Reece Martin

Toronto is building a lot of rapid transit, light rail, and regional rail infrastructure, and that’s going to mean way more services, coverage, and connectivity down the road.

And while I often talk about individual projects, I do think that zooming out and looking at just how many lines and services we will have down the road that we don’t have now is valuable. This lets us get a sense for the scope of expansion, where new potential will be created, and what gaps will remain.

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Knowing where new transit is going to concentrate is also key to determining how the city will be shaped, and how development will concentrate in different places. While I would argue that in the last twenty years, the correlation between transit service and development has been rather weak, especially within the City of Toronto proper, I am getting the sense (from developments appearing along Eglinton as well as near major GO and subway stations) that this will not be the same going forward.

At the same time, as pressure increases to build homes for less, and without parking — transit is only going to become more important.

This post will be broken into several parts discuss what transit is getting added, how this will change journeys, what the natural “successor” projects are, and how this will influence urban development.

We’ll start with what’s getting added – and cover regional rail in this first part.

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On the regional rail front, a lot is happening, but it’s piecemeal and incremental. That being said, I imagine that in about a decade we will see the following services operating:

Lakeshore Line Beyond Hamilton and Oshawa

The Lakeshore line is GO Transit’s bread and butter, with the most service and ridership, and regular all-day service that should be extended both beyond Hamilton (West Harbour) to Confederation. This will really improve the reach of frequent service, and help make more non-downtown trips possible (but of course it will also let people get to and from downtown Toronto at more times of day). Those extensions will also make more frequent inner service, which we are already seeing today, much more important for providing capacity, as trains fill up more and more on the outer parts of lines.

Frequent Core Service

Frequent core service should also be the norm within a decade. Right now, the Lakeshore line already sees 15-minute services during the weekends in the core parts of the line. Meanwhile, the Kitchener line has started to see some midday 30-minute service, and similar midday 30-minute service should soon be possible on the Stouffville line. At that point, with trains running between Unionville and Bramalea and potentially beyond every half hour for most of the week (including in the counterpeak direction), we should hopefully start to see the type of serious all-day ridership growth that has helped make the Lakeshore line what it is today (since 30-minute bidirectional service is its base service level that the line has had for quite some time).

Now, my sort of maybe optimistic assumption is that within 10 years we should hopefully see all-day, 30-minute service on the Barrie line, which is a lower priority as it will not through run with another corridor, and is long and quite far behind the Stouffville and Kitchener lines in terms of track capacity (though it is slowly being built out to double and triple track). That would be good to see, with a basic level of frequent and regular rail service starting to Toronto’s north, connecting nicely at various new stations like Downsview Park, Caledonia, and Bloor-Lansdowne that can start to build up higher ridership on this line.

At the same time, I would expect that within 10 years we will see at least throughrunning 15-minute service on the Kitchener and Stouffville corridors — it’s worth remembering that this more or less already exists on the Kitchener corridor by way of the UP Express, so the Stouffville line is seeing the bigger proportional uplift here.

Finally, I would expect week-long, all-day, 15-minute service on the Lakeshore Line in short order, which means that in a decade I would expect to see service, which is even better than that — perhaps every 7 or 10 minutes, or every 15 with additional regular express services.

Ultimately this creates a tiered series of service levels, with Lakeshore receiving the highest service, followed by Kitchener-Stouffville, and then Barrie.

All-Day Kitchener and Barrie Regional Service

And then there are the true “regional” services. I would assume that within a decade we will see additional all-day service to Allandale Waterfront in Barrie (this might be hourly or two-hourly, with trains alternating to turn back in Bradford or Aurora).

I would also expect to see all-day service to Kitchener by this time. If we are being realistic that is probably only hourly service, enabled by new infrastructure like a flyover west of Mt. Pleasant (land was recently expropriated for this) and additional station and passing tracks, but it could in theory be even more frequent.

So all in all, we will see all-day, bidirectional service expanded from 2 to 4 lines in the short term, and in the long term we should expect to see all-day bidirectional service on 5 lines, and frequent, rapid transit-like service on 4 lines.

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The next topic to cover is light rail — make sure to subscribe to have it delivered to your inbox as soon as it’s up!