Toronto’s most important transit line for the future is barely rolling along.
Just as I am getting back from Utah & a visit to Stadler’s North American factory with an aim to continue to diversify my content away from Toronto, another mess has come up, and this one feels important to discuss — the topic is substantial enough that it also might need to be turned into a video down the road.
In the subtitle, I mention the UP Express as “Toronto’s most important”, and I think it would be useful to highlight why I’m saying that before getting in to all the extremely concerning problems the service is having.
The UP Express was the first entirely new rapid transit service introduced to Toronto in around 15 years when it first opened for the Pan-Am games in 2015, and I’d argue that in many ways it’s set precedents for things we need to be doing more of. From being the first line in Canada to use platform screen doors, to being the first line in Toronto to allow contactless debit and credit payment, to mostly operating above ground on an existing corridor, the UP Express feels like a perfect example of all of the things we should be doing far more often. And with a long time all-day 15-minute service, it was also a model for Toronto’s burgeoning regional rail network.
Unfortunately, over these last few weeks, things have truly gone off the rails.
To start, the reduced service the line has seen has not really been something new. There was an odd tendency — at least in Toronto — for public transit agencies to be stubborn to even slightly reduce service as the pandemic began, but then to more seriously cut service as the pandemic has waned and more people started riding. Because of this, for what seems like the last year, the UP Express has been operating mostly half-hourly and ending quite early. This is a serious issue because waiting half an hour for a train (or even just 20 minutes) after you’ve gotten off a potentially long plane journey is just not a very attractive proposition if you have faster options — which is super concerning because Toronto clearly needs better transit options to Canada’s busiest airport. By comparison, Vancouver has managed nearly 25% modal split with the Canada Line to YVR, which not only provides the same capacity, but with trains more than twice as often at a lower cost, while also doing so with electric trains.
But things have gotten far worse recently. Earlier this week, train service (which is supposedly going to be returning to every 15 minutes all day — rather than just in peak periods) was operating half hourly, and then hourly, and then not at all.
The reason for this as highlighted in a recent CTV article is a fleet of trains that mostly isn’t operating due to issues with the brakes. Now, a lot of people seemed alarmed by this, but it is really just the latest in a series of disappointing issues with the trains and the UP as a broader concept.
You see, while the trains have some brake problems at the moment, this is nothing new. The UP trains have been rather problem-ridden from their initial introduction: from engine issues to door issues, the trains have not been all that reliable. In this case, it sounds like the issue may be maintenance-related, but it’s still unclear, and that makes no difference to people who might want to use the service that their tax dollars built.
This should be even more concerning given the relatively high cost and bespoke nature of the trains. As it turns out, the model is only used by one other transit system —“SMART” in the North of the San Francisco Bay Area — and it wouldn’t be wrong to question whether the trains that (might) make sense for a lightly used interurban rail service in Sonoma make sense for a borderline mass transit application in Toronto. You might think that buying additional cars might be the solution, at least until problems can be worked out — but unfortunately the manufacturer Nippon Sharyo closed their North American plant after completing the last trains. At the same time, given the quality issues, buying more trains with a flawed design or just rewarding Nippon Sharyo with more orders seems questionable.
While the unreliable service is clearly problematic, it’s really only the tip of the iceberg with the UP Express. Now, I have to be clear because it’s sometimes misunderstood when I am critical: When functioning, the UP Express is good; it’s fairly obvious that such a service makes a lot of sense for Toronto. However, the way it was and continues to be planned and operated is just embarrassing.
I recently did a video on Bangkok, where I highlighted the city’s “airport rail link” service, and it’s painful to say, but that service that opened five years before the UP is better executed and planned than it in almost every conceivable way. The fact that this is the case should really give us pause about the capabilities for current institutions in the Toronto region to tackle such projects.
So, what are these structural issues?
Well, for one, Toronto ordered a completely bespoke mini-fleet for the line. Ordering an independent fleet of vehicle for a transit service is not always a bad thing, but when you literally have less than 20 of something quite different from your existing fleet, that should raise some eyebrows.
Worse still, the design of the UP Express infrastructure (relatively short 1220mm high platforms) means that the trains used on UP are not compatible with the rest of the network. Not only does this eliminate any potential for temporarily substituting another train on the network with an UP train during this current lack of available trains, but it means that acquiring new functional trains for the UP is not a great proposition because they can only run on the UP — quite the Catch-22. That being said, it says a lot about our priorities that avoiding some additional fleet inefficiency is seen as a bigger priority than providing a reliable transit service on our only new rail line in the past 15 years. Especially since, while not optimal, a non-infrastructure-integrated UP Express with more better trains and service would actually still be very valuable! Of course, Bangkok has similar problems on their rail network as they have two rail gauges, but we’ve managed to replicate these problems starting from an enviable position of complete network wide standardization…
A degree of awareness to a lot of these structural problems was mostly highlighted some years ago, when an article was released discussing Metrolinx’ plans to stop using a lot of nice expensive infrastructure created for the UP Express but unusable to other trains on the system: Essentially, putting the line’s independent existence into question less than ten years after over half a billion dollars was spent on it. While this does seem like a painful but reasonable decision given current circumstance, since then we’ve seen little progress towards integration or solutions to some of the big remaining problems, like the lack of level boarding on the GO network. All of this feels like a running issue with a lot of the transit in the region — there is a germ of a good system that might exist at some time in the future, but our current system and operations are bungled — and if you actually live in Toronto today, you either buy a car or put up with it.
At the same time, a lot of things we build have little foresight in them. I plan on making a video on futureproofing transit, but in many cases you could argue Toronto is a lesson in the opposite. For example, despite the guideway into Pearson Airport being the one major addition to the rail network that the UP Express brought to Toronto (at high cost!), its long term viability is questionable, given the short station at Terminal 1 and the extremely tight curve off of the Kitchener Line at WICE.
Fortunately, from all this mess, at least one good thing has happened. We’ve seen Metrolinx operate every 15-minute bus service to its very nice new Union Station bus terminal to replace the UP service that has not been running (of course, it is rather sad when you can run a bus service that is better than your train service), which they should probably be doing overnight to provide 24/7 service at the very least.
Many of these issues do not only apply to the UP Express, they apply to GO Transit as well, but that’s a much longer article for a different day.
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