Reece Martin

I’ve put off writing this article for a long time, because “Transit City” was a transit plan for Toronto pushed forth by political juggernauts and strong voices on transit. As Rob Ford (my thoughts on whom should be obvious) cancelled this plan right when he was elected, there is a strong sense that since this mayor that embarrassed Toronto was a major Conservative figure in what is a progressive city, then the plan he cancelled should be defended and must be pretty good.

For me, when it comes to transit — something I care deeply about, I do not decide whether I like a plan based on whether politicians I like or am sympathetic to endorse it, but there’s unfortunately an effect where if you call Team A’s plan bad, you get labelled as being anti-Team A. This is unfortunate because Team A might do better if it had better plans!

I also hear Transit City defended for all manner of reasons — the context of “nothing being built for a long time”, which seems like a reason to go bold. The supposed lack of available funding is another thing I hear about a lot, but in Canada, provinces have the ability to spend an enormous amount, and as the current government shows, we can do this. If a plan coming from a city was particularly inspiring, I don’t see a reason why the province couldn’t decide to actually make it happen.

Now, why am I writing this? Well, in large part because even when I first moved to Toronto I didn’t understand seeing people whose views on transit I generally aligned with lamenting the loss of what was ultimately a weak transit plan (as a political plan it might have been stronger). Sure, I guess you can lament the loss of “bold” thinking in terms of scale, but it’s not like — silly or not — Rob Ford wasn’t also proposing a lot of stuff all at once. People will reply that Ford’s subways were unrealistic, and they were, I just don’t think measuring up how realistic your own plan is based on that says very much about your plan!

As I will point out, Transit City had a number of critical flaws, and was in itself not buildable based on its own stated principles in a number of places. In some ways, it’s become a litmus test for me to see if someone thinks about transit through politics first — i.e., political forces I align with proposed this, so I support it; or if they think about transit in terms of useful and functional systems — i.e. this plan will not create a good network or attract nearly as many people to transit as other uses of the same resources. It also highlights to me whether someone has thought a lot about what makes a transit system successful, both in terms of the transport planning literature, but also data on things like what drives people’s travel mode choices and trip decisions. I’d posit that anyone who’s read the pop classic “Human Transit” by Jarrett Walker, which gives readers a whirlwind tour of how to develop effective transit systems, could quickly point out many issues with this plan.

I’m obviously not writing this because I “hate” trams or whatnot — I quite like how trams look and I’ve made numerous videos talking about good tram systems, and I talked about this on the Urbanist Agenda with Not Just Bikes.

The issue is, and I think this is hard to appreciate unless you are familiar with tram or “LRT” systems around the world, is that getting trams “right” is harder. The interaction with other vehicles and and people at grade makes trams functional contingent on the right policy and design decisions, and these decisions can end up on a wide spectrum of results. Transit City did not use trams to their full extent or make wise design decisions with them, sometimes in the same ways Toronto makes the wrong design and policy decisions with its existing streetcars. On top of this, the plan didn’t include the TTC’s number one priority project, and would have created lines that made travelling across the city a real pain, as opposed to making this better.

Ultimately, I just worry that if we put plans like Transit City on a pedestal, we put all manner of poor transit planning ideas on a pedestal along with it — quite literally something that will drive us farther from being a “Transit City”.

What’s in a name?

My issues with Transit City kind of start with the name.

Calling a plan “Transit City” implies your plan is about making the city a Transit City, but I think anyone asked about what a “Transit City” is would say it’s one where people’s first choice to get around is transit.

This plan flatly does not do that. It prioritizes perceived ease of construction, coverage of the city with tramways, and decentralizing development (you’ll know why this is a problem if you’ve seen my video on “job sprawl”). A plan that was about making Toronto a “Transit City” would need to center reducing trip times to compete with the dominant mode — the car, improving service levels (i.e. frequency), adopting international best practices for things like streetcar infrastructure and wayfinding, and prioritize more TOD units. I would argue that Transit City either did not do these things, or was inferior to alternative approaches to achieve them. For example, I think we know at this point that we are probably going to get more TOD units built under the current planning zeitgeist if we allow large quantities of towers in select locations, as opposed to saying we want medium density, but then making it very hard to actually develop that.

You can sanity check all of this by looking at unambiguous Transit Cities, like Hong Kong, Tokyo, Zurich, or Paris — none of these cities use trams as the primary mode of transport in low-density suburban areas, and even cities like Paris and Zurich that do use trams a lot do not implement trams the way we do today with the streetcars or how we are planning to with the Eglinton and Finch light rail lines, which are the elements of “Transit City” that actually got built.

One Mode to Rule Them All

The first big issue with Transit City is that it was about a single mode of transit — “light rail”. This is a red flag because usually a single mode of transit is not well adapted for all uses: Suburban rail works well over long distances and in lower density areas, while trams are on the other side of the spectrum — functional in dense areas where low average speeds are not an issue because trips are short. Having an entire transit plan for a large city with mixed land use and widely varying density be built with a single mode is obviously bad.

You can even see in the way the actually instantiated transit city line on Eglinton is built that the one size fits all approach was foolish. Because we chose to use trams on what is a subway line (I made a video on why this is not a good idea here) for most of its length, we had to build larger stations than we would otherwise have needed, despite getting lower capacity than any subway line in the city. This looks even worse now that Toronto is focusing enormous amounts of density along Eglinton — in particular along the lowest capacity surface-running sections through the Golden Mile.

Now, with all of that said, as I highlighted at the top of this section, trams do make sense in some places in Toronto — largely the old parts of the city that already have streetcars (and adjacent areas that had them removed). It’s just that by land area most of Toronto is lower density than the old parts of the city, and so if you had to choose a single mode of transit to best serve the land area of Toronto (which is what Transit City was marketed as — stretching to every corner of the city), suburban rail and subway or metro would be a better — if still imperfect — one size fits all fit.

In conversation, supporters have mentioned to me that their plan did not preclude subway expansion, but subway expansion was explicitly not included in the plan, while out-there tram plans were included. On top of this, plans for a “Don Mills LRT” would directly conflict with a rational plan for the Relief Line (now Ontario Line) that did not dead end at Danforth Avenue — meaning the plan actively undermined rational subway building. Not including the Relief line in a plan that already had numerous tram services, despite the fact that it was long known that this was the single most important transit project in the city for ridership (the thing that makes a city… a transit city) is a real stain on the plan in my view.

I do also sometimes hear BRT and GO being mentioned in relation to the plan, but I really find it hard to take these arguments seriously when you are building light rail lines in exactly the places where BRT would have made sense, and when GO barely even registers on maps of the project, even though connections to it would be critical should people hope to ever cross the city efficiently. That’s on top of the fact that I have rarely heard much from Transit City’s strongest proponents on ensuring GO operates like rapid transit, or on highlighting the importance of GO integrating its fare system with the TTC. If your argument in response to “this plan is all trams designed for local trips!” is “these other things fill that need”, but you don’t even include them on the map or advocate to actually make the other things function to fill the role you suggest they will fill, I find it hard to take your argument seriously.

The Suburbs Need Transit!

Another argument I always hear come up when Transit City is mentioned is that “the suburbs deserve transit too!”, which is a crazy thing to say. It’s crazy because of course they need transit, but also because they already have transit — buses!

Now, maybe these assertions would make sense if Toronto had the kind of bad buses that are common in US cities, but Toronto quite notably has very good buses (here’s a Globe and Mail article on the subject), so when I hear someone suggest that these buses more or less don’t exist or don’t constitute transit, I raise both eyebrows.

All of this “ignore the buses” betrays a sense that buses are “inferior” transit, and sometimes that’s openly what it is. I’ve heard people call buses “stinky” and “crappy” (which again does not align with the reality that they are actually very popular in Toronto’s suburbs). It all ends up feeling like “elite projection” which you can learn more about here.

Personally, I feel that any comprehensive transit plan for Toronto cannot treat the most used mode in the city as an afterthought, and needs to expend significant resources on improving the buses. This inherently acknowledges the buses’ usefulness and importance, while also being nuanced about their unique challenges. Some might mention that the idea of “BRT” corridors was part of Transit City, but it was peripheral and felt like an afterthought, and since it was a “corridor”-based approach, it would mean benefits only in certain areas, as opposed to a broad uplift.

Much of the “put light rail everywhere” mentality has been justified to me as being key to “serving” more people with “high-quality” transit, and I hope the problem with this is now obvious. Much of the city is already “served” by high-quality transit in the form of buses, and the connective nature of transit (a very large portion of transit rides connect to and from the fast backbone that is the subway with a coverage-oriented bus) means that even transit that isn’t in geographic proximity to people still serves them. Ultimately, if your concern is about coverage, then the argument for light rail has the same issue as the argument for subways — you are never going to have rails to everyone’s doorstep (however again, I think even if you do make that argument Transit City did not present the most compelling way to move in that direction — in this video, I talk about how Hong Kong manages to serve a very large portion of its population with rail, but by combining high-capacity and fast metro lines with very high density transit-oriented development).

Transfers

Transfers are obviously a fact-of-life for most good transit systems, you just can’t operate high-frequency everywhere-to-everywhere service very efficiently. This is okay, because we know how to avoid transfers where possible and design the ones we do build in reasonable ways, Transit City did not do this.

For one, the plan called for what would surely be an expensive conversion of the SRT line (I think the better plan would have been simply modernizing it with the tech already being used in Vancouver, something that was shot down in favour of a plan that would require heavy construction because it would involve… heavy construction). This would mean spending quite a lot of money on the SRT, while not fixing its biggest problem, which is the frustrating “linear transfer” — that is, a transfer required to keep travelling the in same southwestern-northeastern direction.

At the same time, Transit City would create a new linear transfer on Sheppard where the Sheppard subway met the “Sheppard East LRT” at Don Mills. This was completely unnecessary as even if you had to do LRT on Sheppard East, making it high-floor LRT would have made reusing the Sheppard subway tunnels possible, creating a sub-optimal, but still better than forced transfer scenario with a half-subway, half-tram line akin to the Eglinton Crosstown.

All of these needless transfers baked into the plans reflect a poor understanding of a central element of transit planning that Toronto used to get (there’s a reason we did integrated bus terminals with “gate-free” transfers) and lead to the popular parody name “Transfer City” being adopted — and fairly so! A trip from northern Scarborough to Northern Etobicoke on this proposed network, a common trip today — say, to York University — would mean taking the Sheppard East LRT, transferring to the Sheppard Subway, transferring again to the Yonge Subway, transferring to the Finch LRT, and then possible transferring again on the other end! This corridor — independent of mode/technology — clearly has no reason not to be a continuous service, which would massively reduce the needed number of transfers, which is part of why I’ve advocated for Sheppard subway extensions.

And it wasn’t even just these suburban transfers the plan introduced: A new “Don Mills LRT” would mean riders in fairly central parts of Toronto would need to transfer to continue a journey north-south across Danforth using the eventual relief line. This would seriously hurt the usefulness of what is, again, the most important transit project Toronto needed to build (and is now building as the Ontario Line).

Bad Planning

And I think the bad planning extends beyond just having lots of transfers and transit technology poorly-matched with the intended use case. Others have argued that the orientation of Transit City lines around major arterials and proposals to turn these into “boulevards” would conflict with urban and transport planning best practice in places like the Netherlands, and needlessly create a less safe and efficient transportation system for everyone (here’s a great piece on just that by Ontario Traffic Man).

I’d argue many of the planning problems are oriented on dogmatic “fixations” that came out at multiple levels. On a high-level, the Transit City plan is clearly very fixated on corridors, with most lines being named for and almost entirely following one arterial suburban street.

But, at the micro scale, the street-level planning design that insisted on always putting trams in the middle of the street (something the TTC also does quite consistently with its rather slow and unreliable streetcars) also created lots of needless problems. The issue of turning arterials into “boulevards” might be reduced if trams could be on one side of the street and development was also weighted this way (or if trams jumped off the street to run through the middle of a development like you sometimes see in Europe). But there are also very real operational and technical problems that come out of this. I’ve talked at length about how a minor tweak to the Eglinton Crosstown east of Laird station that would put the line south of the street as opposed to in the middle would allow Science Centre station, a key hub for development and connection point to the Ontario Line, to receive far more service, all while having minimal cost impact. Similarly, even if you assume that a tram is the most sensible option for Eglinton or Finch West, it seems obvious that the best design for one in both cases would be using the Richview Expressway lands and the Finch Hydro Corridor respectively.

Ultimately, the choice not to have the Sheppard Subway link up with a high-floor Sheppard East LRT is also probably about fixations. The Transit City plan called for low-floor light rail lines using modern Flexity vehicles from Bombardier, and sticking to low-floor vehicles (which would make using the Sheppard Subway tunnels much harder) was prioritized over compromising the fixation.

Ironically, this fixation on doing things a certain way ignoring context meant that certain elements of Transit City would be essentially impractical to build — for example, the surface Jane LRT would not fit on Jane along its entire length given the corridors width and the carefully followed standard transit city design. This is ironic because I’ve heard “it wouldn’t have fit” as the rationale for tunnelling central parts of Eglinton, even if those tunnels will not be all that well used by trams. What’s funny is that trams clearly could fit on the surface of Eglinton, but this would require eating into space for cars, something that was avoided even though that runs counter to both designing good trams and a “Transit City”. Now, of course I think you sometimes need to be pragmatic when you plan transit, understanding that the parts of your populace who drive might have an influence, but I have never heard Transit City supporters noting the fact that subways by their design cannot conflict with cars or trucks as the obvious benefit that it is. Basically, if your goal is political support, why are you building something that is going to need to be compromised to get that?

What’s unfortunate about all of this is that now that the Finch West and Eglinton LRTs are set to open in the not so distant future, I hear little from those who pushed Transit City on the lack of strong signal priority on them, even if this fundamentally compromises the service they can provide. This is ironic again, because in years past I have frequently heard prominent voices claim (falsely) that surface transit costs less than a subway and can be just as fast. The same voices are nowhere to be found when the hard advocacy and discussions needed to push for things like signal priority need to happen, even if that is a huge contingency that’s essential for these trams to operate quickly (though still not as fast as a subway that by definition does not interact with any other traffic or traffic lights). I also find this all quite frustrating, because when in the past I have raised the concern that a choice of the light rail mode creates an issue of fast service being contingent on a city implementing a policy that it struggles to even implement on its downtown streetcars, this concern was simply hand waved away because “obviously it will have signal priority!”

An Unrealistic Growth Model

One huge change since the Transit City days is how we perceive growth in Toronto, and this has changed a lot in the public eye.

At the time Transit City was created, there was a lot of political pressure to push almost all growth to the suburbs. This was so that the old City of Toronto could be “saved” or frozen in amber as people talk about today. This is basically the basis of what has created the modern NIMBYism that doesn’t let high-density exist in much of the city, probably most notably along many parts of our existing rapid transit system.

The idea here was that growth would happen under the Transit City plan on land that would replace the less-than-aesthetically pleasing strip malls and industries lining the low-density suburban streets much of the routes would be built on. However, for better or for worse, this is where so much of what makes Toronto good exists — it’s the mom-and-pop, hole-in-the-wall, ethnic cuisine places and the like, and also where a lot of the affordable housing is. Replacing this stuff with more modern condos with RBC branches and Shoppers Drug Marts at the base does not feel like a model for making the city better.

I should say that a desire to avoid “tower-oriented” development is a justification given for the very tight stop spacing on the Transit City lines. It is claimed that this would “lead to” the type of medium-density development that urban planning types still seem to hold above all other built forms, and which predominates the streetcar-served old city. But this gets the land use transport equation backwards: The streetcars exist as they do because the old city’s not that big, and the development is generally not high-density because it often breaks today’s development laws, land values are not what they are today, and because a short streetcar ride made a large number of people openly accept living in these areas. You just can’t reverse engineer your way to medium density by trying to emulate the transportation of Old Toronto (which you shouldn’t because it doesn’t make sense in the context) because there are many other factors that shape how development looks, as well as the reality that cars are highly available in the suburbs and a slow transit service is less likely to lead to denser living and more likely to lead to more car use (and the Transit City designs, which minimally disrupt cars, ensure that any traffic-producing effect that might discourage car use even a bit is mitigated).

Part of the justification I’ve heard over the years for light rail (and for light rail where there should have been subways) was an odd attitude that because Toronto was in a bit of a slump, it didn’t have a future of rapid growth ahead. I don’t have a ton to say on this besides that I think what defines a 30-50 year growth horizon is not whether you are in a slump at the moment, but more durable fundamentals — and I think the fundamentals of Toronto as a big, attractive, and economically-vibrant city in a country very friendly towards immigration should have been obvious.

Local vs. Rapid Transit

A major criticism I have of Transit City is that it would take corridors like Finch Avenue that currently benefit from both frequent local and express services, and combine these into a single, less-frequent, not super local but certainly not express service. Now, you might say “well surely we can just weight the line towards the predominant use”, but I don’t think we did that as Transit City lines had and have very tight stop spacing.

If you look at the Finch Express bus (Finch West doesn’t have one, maybe because it would make the potentially worse service from light rail look problematic) you’ll see it actually has higher ridership than the local service, which makes geometric sense — there are simply more potential trip segments over longer distances on a suburban route like this. And yet, we are building rail infrastructure that actively works against this. I’ve talked about this before, but the characterization that running both local and express services on a corridor is inefficient or creates a bad redundancy is silly. Local and express services are complementary and additive, and we shouldn’t arbitrarily say that service should be limited on a corridor because we don’t like operating multiple service patterns.

Transit City and modern “Ontario-style light rail” is often talked about as if it is rapid transit, and sometimes it is openly called that, but rapid transit Transit City was not. Because of the high number of stops, poor separation from traffic, and reduced frequencies, in many cases this style of light rail can leave riders worse off than an express bus (sometimes even without dedicated lanes).

I think the fact that Transit City was not rapid transit has been spun many directions: Some would make the false “surface light rail can be just as fast as subways” claim, others would say we shouldn’t have fast transit, because that wouldn’t align with the goal of creating virtuous mid-rise suburban neighbourhoods and throwing the brakes on downtown growth, and yet others would say that light rail was a compromise solution that we needed because we could not afford subways. None of these claims really aligns with the others, and they often create these vicious self contradictory cycles — people want rapid transit, but if the transit was rapid people might just commute downtown (where many amenities are naturally clustered!). Ultimately though, claiming projects that were quite explicitly designed in a way to make speed impractical to be rapid transit was disingenuous.

What’s worse is that (and this is not limited to Toronto) I’ve seen time and again the confusion around the term “LRT”, which can mean 10 things to 10 people to create a narrative that fits a particular audience. Want to claim “LRT” is fast? Compare against the Vancouver SkyTrain “LRT” (it’s a subway, but a “light” subway that sometimes gets called “LRT” by confused media anchor types), which has incredible travel times! Want to claim “LRT” is what everyone is building? Cite cities like Dallas, Seattle, Phoenix, and maybe cities like Manila and Singapore that call some lines that are not what we would call “LRT” LRT (and yes, I wish I was joking when I said that I’ve been told by a politician in support of Transit City that LRT is a good solution because cities like Phoenix build it — even when Toronto has buses that move more riders than Phoenix’s entire rail system). And of course, you can cite Paris’ trams or Calgary and Edmonton rail systems as “LRT” even if they don’t look like what was actually being proposed for Toronto.

Ultimately, I see the decision to use trams (and not even fast trams for that matter) for long suburban journeys as an attempt to discourage long trips, justified by serving “local demand” that is perfectly well-served by buses and even by bikes. This plan wanted to spend precious transit dollars to plug a gap that didn’t exist (local transit in the suburbs), while doing little to address the real gap that exists in rapid cross city travel that is best served by subways or perhaps faster buses.

We Can’t Afford Subway

A lot of this was justified by the line “we can’t afford subways”, which… yes, Rob Ford’s most likely suggested subway plan was obviously not feasible on any reasonable time frame, but this is a bad argument to have, because the definition of subway accepted and promoted in Toronto is nonsensical and poorly captures even the existing subway network.

When someone would say “subway” in the context of Transit City, they were almost always saying it as a way of comparing the most expensive possible subway, that being a subway that was all underground and had the large trains Toronto uses on its current lines, to what they perceived as a rational light rail plan. This is despite the fact that Transit City is putting light rail in tunnels, and much of the existing Toronto subway is above ground.

Not clarifying that subways need not all be underground is really on the Rob Fords of the world, but I find Transit City folks claiming they were being rational all the while strawmanning “subway” to make it seem more expensive and challenging that it actually needed to be, especially in suburban areas where SkyTrain-style viaducts could easily be erected. I remember often hearing that Torontonians would not accept elevated rail, and even hearing the Chief Planner of Toronto saying elevated rail was bad for neighbourhoods (someone tell that to some of the best neighbourhoods in Tokyo or Berlin or London), but what’s funny is that we eventually did end up building the Ontario Line, which is in large part elevated, and the pushback in the suburbs was not about it being elevated!

So the idea was that with limited funds we couldn’t afford a big subway plan, ultimately presumes that we could economize on our subways, but that also the only measure of a transit plan is how many kilometres of rails it laid — which is obviously a very unsophisticated metric for measuring success. And ultimately, even within the same scope of the plan proposed, you could clearly build a decent amount of subway — even expensive subway!

Now, I do remember hearing that Transit City was all there was funding for, but we’ve seen the Ontario government spend big in recent years, and costs were much lower when this stuff was proposed; I am not convinced that if a plan was exciting then it couldn’t potentially drum up demand for more funding that Provincial governments have significant power to provide.

Whats funny is that we’ve come full circle on this. The Finch LRT has ended up costing more per kilometre than the Sheppard Subway did, and our tram replacement for the Eglinton Subway killed by Conservatives of the past is of worse quality than the previous plan.

Apolitical?

I don’t want to touch on the politics of transit planning much, but there is idea that subways as pushed by Rob Ford was a “political” plan, and I won’t debate that either way. However, claims that Transit City was evidenced-based and apolitical don’t align with the various things I’ve already discussed here that would have made and will make the lines we are actually building worse and slower than they need to be, as well as the fact that I’ve heard Transit City sold as being an easy sell because it would put rail in almost every ward of the city.

But, the streetcars!

Sometimes I have heard people talk about Toronto as a streetcar city and act as if that means Toronto should, could, or would build Transit City in a way that utilizes our “tram expertise” and the clear public support for the mode. But I think this argument has lost a lot of steam over the years because the streetcars have arguably only gotten worse since Transit City was announced. The same folks I have seen touting the plan also seemed okay with the streetcars operating with too many stops and in an antiquated way that clearly makes them less useful and popular (ask anyone in Toronto if they think the streetcars are fast). Of course, you would expect these unaddressed problems to be even worse in the suburbs, and I think the weak signal priority on the new light rail lines bear that out.

And what’s funny is that in some ways, Transit City regresses from the streetcars. For example, the primary shared infrastructure with the plan would have been maintenance yards, making essentially no use of trams’ ability to operate lots of branches or different service patterns. In fact, the “Waterfront West LRT” was simply going to operate as an extension of the existing streetcar network, and if the small segments of new streetcar we have built show us anything, this was unlikely to fix the usual problems that the network continues to have. What’s funny is that both the Spadina and St. Clair Streetcar lines with their dedicated right-of-ways were once marketed as “LRT”, something that has largely been retconned; this is amusing because it seems that for Toronto, “LRT” is always something just beyond our grasp, or more practically we aren’t going to get good transit when we keep forcing poor priority, too many stops, and fixate on always building things a certain way irrespective of context.

What we’ve built — not even a good tram

And that leads me into my last point, which is that even if you thought all of this was a good idea, the results are not great. The Eglinton and Finch lines look set to suffer from many problems that I was told repeatedly would not exist. They appear likely to be slow because we are giving them weak priority and have put stops so close together (that sometimes a train will almost simultaneously be in two). Essentially, even if you think trams were the answer, we have managed to deliver bad trams.

For one, the tight stop spacing and good signal priority are actually contradictory — tight spacing makes good priority harder. Contradictions like this abound in the plan’s claims of “fast transit on the cheap that goes everywhere”, and doesn’t feel much different to me than Ford claiming that underground subways were going to be built fast and cheap — it’s just that Ford’s claim is more obviously wrong.

And while we made sure to maintain space for cars and avoid priority signals, the lack of grade separations under more big intersections from trams — something the European countries we pretend to be taking inspiration from do — means service will probably also not be super reliable or consistent.

Somehow we also didn’t stick the landing on the design: Over a decade after Paris opened T3, most of Eglinton and Finch won’t have green track or attractive urban design, and where we do have green track it looks more like the grassy median of a rural highway than an urban oasis.

Reflecting

So, it should be obvious that I think Transit City was a bad transit plan, and I think with Toronto’s enormous growth in the last 10-20 years it has aged even more poorly than would otherwise be the case. What hasn’t helped the plan in my view is that any interpretation I might have had that it was actually just the product of a low-growth era with limited transit funding went out the window when one of its primary architects claimed that the Ontario Line shouldn’t go to Liberty Village, instead it seems that it was just a plan that had many elements that didn’t make sense.

Now, some might say the problems with Transit City were introduced at a particular stage: was it the planners who decided the lines must all run down the median that created the issues? In part, probably! However, the plan’s problems began with the weak foundation that was the suggestion that the rapid transit network of a major city should largely exist of poorly connected tramways run down suburban arterials that would have too many stops to be rapid at all. This weak foundation was just the first layer in a multilayered bundle of problems: The fundamentals all the way to the implementation were steeped in real issues.

Ultimately, the issues of Transit City come in part from claims it could do things it couldn’t. Boldly saying you will make a tram as fast as a subway, while not pushing for priority signals, almost entirely not implementing strategic grade separations, and spacing stops as close together as bus stops in some European cities, is fundamentally contradictory. At the same time, I find claims that delivering slow rail with less service than existing buses will create a Transit City for those who “do not have transit” today to be no better than claims that one borough or another “deserves” a subway.

A big part of why I’ve written this is because I think only a part of the “lost decades” where Toronto built very little transit built gets talked about — the part where Rob Ford cancelled Transit City. But I think Transit City itself should be looked at as a delay and distraction from building the important projects that the city really needed. They are not open yet, but I think cumulatively the Ontario Line and subway extensions that are coming along with it (as well as GO Expansion) are going to be far more successful than the Eglinton Crosstown, Finch West LRT, and the Hamilton and Peel LRTs that they inspired.

What makes transit good are its fundamentals, and slow transit for spaced out suburbs is a bad fundamental to start from. The cost of these projects is high, but the costs of the LRT we are building is also high — Better to have an expensive, well-used project, than an expensive one that might actually be worse than the bus.