Ontario Premier Doug Ford rides the newly unveiled Finch LRT train in Toronto alongside Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow, on Dec. 5.Cole Burston/The Canadian Press
The headlines have been merciless.
“Toronto man outruns newly opened Finch LRT by 18 minutes.” – CBC.
“‘Slower than buses’: Toronto’s new Finch West LRT under fire for sluggish travel times.” – Global News.
“We raced TTC’s Line 6 on a bus and it was so slow we had time to stop for a snack.” – blogTO.
There’s been a media pile-on since the new transit line opened on Dec. 7, and with good reason. It’s a fiasco, and it’s so sad, it’s funny.
On the bright side, all that has gone wrong is a matter of choice. It can be fixed, easily. Public outrage may even spark change on other Toronto transit lines plagued by the same problems, produced by the same bad choices.
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All that stands between us and progress is political will, plus a pinch of ambition and intelligence. Little to no money is required. In fact, the changes should bring in millions of dollars in new revenue, because the faster you make transit, the more people use it.
But before we turn to the future, let us pause to marvel at the present failure. It is a thing of wonder.
The 10.3-kilometre light-rail line, which cost Ontario taxpayers $3.7-billion (after delays and cost overruns) is officially Line 6 of the Toronto Transit Commission. It’s in a dedicated lane, separate from car traffic.
Yet it’s rolling at a pace that is far from speedy, with service less frequent than the traffic-bound bus it replaces. Sorry: the bus it will eventually replace. For now, bus and train run in parallel. In videos of the LRT, you are liable to see the bus in the background – overtaking.
The sketch-comedy show Mad TV had a recurring bit called “Lowered Expectations.” This is that.
Last week, TTC officials said the target time for a train to complete a full circuit is 98 minutes, or 49 minutes each way. That’s an average speed of less than 13 kilometres an hour. It’s often slower.
Meanwhile, in Waterloo, Ont., the Ion LRT plies a route nearly twice as long, on a schedule of just 43 minutes.
Signal priority is part of the reason why. Ion trains tend to sail through lights because cross traffic is automatically stopped when a train approaches.
On Finch, as across Toronto’s extremely busy and extremely slow streetcar system, trains don’t get much priority. A train with a hundred passengers often idles at an intersection, waiting for the light to change. Then it waits for a Pontiac Sunfire to make a left.
The TTC is the second most-heavily-used transit service in Canada and the United States, and Finch Avenue is one of its busiest corridors. In 2019, before the pandemic and the disruptions of LRT construction, Finch West was the TTC’s top bus route, moving 55,000 passengers on an average weekday.
That’s more people than use the 23-station, 39-km metro system in Miami. It’s almost as many as ride the Los Angeles subway.
The construction and operation of transit in Ontario is a mess of an org chart, with a secretive provincial agency (Metrolinx) using opaque public-private partnerships to build and maintain lines – slowly and at spectacularly high costs – that on completion are operated by municipal agencies under hidden contract terms. Who is ultimately responsible? Everything seems designed to make it hard to say.
But Toronto appears at least to have power over its own traffic lights, as well as the ability to decide how fast the TTC can drive vehicles between lights. By a vote of 22-1, Toronto City Council recently voted in favour of “more aggressive, active transit signal priority at intersections” for the Finch LRT, the streetcars, and the (oh when will it finally open?) Eglinton Crosstown LRT, as well as investigating other steps to speed things up.
More people take public transit if it’s fast; fewer if it’s slow. Toronto discovered this when it turned a short stretch of its busiest streetcar line along King Street into a zone where cars are somewhat restricted. More speed; more riders.
In 2019, after the changes (and before subsequent backsliding), nearly 91,000 people a day used the King streetcar. That’s more than the entire public transit system of York Region, north of Toronto. It has a population of 1.3 million, more than 100 bus routes, 500 buses and 5,000 bus stops.
We can reasonably prioritize hundreds of thousands of mass-transit riders, and the hundreds of thousands more who would happily join them if things rolled a bit faster. Or we can reject such ideas as part of “The War on the Car.”
Take your pick.