad), while also not getting wide enough platforms to provide truly high capacity. Worse still, the islands only serve the Kitchener Line, once again (as with Spadina-Front, a station at a location where all western lines could be connected) there is an opportunity to enable line to line transfers at a non-Union site. Honestly, given that the Kitchener Line service beyond Bramalea seems likely to be limited in frequency for the medium term, maybe the better option is only dedicating a single track to Kitchener express trains. This site is arguably even better for Kitchener Line to Barrie Line transfers as it’s closer to their junction point. I have brought this up with some folks, who suggested that one could simply use Line 5 to make that connection — which is true, but I think we are missing a lot of seriously big opportunities here to both provide for redundancies in the network and for higher transfer capacities (especially outside of Union, which I expected will become very crowded when GO RER is successful).
What would be a better solution? Well, one option is a single island serving local Kitchener Line services. This would allow for all platforms to be adequately wide (though width matters less if we won’t be encouraging transfers) as well as 8 tracks, allowing at least two tracks for each line. My preferred alternative is probably a solution with 6 tracks and two island platforms, once serving Barrie trains and one serving Kitchener Local trains, with two additional tracks handling Kitchener Express and Milton services. Six tracks would provide for a lot of long-term capacity (hypothetically 72 trains per hour in each direction - a train passing every 25 seconds and stopping every 40 or so). That said, if capacity was insufficient, the Milton Line could be diverted to the Lakeshore West Line and the Canpa sub, or tunneled express bypass tracks could be built. More importantly though, this option provides for people transferring between lines outside of Union Station, allowing Kitchener Line riders to get to Spadina for example (only on the Barrie Line) or for riders from Barrie to more conveniently get to the Airport. Of course, maybe the most reasonable approach is to just expropriate some of the land from the neighboring streets so we don’t need to compromise such a massively high-capacity transit artery.
As long as we don’t deck this location over and build condos, we should have some options for the long term. Thanks for reading and make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next one!
Hi Reece, I thought this was a really good post, thanks. The other thing this made me think of is that if the king liberty go station were reconfigured for service on the Kitchener and Milton lines, the station would also then become a much better location for the Ontario line stop than exhibition. The Ontario line would still be close enough to serve BMO and the ex, but the location at the north end of liberty would put it much closer to the residential buildings in the area that I suspect will form the bulk of the daily ridership. It would give you roughly the same level of connectivity as the lakeshore line. It would be much closer to Parkdale and would set you up for and obvious extension into that neighbourhood. I know it can't happen, path dependence, redesign costs, all that. I'm just left feeling like we are leaving opportunities on the table.