People wait for a GO Train after a significant snowfall in Hamilton, Ont., in February, 2025.Carlos Osorio/Reuters
With the start of the new year, more Canadians beckoned back to the office had to reacquaint themselves with the daily misery of traffic and transit snafus.
Those gridlocked highways, crawling buses and squeeze-yourself-in subway and train cars aren’t just a nuisance that drives up commuter stress and hurts productivity. They’re also a sign of another brewing crisis that promises to worsen Canada’s housing crisis.
If you want to make space for more people in any urban area, there are typically two choices: sprawl outward or grow upward. Either way, experts warn that Canada’s major cities are running up against the limits of their existing transport networks. Without improving public transit, and quickly, clogged urban arteries will increasingly become another factor fuelling inequality between those who already have housing and those trying to secure it.
Picture a young couple with middling incomes looking for a home. They’d like to have kids and stay connected to the city, which gives them more job opportunities and the potential for higher earnings.
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The classic option to find lower housing prices is to move to the suburbs. But studies show that the pandemic housing boom in Canada’s smaller towns shrank the price gap between city and suburban housing.
Despite recent home price declines in some of Canada’s priciest markets, finding substantially cheaper housing now often requires substantially longer commutes.
Another option for that couple would be to settle for an apartment in the city. Here’s where parking could become a growing problem. In an effort to reduce both traffic congestion and construction costs, some cities, including Toronto and Vancouver, have been scaling back requirements for new apartment buildings, be they condos or rentals, to provide mandatory numbers of off-street parking spaces.
Settling in a far-flung suburb or living in the city without a family car – or with the vehicle stored in a distant garage – would be acceptable if Canadians could count on excellent public transit. That means the kind of high-speed and extensive networks that quickly and reliably shuttle people from point A to point B in major cities in Europe and Asia.
Take Copenhagen, where an integrated system of rapid transit radiates out from the city centre, with ring trains connecting the radial lines.
“You can live a very pleasant life in Copenhagen taking the train everywhere,” said Jonathan English, principal at consulting firm Infrastory Insights and a former policy director at the Toronto Region Board of Trade.
Canadians, though, live in a markedly different reality. In Toronto, trying to catch the GO train at peak times often means confronting a wall of passengers, with a high risk of being left behind on the platform when trains are full. The city itself has fewer subway stops than Milan, Italy, which has half of Toronto’s population.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford champions the idea of building a tunnel under Highway 401 to ease congestion, but adding highways would only channel more vehicles into city roads that can’t handle any more cars, Dr. English said.
Vancouver, Montreal and other cities across the country face similar dilemmas, he added.
Governments are aware of the problem. At all levels, they are investing or have earmarked tens of billions of dollars to expand public transit infrastructure. Toronto itself is aiming for a new downtown subway line, three subway extensions, more streetcar lines and extensive work to modernize its regional rail system.
The question is how much of it will actually get done, at what price and how fast. The cost of building public transit projects in Canada has soared in the past two decades. A recent study found the country spent nearly 60 per cent more than a global average per kilometre of newly built rail.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford rides the newly unveiled Finch LRT train in Toronto alongside Mayor Olivia Chow in December, 2025.Cole Burston/The Canadian Press
And that’s not to speak of years-long project delays and underwhelming performance. Cue Toronto’s recently completed Finch West LRT. Originally scheduled to be completed in 2021, it opened in December only to become the butt of jokes when an area man was able to outrun it by 18 minutes.
Experts have pointed to a variety of recurring issues – from poorly managed public-private partnerships to political meddling – for exorbitant spending and ever-stretching timelines. The result has been chronic underbuilding of public transit.
Countries, such as Italy and South Korea, that build more for less often use simpler designs, fewer private-sector consultants and, among other things, a sound practice of sketching out a project in great detail before allowing companies to bid on it, which reduces pricey surprises down the road.
Unless Canada learns to build subway and rail lines quickly and cost-effectively, urban life will get progressively worse for everyone.
But the stakes are higher than that. It’s young people and new residents – the ones without top incomes or family wealth – who are more likely to be forced into the furthest suburbs or be told to make do without cars.
Without more and better public transit, the prospect of horrific commutes threatens to become another factor that forces young Canadians to give up on the big city and the opportunities that come with it.
