The Problems with the Eglinton Crosstown are just getting started.

The issue of shifting realities for transit projects.

Edit: I don’t mention it in the article despite having had it as something I wanted to mention when I thought about writing this. I think the Crosstown, assuming everything works will be a pretty quick and convenient East West subway - but, that usefulness will only make it busier!

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Problems with the construction of the Eglinton Crosstown are well known and endlessly reported on, probably because journalism rarely covers issues before they hit people directly in the face in Toronto: When the Crosstown was looking very much not ready to open before it was meant to open, nobody seemed to care much, but stoking outrage now is pretty effective.

Of course, the construction problems are real — but they aren’t all that unprecedented, and much of the problem seems to be very dubious scheduling as opposed to any particular technical challenge. I talked about this more in my previous article:

I think what’s more interesting are the fundamental and structural issues with the line — which, as usual for Toronto, likely won’t be reported on until their effects are felt. I’ve talked about some of these issues in the past, and I’ll go over them quickly.

Fundamentals

Eglinton as a project has some weird underpinnings. While I’ve been told frequently that the right-of-way was not wide enough to allow surface operation across the entire route (this supposedly being the main motivation behind the tunnels), it’s pretty clearly not impossible if you walk the corridor, which is in tunnel from Laird to just west of Keele.

Mount Pleasant station on the tunnelled section of the Crosstown.

The idea of trams or streetcars (which were the vehicle of choice for Eglinton) in tunnels is not necessarily a bad thing or unprecedented, but they don’t make sense for Eglinton. In most of the good European “light rail” systems, tunnels (which are usually short) are used for two main reasons:

1. Overcoming geographic barriers, going under hills or waterways.

2. Providing more capacity for busy sections of line where routes overlap, decongesting busy surface corridors.

Of course, the tunnels on Eglinton are neither of these. Eglinton is hilly, but not enough to require tunnels for so much of the length; Eglinton also does not have a service pattern where multiple routes will utilize the expensive tunnels running under the avenue. This means the tunnel will be used to run a subway-style service in the centre, with some trains continuing along as surface trams in the middle of Eglinton further to the east. This is a poor use of this much tunnel — which could fit full subway trains that are much better suited for subway-style service — go figure.

The line is also painfully optimized for drivers over transit users, something that promoters probably should have seen coming from a mile away when planning a series of fixed surface transit routes in Toronto. Unfortunately, despite the numerous design issues, silly stop spacing (some stops are barely a train length apart), weak signal priority, low speeds with conservative operations (from the testing we’ve seen), there’s been little public pushing from the projects backers — including on city council — for a service actually oriented towards transit riders. The worst example of this might be the single “T” intersection at Leslie street that breaks the line into a subway-style operation to the west and tram-style operation to the east: this will necessarily mean less service for riders travelling into Scarborough, but exists solely to prevent disrupting drivers travelling from Leslie onto Eglinton headed to the east.

Surface section near Sunnybrook Park.

Now, problems like this — which exist up and down the line and were not inevitable — might not be a showstopper if this line was the kind of city-spanning light rail route you see in small northern European cities, such as Odense in Denmark (pop 200,000 *corrected*), Tampere in Finland (pop 400,000), or Bergen in Norway (pop 290,000). But Toronto is not a small northern European city, and the Eglinton Crosstown is not a route of minor importance — plans call for it to be among the longest rapid transit lines in Canada and its connections are plenty.

If the Crosstown was even meant to serve a city like Edmonton, its whole design might make some sense (besides the long tunnel that is basically going to be wasted — how many low-floor light rail lines have a continuous 10-kilometre tunnel? By my count almost none!), but it would also be under less ridership pressure and its frequency would be significantly lower. Like so many things in public transit, context is incredibly important — Eglinton, or something somewhat like it might well have made sense with less tunnel in a much smaller or less transit-oriented city.

The Transit City plan, which was deeply flawed, had Eglinton at its centre. And while I’ve heard plans like Transit City defended because they were planned for a Toronto that basically was stagnant and saw growth entirely redirected to the suburbs, this was clearly never a thing that was going to happen. It should have been pretty hard to look at Toronto in the early 2000s and imagine it didn’t have a strong future of growth given the fundamentals — Toronto being the biggest city of a country taking increasingly large numbers of immigrants, the fairly good existing infrastructure, the safety, the strong economy, and the very nature of Toronto as the type of diverse metropolitan centre that people (especially those planning transit, one would hope) are drawn to! It was also obviously silly to assume that Toronto would densify the suburbs, based on the infrastructure that existed at the time and that would exist in the future.

Changing Realities

Now, whether those backing Transit City and running Toronto for years didn’t believe in the city enough to see that it was going to get a lot bigger is neither here nor there. The conditions which Eglinton was planned for have clearly not materialized (this is mostly for the better — albeit not for this transit line) and I foresee this having major impacts.

For one, the ridership estimates seem widely off to me. The most common estimate I’ve seen shared around is that the line will have a peak ridership of 5,400 riders per hour per direction by 2031. Let’s dive into that number a bit.

With a capacity of 250 passengers per vehicle and 2-vehicle trains, that would mean demand could be met by running trains every 5 minutes in the peak hour by 2031. (2-vehicle train has 500 passengers, every 5 minutes is 12 trains per hour for a capacity of 6000 people per direction per hour). This seems very low to me. The Sheppard Subway runs 5-minute headways already with larger trains and gets quite busy, and Eglinton is a much longer line with many more connections! That suggests to me that much like Vancouver’s Canada line (which has the same top end capacity of 15,000 ppdph), Eglinton is likely to blow past ridership estimates. That being said, unlike the Canada Line, Eglinton will have to contend with large number of passengers getting onto its trains from much larger subway and GO trains at six different stations along its length, while also having far more and busier bus routes linking into it.

And Eglinton having much higher than predicted ridership is something I am mostly considering in isolation from the incredible intensification happening along the line — much of which is concentrated where it will have the least capacity: on the surface tram section through Scarborough. The development along Golden Mile appears like it will be a second North York Centre!

Some of the planned development along Golden Mile in Scarborough.

Huge amounts of development is also happening at Don Mills and Eglinton (where the Ontario line will connect) as well as Yonge and Eglinton, and in smaller clusters all along the line. The sense I get is that this is way more development than planners bargained for — Transit City always suggested a “Parisian” level of midrise density. All of this development obviously will mean even more riders for the line than the many who will transfer onto it from a bus, but it will also lead to further congestion on Eglinton, which will further benefit Line 5.

A good comparison to consider is between Line 5 and Line 2. Line 2 carries half a million riders per day, which is well beyond what Line 5 could ever handle, but it’s not clear to me that in the long term the demand on Line 5 will actually be all that much lower. While Line 2 does skirt the north end of downtown, it seems like we will see more density along Line 5, many bus passengers diverted onto it, and it connects a similar amount of big destinations. Whatever the case may be, I think there will be a lot of pressure on Line 5 from day one, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we need to be thinking about capacity upgrades in a few decades.

An Old New Transit Line

Perhaps the biggest shifting reality is the time that Eglinton will actually open into. The line was originally planned to open in 2020 (right into Covid-19!), and now it will open at least four years after that. With trains starting to arrive years and years ago, a weird feature of the Crosstown is that much of it will actually be kind of old by the time it opens. Trains will have been sitting waiting to carry passengers for years, and the same will be true of many stations.

I think the “oldness” of this new transit line will have a number of effects. I remember in the case of Berlin Brandenburg Airport, some equipment like monitors had to be replaced for the actual opening because it had been delayed so much, and while I don’t think the effect will be as extreme, it will still inevitably be there with Eglinton.

Many elements of the line already feel rather dated — including the vehicles, which have a design very similar to the “new” TTC streetcars that debuted over ten years ago. That means no nice LCD screens on the trains telling you where the train is stopping and the connections it is making, and not even all that nice of a head sign, which is annoying because many trains will stop short of the easternmost terminal of Kennedy.

The Crosstown trains that look almost identical to the current streetcars bar the colour scheme.

The passenger information displays at stations, while an improvement over the horrible ones on the conventional TTC subway (bigger brighter font and the next several trains), are going to be worse on launch than screens Vancouver has been installing on the Expo and Millennium SkyTrain lines for years.

There also appear to be a fair few design oversights that will at the very least be the topic of BlogTO “articles” for the first several years after opening. For example, the all-white design of the stations (including the floor?!) as noted by Kevin Richardson on Twitter.

What’s funny is that despite a large number of journalists going to check out a station recently (in the video Kevin was commenting on!), nobody seemed to notice and report that this is quite possibly going to start looking very nasty very quickly, especially when it’s wintertime and people track in rocks and slush.

What’s funny about all of this is that Toronto used to get it. Line 1 of the subway is the poster child for a futureproofed transit line, with wide and long trains that handled capacity for many decades with barely any consideration to the need to increase it. Hopefully we can get back to that level of foresight in the future.