Tag: subway

This article was written by Reece Martin and was published in the Toronto Star on January 3, 2026.

Pub­lic transit in Toronto feels slower than it’s ever been.

The street­cars have crawled along since we bought new vehicles without learn­ing any new oper­a­tional tricks. The sub­way is still in a state of con­stant slow zones, includ­ing along Allen Road where the tra­di­tion of sub­ways zip­ping past cars has been reversed. And even the not­par­tic­u­larly­fast buses are get­ting stuck in ever­worsen­ing con­ges­tion.

And then a few weeks ago, Toronto opened the mult­i­bil­lion­dol­lar Finch West light rail line and man­aged to make it not only slower than the buses it replaced, but also most half­decent jog­gers.

For­tu­nately, the crisis has not gone to waste. The mayor and TTC chair have launched into a blitz of motions and moves to not only try to fix the defi­cien­cies on Finch, but also to cap­it­al­ize on this moment to fix the same set of issues on the down­town street­cars. It’s been a rare pos­it­ive moment of polit­ical lead­er­ship and impro­visa­tion.

But at some point, once the dust settles, there’s an uncom­fort­able truth we’ll need to grapple with: Even with sig­nal pri­or­ity — as well as things we aren’t likely to do like insti­tute fewer stops — transit run­ning on or next to the street is just never going to be truly rapid.

The choice of what kind of transit to build became highly politi­cized in the 2010s, par­tic­u­larly with Rob Ford’s man­tra of “sub­ways, sub­ways, sub­ways!”

But the real­ity is that road­based transit is the equi­val­ent of our local roads, and transit still needs its high­ways.

I recently was on Bloor at a hol­i­day party, and upon open­ing Google Maps to see my travel time to get home to Scar­bor­ough on transit, my jaw dropped at the hour­and­ahalf travel time. Were we to hop in a car, I could have got­ten to Niagara Falls in that time, or just home in half that time. This is ulti­mately what cre­ates con­ges­tion and keeps people off transit: driv­ing is so often dra­mat­ic­ally faster than what’s sup­posed to be “the bet­ter way.”

The Transit City plan that birthed Finch West and also envi­sioned the Eglin­ton Crosstown wanted to “improve” my trip to Scar­bor­ough, mak­ing sure that the bus part of my jour­ney was now on a snazzy­street­car like we’ve now opened on Finch. This is still the play­book that’s shap­ing transit decision mak­ing at the city of Toronto, even though the city’s own stud­ies show the Eglin­ton East LRT would be slower than the express buses run­ning on Eglin­ton today; and yet the project is one of the city’s top transit pri­or­it­ies.

The real­ity is that to actu­ally achieve rapid transit, you need to have transit that isn’t chained to the road net­work.

This not only means never wait­ing for a traffic light and going through urban areas at 80 kilo­metres an hour or faster, but maybe even cut­ting across the street grid in diag­on­als.

The sub­ways being delivered by the province would actu­ally prob­ably shave 15 to 20 minutes off of my trip and those of tens of thou­sands of oth­ers if they were open today, and they are only being accep­ted begrudgingly. New GO sta­tions under the “SmartTrack” pro­gram are being treated like they are exclus­ively for the use of rich 905 com­muters, but had they all been open, my trip home could have been done in just 30 minutes — a third of the time it actu­ally took.

The sub­ways are com­ing, and more GO train ser­vice and sta­tions are com­ing, too, but we need to lean into this transit­build­ing renais­sance. There need to be more GO lines and more trains on them to more places, and addi­tional sta­tions to provide access to more neigh­bour­hoods. The sub­way net­work needs to expand fur­ther, with branches to other outly­ing areas, exten­sions, and more lines in the cent­ral city.

Achiev­ing this means chan­ging the way we do things. Toronto cur­rently has among the most expens­ive transit projects in the world — the Finch LRT has cost more than the Shep­pard sub­way. Tack­ling these costs isn’t straight­for­ward, but a start would be to stop think­ing that trains have to be under­ground. People rave about the Lon­don Under­ground, but more than half of that sys­tem is actu­ally above the ground — via­ducts, embank­ments and cut­tings might remind people that transit actu­ally exists, and they also let cit­ies afford transit. If we can change the way we do things, lay out some nation­build­ing projects for the nation’s largest city, and get build­ing, we could finally have a transit sys­tem to be proud of — and yes, that means sub­ways, sub­ways, sub­ways.