A test train departs Sloane Station during ongoing system testing for the Eglinton Crosstown LRT in Toronto, Oct. 9.GABRIEL HUTCHINSON/The Globe and Mail
A Toronto comedian just threw a quinceañera for the Eglinton Crosstown.
It has been – can you believe it? – 15 years since the birth of the light-rail transit line that will traverse the centre of the city. Authorities still won’t say for sure when it will open, though there is talk it could happen next month.
Jacob Balshin hired a mariachi band for a mock celebration of the line’s coming of age. It played merrily at a transit station as he and friends toasted the teenage project on video. “Fifteen years! Next year, you’ll be able to drive. You only cost an estimated $12.8-billion. That’s only $8.2-billion more than expected!”
Funny not funny. The Crosstown has been a comprehensive fiasco. When construction began, the completion date was set at 2020. That was pushed back to 2021, then 2022. For a while there, 2024 seemed like a possibility, but that year passed, too. Eventually, the people in charge stopped even saying when it would open, for fear of being forced to acknowledge they had missed another target.
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So here we are, all these years later, waiting. The tunnels are bored, the stations are built, the trains are even running, gliding along their tracks on test runs with nobody on board, through stops with nobody in them. It is ridiculous and a little eerie – a phantom transit service.
Doug Ford, Ontario’s Premier since 2018, says he’s as frustrated as anyone, telling reporters this week that it is “driving me crazy” and urging transit officials to “get the damn thing moving.”
While he was at it, he couldn’t resist taking a shot at the party that preceded his Progressive Conservatives in office. “This thing has been a disaster since the Liberals started it,” he said.
In fact, the problem goes back farther than that. It was a PC premier, Mike Harris, who cancelled a subway project on Eglinton Avenue in 1995 as he tried to bring provincial spending back in line. The hole had already been dug. Workers filled it up again. That subway would have long ago started whisking commuters across town.
It was Mr. Ford’s brother, Rob, who further gummed up the works when he was Toronto’s mayor by cancelling a plan, called Transit City, to build a whole network of light-rail lines. The Eglinton Crosstown is a remnant of that plan – a 19-kilometre project with 25 stops, some of them underground.
Driving such a line through a dense urban area like midtown Toronto – digging the tunnels, building the stations, redesigning dozens of above-ground intersections – was always going to be expensive. But $13-billion? For what is in essence a fancy streetcar? Outrageous.
People wait for a bus along Eglinton Avenue in view of a test train.GABRIEL HUTCHINSON/The Globe and Mail
By comparison, building Toronto’s 8.6-kilometre Spadina subway extension cost $3.2-billion. That went overbudget and over time, too, but at least the city got a proper, high-speed, high-capacity subway out of it.
The mismanagement of the Crosstown has reached a whole other level. Globe and Mail reporter Jeff Gray laid it all out in a recent investigation.
Instead of giving the job to the Toronto Transit Commission, the century-old agency that operates the transit system, the provincial government handed it to Metrolinx, a new transit-planning agency with little experience building anything.
Using the public-private partnership, or P3, model, Metrolinx then passed it on to a big engineering consortium. But the public and private sides soon set to quarrelling over costs, timelines and a host of other issues, leaving the project tied up in court and adding many millions to the price tag.
Toronto simply can’t afford this kind of mess.
After decades of stalling, the city is finally building out its transit network to fit its status as a major metropolis. Several huge projects are in the works, including subway extensions into Scarborough to the east and Richmond Hill to the north. A whole new subway will run through downtown: the Ontario Line, with its eye-watering budget of $27-billion.
And yet the quarterbacks of this big play can’t even manage to open a line that has been substantially finished for a couple of years. In October, Metrolinx had to put a pause on testing the Crosstown when two trains actually collided in a storage yard.
Not funny at all.