Reece Martin

UPDATE: Due to immense public pressure the cuts have been cancelled! While I think the plan was bad to begin with the government does deserve credit for reverting a bad plan!

Toronto’s UP Express is a really rather good way to go from Union Station, or Bloor (or Weston for that matter) to Pearson Airport, or between any combination of stops the service stops at. The service has gained a lot of popularity for obvious reason — for the vast majority of its history, it’s been the only regional train service in Toronto to operate a fixed fifteen-minute schedule all day every day from earlier in the morning to late at night. This good service has made the UP truly turn up and go: like the subway, you don’t need to look at a schedule — show up at a station and a train will be along shortly.

What is happening with the UP Express?

And it’s not just the frequent service: UP has a lot of features that GO lines probably should have, and might have in the future. For example, next train displays telling you how long until the next train instead of when the next train is coming. Or level boarding that makes it easy for those with strollers or mobility devices to use the service (and makes boarding easy for everyone — no risk of twisted ankles). UP trains even all depart from a single platform at Union, taking the waiting in a concourse and guesswork out of the equation.

And now Metrolinx has a new service pattern that is going to make things much worse. Fortunately, I think they will end up reconsidering this pretty quickly, read on for more!

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So, What’s changing?

Right now, all UP Express trains stop at all stations and there is a train both northbound and southbound every 15 minutes, it’s easy to understand and quite convenient — again, there is a lot to learn here for GO.

Metrolinx is changing the schedule at the end of April so that UP trains will alternate running nonstop from Union to Pearson, and making stops at Bloor and Weston. If you only use UP to go between Union and the airport, you are spared any real change, but for anyone getting on or off trains at Bloor or Weston, you suddenly have half the service you had before, with trains only stopping on a half hourly basis (time to start checking a schedule again, or maybe as many people remarked on Twitter, start using Uber — even if I still think transit is better).

Now, the wild card here is that along with the UP changes, Metrolinx is implementing 30-minute service on the Kitchener Line that if (and this is a fairly big if) timed right could essentially maintain the 15-minute service between the Toronto stations. Essentially, at Bloor or Weston or Union, you should have either an UP or GO train every 15 minutes that can take you where you want to go. The 30-minute service is a big deal and very good, since the Kitchener line had previously been limited to hourly service, but it’s hard for me to get excited when there’s also the bad news.

Now, why are they doing this? The supposed explanation is that UP trains are filling up with non-airport travellers using the service to go between Bloor, Weston, and Union, and these passengers are potentially crowding out airport travellers that the service is meant for. I have ridden the UP a fair number of times at various times of day and I’ve never experienced this (though I have experienced standing room-only trains), but I admit it may be an issue during the period after a major event lets out in downtown Toronto. The idea appears to be that if you reduce service to Bloor and Weston, riders will find another option to get to their destinations (a very weird thing for an agency responsible for transporting people to do), and stop taking UP — but it seems equally possible that trains to Bloor and Weston will just become even more crowded as people going to those stops cram on to half as many services going there.

Why is this bad?

The UP Express has been growing in popularity pretty consistently since its fares were rationalized a while after it opened in the mid-2010s. This is good and should come as a surprise to nobody: the train is faster than driving much of the time, not very expensive, and very consistent and reliable.

Now, the UP Express was not a problem-free project; there are the fare issues I referenced that I am not going to get into, but Metrolinx also made some really questionable choices with the rolling stock. The agency ordered a small fleet of diesel multiple units from Nippon Sharyo (who has left the North American market and was ?never? really known for making great stuff here), which were not only basically untested (only one other system bought the same cars and they are used in a much less intense service), but also were incompatible with the infrastructure used by GO trains, requiring separate high platforms at UP Express stops for the trains to board at. This fleet has been a problem for years as the trains have had a number of problems, and these reliability problems compounded with the frankly undersized fleet has meant that Metrolinx has not ever been able to run a frequent service (every 15 minutes) with full length three car trains that can use the full platform at each station since not enough of the fleet has been available.

So it should have been obvious to Metrolinx for at least five years that it had a problem brewing with the UP Express, even if ridership wasn’t growing much. The fleet of trains probably should have been expanded (of course this would not be cheap because you’d be either ordering something from Nippon Sharyo overseas, or from another manufacturer in a smallish quantity) so that service reliability could be maintained. Given that ridership has grown quite a lot, it’s crazy to me that Metrolinx didn’t place an order from, say, Stadler (who are known for building bespoke trainsets) and have high-floor diesel-powered FLIRTs currently operating in the UK that would probably be fine for UP with some modifications (if you are wondering, all of the diesel FLIRTs sold in North America are Tier 4 diesels, so emissions restrictions shouldn’t be an issue). Doing this should have let Metrolinx fairly seamlessly increase UP service by running more and longer trains, which should be able to handle ridership pressure for at least another decade or more (while other options and expanded GO service start to relieve some of the pressure on the UP). New trains would be expensive, but cutting your service and making the service pattern more confusing also has an obvious cost, and a high one!

This leaves us in a crazy place where Pearson, an airport with substantially more passenger traffic than Vancouver International (and in a much larger region), has a fair amount less rail capacity to its airport. If airport capacity is really a concern then we should be expediting the extension of Line 5 Eglinton to Pearson.

And to be clear, I think it’s basically indisputable that this is a service cut. The number of trains to both Bloor and Weston will be falling significantly, and what’s worse is that this hurts the basic functioning of the line. For every person riding the UP as a fast option from Union to the Dundas West (that we are trying to stop by cutting service between Union and Bloor), there is surely someone who wants to take UP to Pearson (and would hop on and take their seat as they hop off), but lives along Line 2 or in the neighbourhood who will happily get on at Bloor GO. A huge part of the utility of the UP is that it provided for a lot of convenient connections to the airport from other parts of central Toronto via Bloor-Dundas West and either Line 2 of the Subway or various streetcars; all of those airport riders are getting hit with a huge cut with these changes! Of course, removing a turn up-and-go transit service is also very bad, and this sets us back. While I have long advocated for UP being on the subway map, since you can use it like you use the subway, with this service pattern it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Now, I think the idea with the Kitchener line service increase is that this somehow makes up for the cuts at Bloor and Weston on the UP. But, even assuming that the Kitchener line trains are perfectly spaced between the UP trains stopping at Bloor and Weston, which again seems unlikely, since the UP trains have a different platform height, this isn’t a good solution. When two S-Bahn lines in a German city interline, that provides a true 15-minute service (for example S8 and S9 to Frankfurt Airport), but those trains will all stop at the same platform and charge the same fare (the only real difference will be the name of the service on the trains digital screens).

For passengers travelling between Bloor, Weston, and Union, the “15-minute service” provided by combining GO and UP is really bad. For one, if you show up at Union, it will not be immediately clear where to go: UP and Kitchener trains are in totally different parts of the station. At the same time, the fares are different, the boarding is not all level on GO trains, and the webpage with the schedule is also different. This is a good example of how simply having trains between two facilities roughly every 15 minutes does not actually constitute a useable or even reasonable 15-minute service.

And what’s worse is that those additional “filler” Kitchener services do not run all the time. On weekends, and during evenings and counterpeak periods (outbound in the morning and inbound in the evening) people will be left with no option but to wait for a train they used to barely have to wait for.

There was a comment on Twitter that these changes may be to accommodate the addition of Mount Dennis station (which would increase run times too much if trains were to also stop at Bloor and Weston) in the next year or so when Line 5 Eglinton opens, or that construction on the Kitchener Line doesn’t allow half hourly service to run while UP runs it’s previous service pattern. But for the former, the issue is clearly just downstream of Metrolinx not having enough trains. And for the latter, the idea that you cannot simultaneously run UP in the previous service pattern and 30-minute Kitchener service is not accurate, since 30-minute midday Kitchener service should only require the eastern track (sometimes two tracks) of the Georgetown south corridor, while UP uses the western two tracks.

Now, to be clear, the idea of running both some nonstop and some local trains from Pearson into Toronto is not a bad one and not uncommon in other cities. This just shouldn’t be done if it means compromising the 15-minute frequency for any given service which is more important than a slightly faster run. What’s funny is that the planned nonstop service is only very marginally faster than current all-stop service (probably just enough to allow a stop at Mt. Dennis: it really isn’t a true “express”) because trains going past the high platforms at Bloor and Weston are speed restricted to 10 miles per hour (for some reason we have a speed restriction even though trains fly by high platforms in other parts of the world no problem, including on the Northeast corridor). This is likely to lead to absolutely painful moments when the schedule first goes into effect where people are waiting at Bloor, a train approaches and slows down, and then blows right past waiting passengers. Suffice to say, I really think this is going to make for a “TTC tries interlining the subway” moment, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Metrolinx abandons this “clever” service pattern in a few months with backlash and confused passengers. This should stand as a regular reminder that complicated “solutions” like this are usually a bad idea.

Hanging over all of this is the fact that Metrolinx (in a relatively wishy washy way) has mentioned before that they plan on integrating UP into GO over the long term, essentially moving to using the same trains as GO in the future, and operating under the GO fare structure. This might all just be part of the slow crawl in that direction, and while such a transition totally makes sense, the frustrating bit is that Metrolinx is once again showing what I would say is an excessive willingness to make riders lives worse today (riders who might think twice before building their lives around a Metrolinx service again), for some possible payoff down the road. Less UP service wouldn’t be a big issue if GO was running a great service that could sub in for it, but 30 minute service to Brampton is not a great service that justifies riders losing the frequent service they rely on today.

Can Toronto's Airport Express finally truly take off?

What is the correct solution?

Of course, I think there is a better path here.

As I said, Metrolinx should have seen this coming. UP has been growing more and more popular over time, and so naturally trains are going to be more crowded. However, making your service pattern bad all-day so that you can avoid crowding during select periods seems like a very bad tradeoff. I think the pertinent option is to maintain the current every 15-minute service pattern, and then operate extra GO service during the busiest periods (and more heavily advertise that it exists, perhaps including on UP trains via announcements). You can even have people directing passengers coming out of events away from the UP and over towards the GO concourses.

But, running the current service pattern is just an interim solution, the other thing that needs to happen is a fleet expansion so more service can be run. I go back and forth on this, and while the correct answer a few years ago was probably ordering more Nippon Sharyo DMUs or an analogue from another supplier (with high floors) that could seamlessly operate on the current infrastructure, at the moment I think the best option is a plan to transition to UP station at Pearson to low, 610mm platforms. Doing this (one side of the island platform at a time) would allow us to maintain UP Express service while transitioning the trains to a modern low-floor DMU, or EMU model like the Stadler FLIRT (which I bring up because it has FRA approval) that are actually probably more nimble and better suited to operating on the rather winding airport viaduct. Once you have low-floor trains on the line and a low platform station at Pearson, you can either board from the regular GO platforms at the other stations (which will eventually be raised to 610mm for level boarding), or build new “mini platforms” at the end of the GO platforms that can become part of the final level GO platforms. Basically, this option transitions the UP trains to a multiple unit train platform that should be compatible with whatever multiple unit GO ends up using in the long term, harmonizing the fleet on trains with the same boarding height and similar performance.

But until then, we should keep running UP trains every 15 minutes: it’s the best solution for riders and the network.