Passengers prepare to board a streetcar on opening day for Line 6 at the Finch West station in northwest Toronto on Dec. 7, 2025.Colin N. Perkel/The Canadian Press
Many readers will have heard by now about Toronto’s latest public transit debacle: the Finch West light-rail line, on which the cars move slower than a person can run. What they might not know is that the debacle had its roots in a desire to serve the disadvantaged. Seldom has the road to hell been so well-paved.
To understand how this happened, we need to go back two decades to the mid-aughts. David Miller, a left-leaning former Bay Street lawyer, was mayor. Toronto was booming, spreading in all directions and adding throngs of new residents from every corner of the globe.
Its transit system had failed to keep up. While other cities from Madrid to Shanghai were building vast transit networks to carry their commuting millions, Toronto had stood still. The only new subway line that had been built for years was on Sheppard Avenue, a five-stop spur line justly nicknamed the Sheppard stub-way. In 1995, the cash-strapped provincial government even cancelled a subway on Eglinton Avenue that was already under construction.
Mr. Miller proposed a solution: Transit City, a network of light-rail lines travelling mostly above ground instead of in tunnels. It would give the city its first comprehensive rapid-transit network, binding east and west, north and south. As an added benefit, it would reach into some of the least prosperous parts of town: its inner suburbs, where many striving newcomers were settling.
The plight of those suburbs was much on the city’s mind. An influential 2007 report by University of Toronto housing professor David Hulchanski said Toronto was becoming more polarized, both economically and geographically. As The Globe and Mail put it around the same time, the city was “increasingly comprised of downtown-centred, high-income residents – most living near subway lines – and a concentration of low-income families in less dense, service- and transit-starved inner suburbs.”
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Transit City was meant to help fix the problem. If not all of the inner suburbs would get subways, given the huge costs of digging tunnels, they would have something nearly as good: reliable, fast, modern “high-order” transit. After much back and forth about the shape and extent of the network, government leaders approved two lines.
The Eglinton Crosstown would span the middle of the city from east to west, with a tunnelled section where the city was most dense. This famously delayed and grotesquely overpriced project – with a price tag of $13-billion, when future maintenance is figured in – is due to start running … who knows when? Transit authorities have put off its opening over and over since 2020, as they work to fix its many glitches.
The second project, the 18-stop, 10-kilometre Finch line, would reach all the way into the Jane-Finch neighbourhood, one of the city’s poorest. That fit well with the city’s policy of applying an “equity lens” to many of its spending decisions.
As a 2024 staff report on the “Prioritization of Planned Higher-Order Transit Projects” puts it: “The City uses a Transportation Equity Lens and a Transportation Equity Opportunity Zones [TEOZ] index to identify and prioritize projects that benefit equity-deserving communities. This ensures that new transit planning considers the impacts on marginalized populations.”
The intention was noble. A caring city tries to make sure everyone gets their fair share. City Hall had long decided to invest in education, health and other community services in areas with many low-income residents, among them Jane and Finch.
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But do the chosen transit projects actually work for those places? Do they work at all? The equity lens blurred instead of sharpened the city’s vision. The result was to plunk a sluggish rail line on a broad suburban avenue, a poor second-best to the fast subway service some areas enjoy.
When the city was considering the Finch project, skeptics pointed out that light-rail line would be complicated and expensive to build, with all those new tracks, overhead electric lines and traffic signals.
Worse, it might not in fact improve travel time much, because it would have to cross so many intersections and stop so often. It would be smarter, some suggested, to build a dedicated lane for buses – a system known as bus rapid transit, which works well in places from Istanbul to Mexico City, and might well have worked for the Finch and Eglinton areas, at a fraction of the cost.
But, no, it was light-rail or bust. The hard-pressed people of the inner suburbs deserved no less.
Construction on the Finch West line began in 2019. Six years and nearly $4-billion later, it is finally open, its sleek cars lumbering along at a pace that it would be charitable to call stately. Toronto runner Mac Bauer set out to test that pace after it started operating last month. He beat the train by 18 minutes.
“This is a generally underserved part of Toronto,” Mr. Bauer told the CBC. “That’s a pretty big disservice to this group of people that really thought something good was going to happen.”