How better transit might be making Canada worse
How a country of many great cities is moving towards a country of one.
A big theme of my writings and videos is the ascendance of Toronto; the city region is growing rapidly and is already by far the largest in the country.
Growing up, people complained and made jokes about Toronto as the centre of the universe. Within Canada, Toronto is where the large business headquarters and international organizations tend to be located — and culturally, it feels like the centre of gravity, which for better or for worse can be very irritating for those who aren’t in Toronto (and those in it sometimes too…). But I don’t think this trend is slowing down, instead it’s speeding up — and looking at all the transit infrastructure getting built can give us a unique insight into just how much.
Over the last few weeks there has been more negative news out of Quebec with regards to big public transit projects. The Quebec City tram is already on thin ice because of massive cost inflation and procurement issues, and now it appears similar things are happening to the long-planned and never really started Blue line extension of the Montreal metro. Of course there is the REM, but it’s one project (the second was killed by local politicians and NIMBYs in Montreal who don’t appear to care that the Blue line extension might not happen because of cost) and it really only helps Montreal make up for lost time, so much more is needed in 2023.
Vancouver is faring somewhat better, with a system that is already more advanced than the Montreal Metro in a number of ways, and with two major extensions under construction as well as a number of smaller projects. However, a lot of long discussed projects such as SkyTrain to UBC still aren’t underway, and since plans for the future are lacking in detail, it’s not clear the region will be able to follow up the projects of today with more than BRT — which is positive but hardly ambitious enough if Vancouver wants to keep its status of being so good it’s almost un-North American. I made a video a while back on some of the ideas Vancouver should be exploring so that it can start protecting for and better planning future projects:
Meanwhile in Alberta, neither Edmonton and Calgary are doing enough, although Edmonton is way out ahead of its sister city. Calgary is slowly moving the Green Line forward, but it’s the only properly big project happening; things are moving very slowly and the project is not all that great — another radial light rail line but without the nice high-floor trains of the older lines. It’s been about a decade since Calgary opened a big transit project and the Green line alone just doesn’t feel like it’s been a good use of that decade of planning. On the other hand, there is actually a fair amount going on in Edmonton — the southeastern leg of the Valley line, Edmonton’s cross-city low-floor light rail line recently opened and the western leg is well underway. There are also a couple of extensions to Edmonton’s existing high-floor system moving forward, alongside some quality-of-life improvements like a smart card system call ARC. Unfortunately, most of this expansion just helps catch Edmonton up to Calgary’s larger existing system ,and so like Montreal there is a real lack of a big project or two that seriously moves the needle on the scope of the transit networks in both of Alberta’s big cities.
Ottawa weirdly has very different problems from the cities in Alberta despite being of pretty similar size. Ottawa is actually rapidly expanding its O-Train system, the backbone of which (the electric Confederation line) functions a lot like (or should function a lot like) the Vancouver SkyTrain, with small trains operating across the Ottawa region at high frequencies. This means the actual train service and infrastructure is much more impressive in Ottawa than in the Albertan cities. And the city already benefits from contactless payment, pretty decent 24/7 service, beautiful stations, and a common fare card with the Toronto region. I should also say that the diesel-powered Trillium line — which is the original O-Train line — is getting upgraded right now into what can basically be described as modern regional rail that is probably a much better transit solution than most of the suburban light rail we build in Canada. Unfortunately though, while Ottawa got a lot of elements of the transit model right on the Confederation line — with pretty fast and high frequency service (which blows the stuff Edmonton and Calgary are building out of the water when it works), huge reliability issues have not only severely deteriorated that experience, but also put Ottawa into what feels like a transit death spiral that will make further expansion a really difficult politically.
And then there’s Toronto, which is doing about as much transit expansion as the rest of the country combined — with upgraded regional rail far in excess of what Montreal is getting with the REM, subway extensions beyond what Vancouver is building, more surface LRT than Edmonton or Calgary, and the Ontario Line among a lot of other “smaller” billion dollar projects!
To be perfectly clear, this isn’t so much about good planning. Toronto is very middle-of-the-road with regards to the planning of transit infrastructure in Canada. Moreover, prices for expansion are high, especially when you consider the huge infrastructure pipeline in the region. But ultimately there is political will and alignment about getting stuff built and spending money that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the country — and might not exist anywhere again for a long time. This almost means the cost issue appears to be invisible to government, though Toronto is probably just getting a huge share of the pie.
So now that we’ve established just how much more infrastructure Toronto is building than Canada’s other big cities, it’s worth considering how that will change the country’s urban dynamics.
I’m a big believer that housing, commerce, opportunity and people tend to follow infrastructure (and people!), and with Toronto already having the most comprehensive public transport system in the country and the biggest expansion program, the city is going to be an order of magnitude ahead of any other in the country from a transportation perspective. That better transportation system will mean a stronger more efficient economy, more potential for high density housing construction, and lower cost of living — and I expect Toronto’s increasing primacy will only accelerate all of these trends.
Toronto is already where most immigrants to Canada end up due to the good job opportunities and large existing immigrant communities. The city is also a pretty attractive place for internal migrants especially in a warming world, with a better climate that anywhere else in the country than Vancouver, lower cost of living than Vancouver, and way more employment options than any other Canadian city. Toronto’s existing institutions from large universities to the Canadian headquarters of almost everything also means a big draw. And I think better public transit (though Ontario is investing in a lot of non-transit infrastructure too) just sweetens the deal, making getting around practical without a car and relatively quick and reliable.
I care a lot about this dynamic because I’ve always thought a historic strength of countries like Canada and Australia was the wide-range of growing and economically-vibrant large cities. Having a lot of cities that you could potentially move to leads to competition between cities that makes them better (when Toronto gets expensive, people can actually seriously consider moving elsewhere!). It also means politicians are forced to think carefully before directing all their attention and funding towards one city. In Australia, things are arguably even better than in Canada since Sydney and Melbourne are much more competitive with one another than Toronto and Montreal. If each big city can act as an “urban laboratory”, that also means the potential for more improvement as people move around the country and bring good ideas with them.
You can contrast the many cities of Canada and Australia with countries like the UK and France, which both have one large city that dominates the country — leading to economic inequality and a degree of social alienation and division. Having one giant city means you do get one city with a really big economy and transport system, but since that city competes less the economy is likely less efficient, and I’m pretty confident transport also is much more challenging from a cost perspective since cost seems to increase exponentially with density and interaction with existing infrastructure: It’s probably going to be easier to build light rail and light metro for several smaller cities than one Crossrail or Grand Paris Express. Of course, when people don’t have solid other cities they can move to, this makes solving challenges like affordability much more challenging, since urban policymakers in cities with issues have less incentive to help “locked-in” citizens.
Unfortunately, I fear this is where things are going for Canada and Toronto, and better regional and long-distance travel options are probably only going to accelerate this trend. Toronto is getting a big boost in infrastructure that will put it decades ahead of the country’s other cities, and this will create a critical mass for more expansion and the huge amounts of funds needed. It’s what I see as the beginning of a snowball effect, where Canada’s biggest city increases its lead more and more.
Resisting this trend won’t be easy, but I do have some thoughts. Cities that are not Toronto need to make getting more transit built a priority: that means making a list of priority projects, aligning municipalities and provinces and making more asks to the federal government (it kind of seems like the current one will more or less pay their 1/3 of anything proposed). Since better transit in cities across the country should be a federal priority, the government could make funding conditional on cost effectiveness measures like design standardization, less overbuilding, and value-capture solutions. While Ontario doesn’t seem serious about trying to get transit costs under control, if we want to rapidly accelerate the buildout of rapid transit across the country, it’s a problem we need to tackle.
We should also be focusing on building projects that provide high value —Alberta’s love affair with LRT might seem cost effective, until you realize a line like the Valley line cost billions but barely outperforms an express bus. Canadian cities should be building more subways, regional rail, and traditional high-floor Stadtbahn-style LRT.
In a follow up article I plan to write, I’m going to talk about the level of ambition I would like to see in cities across Canada by proposing some projects which they could be pursuing. Stay tuned!
Really interested and excited for the follow up article after this one. What you have said is so true, moving from the Philippines seeing that it is such a centralized country with almost everything business, government departmental associating,historical are mostly in the greater Metro Manila region seeing they’re the only ones with an actual urban rail system in our country. Does not help the country is divided into islands, but political and investment will makes it hard for other cities to have transit options.
I applaud Canada for being diverse and not much decentralized, at a cost that cities are so spread apart due to the land mass. Though it does seem to be on the way there for Toronto, feeling practically the nation’s centre for any development and growth. It does show when all those “Alberta is calling” ads people move to Calgary or to an extent Edmonton, for it’s a bit similar to other subway cities and able to somehow implement car-lite life as well for those who would like to use the LRT systems and still feel like a “big city” without it being that expensive, despite gas is cheaper.
Though some what unpopular but maybe other smaller cities should somewhat take the brunt of the immigrants coming into Canada and have them be planned and built for transit early to cope with the demand and the possible cost being cheaper than bigger cities. Let’s the cities get more development, see more funding from levels of government, and be more enticing for other people to chose them as an option than just the bigger cities. It’s a generational change and somewhat follows the “______ is full”