The Crosstown light rail route broke ground in 2011 and was supposed to be operational by 2020, but after repeated delays it remains unclear when it will open.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
The Eglinton Crosstown transit line in Toronto isn’t even open yet but is already a failure in one key respect: most of the underground stations have been topped with a small glass box that fails to incorporate housing – in a city facing an affordability crisis.
This is a massive wasted opportunity. And it’s not clear that the government of Premier Doug Ford, which inherited this project, has learned the lesson. Drawings for some stations on the $27-billion Ontario Line subway currently being built show the same approach, with proposals for adjoining development “subject to further approvals and consultations.”
Mass transit works best when it can draw on a large pool of passengers who live within walking distance. As tens of billions of dollars are spent to build transit in cities across Canada, from Metro Vancouver to the Greater Toronto Area, governments must get the best value for investment by maximizing ridership growth.
The Ontario government has made progress in allowing development around suburban commuter rail stations, and a recent deal between the province and Toronto should allow taller buildings near TTC stations, subject to city council approval. Putting homes on top of stations should be obvious.
Doing so makes access to the station hyper-easy and can jump-start a local boom in housing and retail. Developing atop transit can also be used to defray the cost of building the new line – a practice used to great effect in some cities in Asia.
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The Crosstown is a light rail route that will run 19 kilometres across mid-town Toronto, about half of it on the surface and the remainder underground. It broke ground in 2011 and was supposed to be operational by 2020. After repeated delays, it remains unclear when the line will open. The head of Metrolinx, the provincial transit agency overseeing the project, hopes that can happen this year.
By the time the Crosstown finally runs, Torontonians can be forgiven for not feeling anything but a weary sense of finally. But being able to ride the new line doesn’t wipe out the flaws in its design.
Consider the Crosstown station dubbed Cedarvale. The gleaming glass box is ready for use and visible to passing drivers at the intersection of several major transportation routes. One of the TTC’s main subway lines runs north-south there, with the Crosstown route intersecting it at a right angle. Meanwhile, the Allen Expressway, a commuter highway, terminates at the same spot.
Instead of a substantial development, Cedarvale is a single-storey building.
There’s no doubt that building atop transit can be difficult. The large excavation required for the station platforms and passenger areas competes with the multi-storey basements included in most modern towers. But there are ways to work around the issue.
In New York, the Hudson Yards project put multiple towers atop active rail lines by building a huge platform as a base for the development, the platform held up by supports planted deep between the tracks. New transit stations could be built with a similar approach, allowing both the spaciousness that allows for good passenger flow and the structural footings needed to hold up a building above.
Building housing close to transit is an obvious good in a city where people struggle to afford a home. It can also have the advantage of making transit projects cheaper.
Tokyo and Hong Kong have both mastered the idea of linking development and transit, and using the former to pay for the latter. Doing so has made the MTR network in Hong Kong one of the few transit agencies in the world to turn a profit, though in many respects its real estate activities are so substantial it could be called a developer that runs trains.
The idea of stacking development on top of transit is not new and is often a process that happens in phases. In London, Covent Garden station was built in 1904 with three storeys above. The building was later heritage-listed but, in 2018, local councillors approved the addition of one more floor.
The standard urban pattern is that modest developments are replaced with taller buildings as demand pushes up land value. But the Crosstown is making that process harder by starting with stations that are so small. And the glass box design, while airy and attractive, is more difficult to build onto than a standard building.
It’s a missed opportunity and one the Ontario government should not make again on its next transit project.