Given its the height of summer here in Canada, posts are likely to slow down over the rest of the month, there will probably be some, but almost certainly not weekly.

When I set out to create The Transit Brief as an evolution of my previous blog the timing was not ideal. For the past month I’ve been working on some major life stuff (and likely will befor the rest of August) which has made writing posts every week a stressful challenge, particularly so given each post has taken 2-3 times as long to complete as those on Next Metro — the goal here is serious quality.

The upshot of this is once I’ve digested all of this change I should be able to come swinging into September and Fall with fortnightly posts, and with audio posts, and podcasts also becoming regular. There is so much happening on the transit file in Canada and globally, and I’m getting lots of ideas for posts, a new era of article abundance is on the horizon!

In the meantime, have a great August with your friends, family, and community.

Reece from The Transit Brief

Even though most developed countries, and increasing numbers of developing nations like Indonesia and Morocco have built such systems. These debates — while frustrating — are important to have, and The Transit Brief encourages them, so long as a shared understanding of the ground truth exists, and interlocutors can remain civil.

We at The Transit Brief think that numerous wealthy nations, which we could hopefully presume are not all run by incompetent politicians and planners, choosing a technology semi-independently should be seen as a significant vote of confidence in it. However, it is the case that technology changes and asking whether conditions have changed before embarking on a legitimately massive nation-building scheme.

The discussion has heated up in the last few days as the Canadian Federal Government’s dashing of dreams around an expansion of the rather unique regional airport in Lake Ontario near downtown Toronto has spurred shots across the bow of the Alto high-speed rail project. The expansion would have largely consisted of a lengthened runway capable of supporting larger aircraft. The relationship here is important — 40% the airport’s flights are to Montreal or Ottawa, prime high-speed rail territory.

The “Debate”

The natural question when building a big piece of infrastructure is whether it is a good plan — whether the case, “business” or otherwise, is good. This is a responsible question to ask and is how you avoid starting a video rental business two years before Netflix appears on the scene.

With high-speed rail, the “alternatives” we most often hear about are either flights, or looking forward, autonomous vehicles — perhaps even of the flying variety.

Don’t miss a single post. Become a subscriber today for the latest on public transport in Canada, and beyond.

Subscribe now

Planes

It makes at least some sense that flights get presented as an “alternative” for high-speed rail by uninformed commentators, because you do frequently hear of flights being curtailed because of high-speed rail availability. The directionality of this policy seems important — flights are being rendered obsolete, not the other way around, but even still it does highlight the overlap in the market for these technologies.

The markets do overlap, but the case is that high-speed rail is specialized for shorter trips and flights for longer — often intercontiental — ones. There are a number of reasons for this.

For one, a longer trip can “absorb” a lot of costs. Fuel-hungry takeoff and landing and the fees associated with them at airports are required no matter the distance of a flight. Spending significant time to go to an airport, which is generally far from the city centre (and essentially always far from the city centre for the large aircraft used on the longest flight) is more tolerable when it is a much smaller percentage of the overall travel time. For a 1 hour flight, a 45 minute trip to and from the gate on either side — which is optimistic — means a ratio of 1:1.5 of flying to getting to and from the flight, whereas a 10-hour flight with 2 hours on either end (probably more like 3 upfront and 1 when one lands) is a ratio of 1:0.4 — over three times better.

Air and rail travel also have fundamentally different economics. The biggest cost for air travel is fuel, which as we have recently seen can swing wildly in its price, but also a large aircrew. Rail travel has a smaller crew, a much higher capacity per vehicle, and is overwhelmingly powered by electricity for which the market is not global. The travel dynamics are different too: A flight from Montreal to Toronto serves people travelling from Montreal to Toronto, but a train can stop along the way with minimal cost and serve far more unique journeys with a small marginal cost.

An attempt to argue that for the price of high-speed rail you could give people free flights forever falls apart because of these differences.

Even if one assume- the numbers are correct, the maintenance costs presented appear to be off by an order of magnitude, close to those for the highest use high-speed rail route in the world rather than a lighter route in Canada — but then they fall apart because the return on investment and what is considered “in-scope” is completely different. Aviation infrastructure would be needed even if not for mass commercial passenger transport, and so piggybacking is a real thing, but this doesn’t make the case for trains weaker, just different.

You cannot compare the cost of building and operating a new high-speed railway with the cost of buying plane tickets. It may be an interesting exercise, but little more.

For one, the cost stated for high-speed rail is the whole system cost, or much closer to it than for buying plane tickets. It covers the rails, trains, and operations and maintenance. Plane tickets aren’t covering the creation or full maintenance of the aviation system, even with our rather unique airport model in Canada.

At the same time, the comparison misses that flights are not equivalent to rail journeys. High-speed rail can connect cities with higher frequency and capacity, while directly serving city centres. The availability of service, convenient siting of stations and low cost of operation induce demand that does not and will never materialize for flights on the same route. You cannot judge the need for a bridge by the number of people swimming.

The comparison does not only favour high-speed rail, planes for example also carry significant cargo — very rare to nonexistent on high-speed rail (though possibly changing in China), another reason why the comparison is ultimately apples and oranges.

Infrastory

Going on Vacation to Peru? Thank Asparagus

If you have ever settled into a window seat for a long-haul flight, you have probably spent a few moments looking out at the wing, watching the ground crew load big metal containers into the airplane. Some of these are filled with the checked baggage of you and your fellow passengers. But others can be filled with all variety of cargo being shipped arou…

Read more

2 months ago · 18 likes · 1 comment · Jonathan English

The case for high-speed rail just is not undermined by the fact that you could use the same money to buy tickets for a different transportation system. It’s not unlike arguing that one could buy a house, or lease a commercial office with the same capital. Air travel exists in virtually all of the same markets as high-speed rail (one regular reader notes that rail takes nearly the entire market for travel from Tokyo to Osaka, but is weaker on the longer trips to Fukuoka or Hakodate), and serves a different role. It may be helpful to point out that the modern airliner actually came predating the high-speed train.

Waymo — Autonomous Vehicles (AVs)

The other “alternative” we hear about time and again is autonomous cars: why not just hop in, press a button, and sleep, work, watch a film, or game, while your car takes you not only to you destination city, but your actual final address?

It’s helpful we think to ground this discussion in reality, and the reality is that while tens of thousands of kilometres of high-speed rail — serving billions of annual trips — exist in commercial service, autonomous intercity cars exist in commercial service … nowhere.

That’s not to say that they won’t. Waymo exists in a handful of cities, and in a subset of cities it will even take you on an expressway. But, Waymo doesn’t exist anywhere in Canada at the moment, and has various challenges to overcome just to scale its urban service (cleaning, demand management, vehicle costs, congestion) — which despite its success carries a fraction as many people as the middling public transit in the markets where it operates.

That intercity autonomous vehicle travel is technically possible is obvious and it probably will happen eventually, but actually delivering it, much less at the scale needed to come anywhere close to the capacity of high-speed rail is not something that has been done in Silicon Valley or anywhere else.

Don’t miss a single post. Become a subscriber today for the latest on public transport in Canada, and beyond.

Subscribe now

Suggesting that this will come sooner than high-speed rail — remember Google has had good self-driving cars for over a decade — which has been delivered commercially in loads of places, frequently in less than a decade, requires either extreme cynicism,or the type of hubris that even tech people find grating (your author holds a degree in Computer Science). The comparison is between knowns, and some known unknowns, but mostly unknown unknowns, and is not serious. It’s another flavour of Hyperloop, which by chance also still does not exist — and to be fair is frankly less likely to ever exist than intercity driverless car travel.

Of course, suspending all disbelief — as one rarely does when the goal is delivering a real piece of infrastructure people can use — leads to an interesting conversation.

Clearly if one could just get into their car and have it them take wherever they wanted it would be a revolutionary technology; we clearly are getting closer to that being possible each year. However, the market for this might not actually be growing much, particularly in Canada.

In this country, and in particular along the Toronto-to-Montreal corridor, public policy is focused on more rapid urban transit, and more homes and businesses near this new transit, and existing subways and regional rail, and actively discouraging car use.

To explain how this shrinks the market, consider the geometry: while getting into your own car in the garage of your suburban home, and being taken down quiet streets to a major highway before zooming to you destination sounds great, this is unlikely to be how many Canadians live. Most housing built in our biggest regions is now apartments. For residents here, car ownership is increasingly not seen as a positive. That means using an AV means getting into a high-tech Uber, and we question whether the smell of over strong air “freshener” and dirty seats would be bearable for 3 or 5 hours.

At the same time, transit-oriented development puts trains on a much better footing. The car is no longer just a door away from your kitchen, and the subway might just mean taking the elevator a few extra floors down, or a 5 minute walk.

The point is that self-driving cars are obviously compelling, but that they also aren’t obviously better than good public transport — which is structurally better at being used en-masse. It’s not clear to us that an aspirational city like Hong Kong with a near-ideal mass transit system will see much change at all by taking the driver out of taxis. AVs may be more compelling in a city like Houston, but ironically for those who decry the high spending on subways that makes a place like Hong Kong possible, it seems likely that in the long run it will be Houston with the dramatically more capital-hungry maintenance-intensive transport system.

So then, autonomous cars will be an amazing technology, but in large part for places that people don’t love — and that in Canada planning policy is actively trying to move away from.

Assuming one did hop in their car for a weekend trip to Montreal, there is another issue with the car: When we arrive in Montreal, a city defined by walkability with an impressive cycle-track network and metro, you do not want to be encumbered by a car — A car which must be parked and paid for, might get broken into, and which is more or less unnecessary, if not actively worse for getting around. The nice thing about taking a train is that once you are off it, parking it is not your problem.

So then, the real market for autonomous intercity car travel is really suburb-to-suburb, transit-desert to transit-desert, increasingly marginal places to the extent that all manner of widely held policy goals are achieved.

And then there is the problem of capacity.

While high-speed rail can move huge numbers of people, highways with private cars cannot. Sometime far in the future, after we have intercity capable AV options they may be able to communicate and coordinate with one another to boost capacity using platoons and other techniques, changes to infrastructure will help more. The issue is, advanced digital traffic management and signalling already exist for high-speed rail, remember that we have been automating subways for decades. The ultimate bound is still that automated vehicles are less efficient at moving people and using space than trains. This means that if we were to manage to overcome the technical hurdles to intercity AVs that congestion would likely just become the bounding factor, and if it comes down to building an 18-lane wide highway from Toronto to Montreal, NIMBYism towards high-speed rail will look like child’s play.

Meanwhile, high-speed rail construction is meant to start in about three years.

Even in the likely future where AVs are a major part of the mobility mix, to the extent we are successful in building walkable transit oriented cities that are quite broadly loved, their use cases will likely be somewhat marginal.

To bring it back to Hong Kong, that city suggests to us — along with perhaps Amsterdam, Singapore and Copenhagen — that urban transportation is a solved problem. While a car without a driver is neat, it’s not entirely clear what substantive benefits it would bring to places with already great transportation, that by no accident do not heavily rely on private cars.

eVTOL

But, driverless cars are not the only new technology “alternative” that high-speed rail needs to watch out for.

Read more

Something we will be doing periodically on The Transit Brief are posts responding publicly to comments from the audience on posts, and sent directly to us at reece@thetransitbrief.net. Historically, commentary in comments has driven a lot of the editorial work we have done, and this format will allow an interesting back-and-forth, where you can see the …

Read more

Transit in Alberta periodically slides across our screen. In the last few years, we’ve seen Edmonton’s new southeastern tramway open — the Valley Line — a proposed Chicago ‘L’-esque rail route to take trains from Calgary’s Green Line across that city’s downtown, and a passenger rail “masterplan.” A fairly in-the-know friend of The Transit Brief recently commented to us that it seems like Alberta is doing the right things — cutting tunnels and costs, and masterplanning.

But we don’t think that’s entirely correct.

It’s understandable how what Alberta is doing now could be perceived as a competent, technocratic approach to getting rail built out, and parts of it actually probably are that, or at least have been historically. The province has been more forward-looking in transit development and somewhat more disciplined on cost. However, the value side — that is, getting people riding transit — cannot be sensibly improved with stagnant networks in growing cities and worse projects. Such endeavours cost a lot both in terms of real and political capital, but don’t move the needle on ridership. Projects like the Max BRT in Calgary that provide worse service than many standard buses in Toronto or Vancouver could, for example, worsen the perception of transit. Masterplanning is conceptually good as well, but only so long as it’s not getting in the way of building for the present and taking advantage of all available funding.

Share The Transit Brief

The Good Old Days.

Historically, Alberta was shockingly good at urban rail development. The adoption of light rail from Germany was much more of a lift-and-shift than it was in America, and so the high-floor light rail systems — the Red and Blue lines in Calgary and the Capital and Metro lines in Edmonton — managed to provide close to metro-level service and speed for a small fraction of the price. In Edmonton, they even combined with a Swiss-style pulse scheduling system that formed the basis of a great transit network for the whole city.

The cities also really did a pretty good job building at a consistent rate: Calgary in particular, with new extensions opening regularly to service new areas of development — often using strategically reserved land, a practice which continues to some extent today, and often executed as small projects managed by the city and delivered at fairly low costs in the Canadian context.

These suburbs are by no means perfect, but as Toronto with its greenbelt delivers new suburbia with no rail, services, or high density to be found, Calgary and Edmonton provided rail service right to the middle of their premier suburbs, with (admittedly sometimes strip-mall-like, but increasingly less so) retail and institutional uses near stations, and increasingly mixed-use development.

We’d argue the high water mark of Albertan rail development in terms of value — but also the beginning of a decline in cost effectiveness — was Calgary’s West LRT. This project came in at a higher price than your author recalled ($1.4 billion CAD for 8 kilometres), but a tiny fraction of going prices these days (Waterloo ION Phase 2 is projected to cost 30% more per kilometre for a system with ~50% of the capacity, and far less grade separation). We’d also argue that by some measures this was the pinnacle of Canadian efforts in providing remarkably nice transit at a reasonable budget and in only five years — a third the construction timeline of Toronto’s first real foray into modern “light rail”, with more capacity, and for less capital. The route for the West LRT was in our view a masterclass despite lacking total grade separation: there were level crossings, but with total priority and boom gates, as well as strategic grade separations to ensure speed and reliability. It is kind of like a higher-order form of the French tramway — highly dynamic and contextual, utilizing underground, trenched, at-grade, and elevated alignments. Let’s take a look in detail.

It’s elevated as it leaves downtown.

Then mostly uninterrupted in the middle of an arterial.

Then underground to jump to a parallel corridor.

The route remains in a trench just long enough as to not have level crossings on both sides of 45 Street Station.

Then more surface operation at the side of the road, meaning only two level crossings between stations.

And then only two more crossings to the terminal station, which is also in a trench, and features a parking garage near the edge of the urban area (where some parking is sensible).

While German cities contend with very different built form and urban design, when building out their stadtbahn systems, the West LRT feels like what Stuttgart planners might build if they were airdropped into Canada.

The stations also feel soulful, while the modern light rail we build often has all the charm of a parking garage.

Meanwhile …

Now, thoughtful readers might question all the praise we’re throwing on this project given that it’s not a metro — it still has level crossings! This is a lot of fuss for something that can’t run every 90 seconds!

The thing is, the need for total grade separation is itself less total when you don’t need every ounce of benefit on the benefit side of the cost-benefit scale. Hyper-optimization is not necessary when you aren’t betting the farm. At the same time, Calgary has downtown level crossings, so the small number of new ones here don’t really add a novel challenge.

Suffice to say, the iron was hot for rail development in Calgary in the late 2000s.

How far we have fallen …

Don’t miss a single post. Become a subscriber today for the latest on public transport in Canada, and beyond.

Subscribe now

The Fall … in Edmonton

The fact that something was really changing became most obvious with Edmonton’s Metro line project, which was just fiasco after fiasco. Let’s look at that.

The Metro line started from the very nice downtown subway Edmonton invested in early on — a move that Calgary still has not matched. Even the branching tunnel north of Churchill station was a vestige of that lost era, pragmatically built as part of adjacent skyscraper development projects.

As if to make it especially clear the transition that was being made, after leaving the subway and serving the slick Rogers Place, the huge once-subway trains are reduced to plodding median trams. From Manhattan to the Spadina streetcar in the blink of an eye.

In Calgary on, say, the West LRT, this section of track likely would have remained below-grade or in a cut-and-cover tunnel; instead, we have several downtown-adjacent level crossings.

The route also suffers from a bunch of awkward level crossings, which are taken at low speed — increasing disruption to pedestrians and drivers — across fairly significant urban arterials. What’s worse is that the at-grade stations lack indoor underground connections to the major hospital, mall, and college near them, making trips longer and transit less convenient, especially in the brutal winter. This forces riders to cross those wide streets, mixing with trains and traffic. It’s almost as if you asked a traffic engineer to design something that would cause a traffic jam — a plague in the city’s arteries.

You can really tell that things have not gone well, because less than ten years after the line opened — and with both lower frequency and shorter trains than it will one day have (thus lowering the impact at crossings) — expensive grade separations have already been discussed.

What’s worse is that the line’s extension north, which includes two new stations and thankfully no major crossings, created an entirely different problem. In order to minimize the “visual weight” of the overhead power system — an entirely aesthetic concern — this new extension has a single overhead contact line tensioned by the trains, leading to frustrating speed restrictions. At The Transit Brief, we support more visual considerations for transit infrastructure, but not when it means making that infrastructure obviously worse.

The following photos show the two overhead line systems, and the visual weight that was avoided for onerous speed restrictions.

As it turns out, basically all of these — mostly negative — changes come back to a concept that planners and officials refer to as “urban LRT.” The concept is honestly a bit incoherent, but appears to be the result of a desire to make Edmonton’s light rail, which is closely related to the German Stadtbahns, more like a lightweight tram or streetcar. Fewer tunnels and underpasses, more people waiting on platforms next to roadways, filling sidewalks, and electric trains snaking through a street grid on the surface.

This instinct isn’t necessarily entirely crazy: the way light rail was deployed in Edmonton, with larger trains than you’d generally see in Germany and alongside wider streets, can feel a bit pedestrian-hostile and doesn’t exactly make one feel like they are in Paris or Milan. However, the aggressive avoidance of intersections and overhead and underground connections to stations are not aesthetic; they are functional design choices. If anything, a greater degree of separation, making the system more like a subway, would be reasonable. Trying to contort this higher-capacity transit to emulate the function and aesthetic of a form of transit that we ripped out (not entirely without reason) — the streetcar — for reasons of appearing more urbane actually hurts the thing that matters much more for good urbanity: fast, frequent, and popular transit.

Valley

The Valley Line, Edmonton’s latest, suffers from many of the same problems. While the new low-floor trams now look like they came from Europe, the reality of the size and sprawl of Edmonton forces them to be coupled up into giant, nearly 100-metre-long units that lack the quaint aspect of a tram running through old European city centres, and can feel a bit more reminiscent of a freight train crawling through town as they lumber by.

Now, the line itself is a bit more attractive and sensible. The stations stand out less with their platforms barely above the curb, and the street design has trains closer than ever to cars and pedestrians, sometimes with narrowed streets. However, the cost of this and the avoidance of traditional railway boom gates with bells means slower service and more near-misses and collisions with cars — making transit prettier, but less reliable and competitive.

The Valley Line also does not totally lack the crazy intersections with roads that would never exist near a contemporary tram in Europe, or the sections of grade-separated track needed to navigate a city that has not had streetcars for a long time.

The result is that the Valley Line, while obviously more comfortable than a narrow, bouncy bus, is not always consistently faster than bus options (a common affliction for light rail in this country), and has attracted disappointing ridership — just 10% of overall system use despite being close to 40% of the system’s length.

So then, Alberta went from building architecturally interesting semi-metros to a poor emulation of Europe that doesn’t just fail to beat the car, but also the bus, in a span of just about a decade. Planners seemed to forget that what really makes transit beautiful is not its positive aesthetic characteristics, but its ability to quickly and efficiently move masses of people, notably allowing cities to avoid ugly car infrastructure.

Don’t miss a single post. Become a subscriber today for the latest on public transport in Canada, and beyond.

Subscribe now

Meanwhile, to the South

While Edmonton was busy building what are arguably the wrong things, Calgary was simply not building. In the nearly 15 years since Calgary opened the West LRT, no new project had even started until the last few months with the Green Line.

This delay would be bad enough by itself, but a real win for transit in the Trudeau era was plentiful federal funding for new transit — funding that kicked off building booms in Vancouver (where two major, long-planned SkyTrain projects are underway); Edmonton and Ottawa (cities which had much smaller rail systems, but are now close in scale to Calgary); Montreal (which built a new regional subway larger than Calgary’s entire existing rail network just in the time since Calgary’s last rail project opened and while its next project has been debated); and Toronto (which will have likely added as much subway as Calgary has light rail in these intervening years).

Calgary in the early 2010s had a huge advantage: rolling, cost-effective, and functional rail expansion, and a transit system that punched way above its weight. It has completely wasted and lost that advantage, with its biggest transit initiative of the last decade being a disappointing bus project — the Max “BRT.”

What is so frustrating is that this was not inevitable. Near the end of the Harper government, Calgary was advancing plans for the “SETWAY” or Southeast Transitway, a busway that would be designed for eventual rail conversion, as in Ottawa. The election of the Trudeau government was initially a boon here: the in-between busway stage was dropped and the money was there to do rail from the beginning — this was the Green Line.

However, the Green Line is only finally starting to get seriously going, probably a decade after it could have. The reasons for the delay are many.

For one, the project was — like Edmonton — to use low-floor trains. The idea here was definitely shaped by an “urban design before transportation planning” approach, largely driven by a desire to create a certain type of urban street environment on the route along Centre Street north of downtown Calgary — a Spadina Avenue of the West (a broad avenue in Toronto with a median streetcar), if you will.

We recall public meetings where interested city councillors suggested the Green Line “had” to be different: existing sections of C-Train ran down the middle of highways (this is true, though it was also not a natural option for the Green Line), and had high platforms that stood out like a sore thumb (this is kind of true, though cities in other places manage to have high platforms for trains along urban strips that are perfectly pleasant). Thus, the Green Line would be like a European tram, winding through the city around roundabouts and such (there are no roundabouts on the route).

To the chagrin of these advocates, a series of technical advocates (a bit like one might experience in Germany, honestly), comprised of engineers and concerned citizens, put up a real fight about abandoning the old style of trains Calgary had used for new low-floor ones. Some of their arguments were off the mark: while you could share things like yards with the older lines if you had the same type of trains, the reality is that functionally speaking, Calgary already had too few yards, and ideally you want a yard for each line, on each line. But at the same time, they did have a point! The C-Train model as it was worked well, using a common standard would probably be more likely to keep that legacy going, and there were still in truth ways that a unified system would help save money, like larger fleet procurements.

To add to their point, while the case for low-floor trains on Centre Street does make some sense, the part of the line that actually had a prospect of being built in the Southeast was a shoe-in for a design highly separated from roads, like the West LRT. Furthermore, the plan for a downtown tunnel would be much more expensive for the longer, lower-capacity low-floor trains on the line.

Suffice it to say, the line using low-floor trains — when these would have significant cost implications, encourage less-functional corridor design, and not even see their natural application running up a road median until some untold future date — felt like the tail wagging the dog. They were the perfect thing for a project the city was not building, though changing things is no longer in the cards. The city placed an order for vehicles from Spanish trainbuilder CAF some years ago. Sadly, the diamond-in-the-rough, forward-looking super-long trains were cut as a cost-saving measure, meaning the once-excellent foresight in Alberta rail planning was clearly eroding.

All this battling ended up slowing down the project, which made it more expensive, cost Calgary more funding, led to expensive designs and redesigns, and also meant delays and enormous inflation inflicted by the COVID-19 pandemic that might have otherwise been largely avoided.

Tunnel Troubles

Worse still, the downtown tunnel created a number of issues. Calgary’s soil is not ideal for tunnelling through (though it’s clearly not literal mud like, say, Shanghai — a city with more subways than all of Canada — so these concerns do seem out of line with reality), and so that has been a recurring theme. Initial plans with long trains also came with large, almost excessively large and opulent underground stations, which would likely have cost a lot.

The cost and problems with the tunnel meant endless back-and-forth and plan revisions with different routes and designs. There were also concerns with how the route might ultimately leave the tunnel and the surface impacts it would have, as well as with where a new downtown arena might go and how the Green Line might best serve it — not to mention ever-rising costs. These were all a major source of delay.

As we see it, this was all a bit silly. The Green Line probably should have been high-floor, but if it was to be low-floor, then a tunnel would be either expensive (if long trains were used) or wasted (if short trains were used). The most sensible thing to do would be to get to the Edmonton layout, where a tunnel carries the high-floor trains, which best use the capacity of the tunnel, and the low-floor trains — optimized to pick people up from the curb — actually operate along downtown streets. The natural thing to do to achieve this would be a little swap. That would let Calgary fix its downtown transit mall — which works, but is ugly, with every other block being a high rail platform for the trains — by burying the existing Red and Blue lines in a tunnel. That project would be made somewhat easier by some provisions made in downtown buildings, and by the fact that unlike Edmonton, Toronto, or Montreal, Calgary has its downtown enclosed pedestrian network — the +15 — elevated above the streets, reducing potential conflicts.

The issue is that this plan would probably cost more than just tunnelling the Green Line, but not much more, and would have significantly more benefits (for all our obsession with cost-benefit analysis in Canada, it is often applied narrowly). This would have meant accepting that building a mass transit network for a city is not always best achieved by wrapping an atomized project up in a bow. As seen in many cities, sometimes trading space — or literally tracks — leads to a better outcome and a lower overall cost. This, however, was not really in the cards in the contemporary era of P3 project design and delivery, heavily pushed in Canada while the Green Line was being developed — which likely also would have derailed plans to somehow interoperate with the existing lines that the technical advocates wanted. Ironically, this is another reason those folks, even without realizing it, might have helped save costs by avoiding a P3.

The latest phase of these battles and machinations is a provincially imposed plan to instead elevate the Green Line through the dense downtown of Calgary. This plan may well save money compared to tunnelling today, but seems likely to be shockingly ugly, and truly the type of infrastructure that one would never expect a wealthy, developed city to go for. It also ironically introduces conflicts with the +15 network, and probably means a permanently worse route through downtown. We like elevated rail at The Transit Brief, but this is not the way.

High Concepts, Low Discipline

The imposition of a worse elevated plan through downtown Calgary — which somehow feels more absurd given it is being used for trams, chosen because they look nice when running on the street — is perhaps a lesson for us all. You can create a great plan, but if it is so slow or expensive that the political level won’t fund it — or if the political level is overly slow and conservative with funding — you may suddenly be forced to accept something much worse than if you’d compromised more, or been more pragmatic upfront.

But this also isn’t really the result of competent policymaking.

It is basically the case that because the Green Line tunnel downtown got so expensive, the province decided to dictate that it had to be above ground. But this didn’t happen because the province decided that it was the right way to send a message to a wayward city. Many of the delays on the Green Line come down to on-again, off-again funding from the province, or imposed reviews and the like. Had the project been driven forward to take advantage of federal money years earlier, you probably could have gotten the bigger tunnel for the same price as the elevated alignment might have cost. Sitting on your hands is not free, or good policy. Forcing a less-nice project that is less locally popular is an interesting fiscal enforcement mechanism — less so when the costs and delays are half on the enforcer.

The masterplanning work Alberta is doing is absolutely good. But does the same government so willing to come in and completely change a project being developed by a city think that its designs will actually be followed? A masterplan is worth much more if it’s actually largely adhered to; without that, it might be a net negative in slowing projects and spending resources. The analysis paralysis they have contributed to in Calgary does not bode well.

The various private projects in the mix really do make things feel like the Wild West: from “Prairie Link” high-speed rail, to rail from YYC to downtown Calgary and Banff, to a “hyperloop” (still not a real technology) being proposed on the outside of the masterplan. This does not help matters, and makes it unclear how serious the masterplan even is. Will these projects happen? While it’s great that there is interest, it’s hard to say. At some point, politicians need to realize that a project funded even in part by others is rare, and that a project is generally better than no project (which is the status quo for most of these lofty aspirations these days).

Spot checks for rational decision-making also turn up bad. For a while, “hydrogen rail” — a former silly obsession in Ontario — was hot in Alberta, largely as a cynical attempt to create a new market for the fossil fuels Alberta continually fails to diversify away from. Unfortunately, an alternative fuel that isn’t going to save Alberta’s energy industry is doubly sure to not save transportation (there are a small number of hydrogen train projects globally, interest is low, and projects have consistently been abandoned). The last thing we need in Canada is energy and vehicle availability to somehow make planning projects even harder.

At the same time, a constant pipeline of projects in planning and delivery is critical, and somewhat absent. While Alberta’s government talks a lot about extending the C-Train to the Calgary Airport, the project — which is basically trivial — has gone nowhere. In the time it’s been seriously talked about, Ottawa and Montreal will have christened their own airport rail link trains, and Toronto will be working on its second. Alberta has traded regular, cost-effective, and well-conceived projects that were actually delivered for “plans” which are not. While masterplanning is good, given the experience in Edmonton, better planning and design seem like they may be even more important.

It all leaves us feeling like Alberta’s housing market is a good parallel. Homes in Edmonton or Calgary are a fraction of the price of Toronto or Vancouver, which is a huge win; however, this was largely achieved through mostly unchecked sprawl and disorganized processes. No doubt there are some good things happening as well — mixed-use suburbs with a variety of densities as discussed above — but Alberta has (largely, and historically) not delivered affordability through concerted efforts unlocking challenging policies like building code reform or massive rezoning (Calgary is busy rolling one back, actually), but through simply regulating less. That approach just won’t work for transport, where coordination is key.

Bring the Fix In

Alberta fixing the situation means recognizing what it used to do well. Incremental transit builds in Edmonton and Calgary could — in time — deliver rail to each slice of each city if a mind is paid to low costs, smart design, and consistent building. Setting aside space to put tracks, and clearing the path of utilities and structures, would double down on smart decisions made in the past. Cities know where they are going to grow; setting aside space, and sometimes even constructing things like bridges or short sections of tunnel when a neighbourhood is built, could give you better infrastructure for less. These ideas have been experimented with, but not enough.

But some things also need to change — as the cities grow, old lines need to be upgraded, infrastructure needs to be replaced, and tunnels are sometimes necessary. You can’t expect transit to always subsist on limited funding and small projects; growth can’t always pay for growth. It is often the surge of riders, or of solved problems that come with a big project, that enable another period of slow, methodical building, and projects like orbital rail or BRT that will one day make sense are unlikely to be funded by distant suburban growth.

Standards, which should exist on a national scale, could help make the decision-making process more streamlined, keep everyone honest, and help reduce costs. For example, determining what type of train technology is used could be based on the length of a line and average speed; traffic numbers could decide whether a level crossing in a particular place is okay. Procurement of trains and other equipment and material should be done in bulk, possibly in collaboration with other provinces — this is made much easier when the same train that works in Toronto also works in Calgary. The responsibility for standards like this ought to be passed back to the federal government, which funds projects, but doesn’t get a lot of say in how they are managed.

For Calgary, no amount of plans will fix the fact that the city just isn’t getting transit built. The reality is that no project is perfect, but that incremental improvement — the only reliable path in that direction — is only possible if you actually have something to increment on! Transit building is a process of experiments; not everything is an overnight success, and the only real way of knowing the value of projects is building them, and then adjusting.

For Edmonton, serious soul-searching is needed. New projects have been expensive and less forward-looking. We need more “let’s build a subway for downtown” and less “let’s put tracks across two heavily trafficked urban arterials.” The city needs to recognize that the outcome of good transit will be pleasant urbanity; transit, like sewers or power lines, should not carry the weight itself of bringing about a prettier city.

The Alberta government needs to understand that while pressing pause is sometimes the right decision, and one that can control costs, this is not always the case. When the federal government is being generous with funding for transit — arguably one of the biggest things it can do for Alberta — the province should really take maximal advantage. Planning is a great idea, and planning for central station hubs in the cities in particular, but planning cannot get in the way of continual building and learning, unless there is a real concern that a build will make some other planned initiative impossible. You need to manage the dance of following plans where they make sense, and diverging as conditions change and new evidence emerges. Having transit be early is also key to making it successful. Calgary and Vancouver both did big airport expansions in the early 2010s; Vancouver’s came with great new rail transit, while Calgary still hasn’t even broken ground on this, hurting its status as a major hub. Finally, the idea of a mechanism to make locals bear the costs of local transit decisions that create delays or increase costs is interesting, but doesn’t work if the province is the one creating those delays or increases.

We remain optimistic about transit, especially rail in Alberta, but for now, the province has a lot of catching up to do.

Keeping abreast of the transit networks across all of Canada’s big cities takes a lot of time and commitment. The Transit Brief lives and dies by your support. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Thank you.

If you enjoyed this post, consider sharing “The Transit Brief”.

Share The Transit Brief

Made with love, in Canada - 2026.

Rail automation should be much more widespread in Canada, and would unlock a massive expansion in transit service as well as improvements in speed, but this doesn’t look how you imagine.

A recent CP24 story out of Toronto on cancelled suburban trains actually has lessons in it for the whole country — lessons of automation, and lessons in what is, and is not, possible. “GO Transit cancelled more than a dozen train trips Saturday. Here’s what’s impacted. (sic)”

The GO Story

The story isn’t all that complicated. Metrolinx, the regional transit agency for Toronto and increasingly all of southern Ontario — they just added daily service to Stratford, roughly 150 kilometres from Union Station — runs a significant, if not impressive, number of trains in and out of Toronto. Over the past decade or so, the number of trains being run has increased substantially — trains now run on weekends and outside of peak commute hours on five of the seven GO train lines; they are also running more frequently than ever. On the Lakeshore route from Oshawa to Burlington, and from downtown to the airport, trains run so frequently that you can just show up at a station and catch a train; it’s the subway model. Even on the lines to Barrie, Brampton, and Markham, trains run every hour or better into and out of town all day — a boon for a world where people travel for reasons other than work, and workers sometimes want to leave early or start work late.

Hourly service is decidedly basic — it’s the service you’d get between all but the most minor towns on rural rail lines in the UK (services akin to GO into London run as frequently as every few minutes) — but it’s a sea change from the days where there were just a few trains into the city in the morning and out at night.

The thing about running more trains is that you need more train drivers. The old way that GO ran trains, with a crew taking a train from the suburbs to the city, hanging out for a few hours and parking the train on the most expensive real estate in the country, then driving it back at night, is horrifically inefficient — this is something that is only really done in North America, and nowhere more than Toronto. The shifts are irritatingly split (which is expensive for Metrolinx), and a more sensible operation has some number of trains running up and down the lines all day, reducing downtown parking, giving people more options, and “sweating the assets.”

To run all of these additional services, Metrolinx and Alstom (formerly Bombardier), who run the trains on their behalf, have been aggressively training new staff. The issue is that changing operating plans (German national railway Deutsche Bahn was set to take over last year, a plan that was cancelled) and constant attrition to higher-paying jobs in freight rail (something that can largely happen because the same antiquated control systems and operating rules used on freight are also used for passenger trains in Canada) means that staffing the system is like mending a leaky ship. The complexity and multi-year training process does not help.

Don’t miss a single post. Become a subscriber today for the latest on public transport in Canada, and beyond.

Subscribe now

Train as Robot

A natural point then, given the struggle to staff the system up, is “why not just automate?” — it’s not a question we even need to raise, as netizens already are. In the age of Waymo, more and more people are asking this in cities all around the world.

And the truth is, automated trains are nothing new, but all train systems are not the same.

Not New.

Canada is actually a real trailblazer in automated train systems. The Vancouver SkyTrain network has been safely operating and growing every few years since 1986, and the system relied on trains and electronic control systems built in Canada (and since used around the world). Since then, the world has opened more and more automated train lines, with a large percentage of new subways featuring no drivers — some entire systems, such as the subways of Singapore, Sydney, and Copenhagen, entirely consist of driverless lines.

Even in Canada, Montreal opened a new network in 2023 that will soon stretch over 60 kilometres, using similar technologies as SkyTrain, and Toronto’s new Ontario Line subway will also be driverless.

... But only new.

For a long time, driverless train systems consisted only of newly-built systems designed from the ground up for automated operation.

Part of the reason automating existing train systems has not been a real priority is that most train systems do not face the same crewing challenges as GO. Train driver jobs are well paid (as one would hope for such a safety-critical job) and typically unionised, but other systems also are far less staff-intensive. At the same time, having a trained member of staff who can evacuate a train and help in the event of an emergency is not a bad thing. Driverless train systems do still have lots of staff, who become more important when a system gets busier and incidents can create bigger problems. The main benefit here is that on a driverless system, fewer staff need to be trained to drive the trains — since that’s only needed in emergencies — and more of a customer service role can be taken on.

GO trains are not like most trains; each has three staff members — two people at the front of the train, and a customer service agent in the middle who controls the doors and deploys the ramp. This status quo is not good, and it is very expensive. Staffing is one of the main costs of a rail service, and while most urban rail services have a driver and that’s it, GO trains have roughly triple the operating cost.

Share The Transit Brief

The Birth of Automation

It’s important now to note that automation is a funny term with respect to railways. While lots of train systems have drivers, many such systems are still automated to varying degrees, largely thanks to a series of progressive innovations.

The automation of train systems has largely been driven by urban subways, where lots of trains operate close together in winding tunnels where drivers cannot see far enough ahead to stop as needed in all conditions. The inability to stop in time forced the implementation of signalling systems — a term that sounds so boring that we can already imagine the light leaving your eyes — and these systems initially just indicated whether trains could proceed, or should slow or stop based on the status of the tracks. More lights (known as signal aspects) were added over time to do things like enforce speed limits. Additional equipment ensured drivers were alert by requiring them to press a button or hold onto something, while train-mounted systems meant that a driver who disobeyed a red signal could have the train’s brakes thrown on automatically.

This process of creating various safety systems eventually meant that getting a computer to drive the train was practical with the right train and track systems: once the doors close, accelerate to the speed limit of the current section of track; as you approach a station, decelerate to a standstill to line up with the platform; monitor the signals, and slow down and stop as needed along the way. The first systems, which we refer to as Grade of Automation 2, were running in the 1960s and basically turned the driver into a door operator and button pusher — pressing the start button once the doors successfully closed, and being ready to stop the train if something got in the way. This is the way most subway lines which are not driverless operate today.

SkyTrain then was just a step further along this journey. CCTV and fences made sure nothing could block the tracks between stations, and within stations, pressure plates along the tracks, and later sensors akin to those used to stop a garage door closing on you, were used to make sure nobody jumped onto the tracks. Doors closed automatically like they do on an elevator. The same fundamental technology is how people mover trains at airports work.

Driver’s Little Helper

It’s fair then to say that while only a fraction of train systems are truly driverless, a substantial minority are automated in the sense that the driver is really not a driver at all, but more an attendant just working with the automated systems of the train, and rarely actually controlling the throttle or brakes.

Automated driving has been transformational for subway systems. Computerised systems can drive as well as the best driver on their best day, every single time. This speeds up journeys, safely lets trains operate just metres apart, and is dramatically more energy efficient, while also reducing wear on trains and tracks.

The Upgrade

For a long time, there was a fairly strict divide between driverless train systems and older legacy subways, which were mostly computer-driven but required staffing to stop the trains if someone entered the track area, as well as to control the doors. However, that divide has largely come down.

Don’t miss a single post. Become a subscriber today for the latest on public transport in Canada, and beyond.

Subscribe now

In the late ‘90s, Paris did something novel with its new Line 14. While early automated train lines were limited to smaller cities, or minor lines in bigger cities, a major subway line that formed a critical transport artery for a major centre was not something that had been widely tested. Line 14 did this and was a smashing success, with trains running efficiently and safely. This project led the Paris metro authority to investigate converting older lines for full automation in order to expand capacity, but clearly also as a counter to frequent strikes from metro drivers. The honest truth is a well-functioning rail system can save money by getting rid of drivers, but will also move so many people with each run that the incentive is not as huge as it seems — this is not Uber.

As it turns out, this approach worked, and Paris managed to fully automate Metro Line 1, one of the system’s busiest, back in the 2010s. This process involved upgrades to signals and control systems, as well as new trains and platform safety doors. It managed not only to fully automate a line dating from 1900, with tight stations and curvaceous platforms, but to seriously expand capacity on the line.

The Transit Brief

These platforms could use some work.

The Vancouver SkyTrain is the most natural place to start retrofitting platform screen doors onto Canadian rail systems. Vancouver is a leading transit system in North America, and this is yet another thing to lead on…

Read more

a month ago · 22 likes · 9 comments · Reece

Since then, Paris, and various other cities have automated more metro lines, such that it’s now fairly standard, if not common practice.

Can we do it on GO?

Automating the GO trains as you might imagine is a different story.

While not necessarily an issue, no diesel-powered passenger rail system has been fully automated — subways, after all, are all electrically powered. This is because diesel rail systems are shockingly energy inefficient, and automating a system before you’ve electrified it — something Metrolinx is working towards for GO at an agonizingly slow pace — is a bit like trying to install a theatre room in your house before you have running water.

Level crossings are a bigger issue. No current fully automated rail system has any, but the GO train system has quite a few. While with modern technology clearly there is no technical reason these need to be a barrier, the issue is of the same type as the lack of electrification. A frequent urban rail system should not use heavy, slow trains running on dinosaur juice, and probably also shouldn’t have level crossings where pedestrians could be hit and cars could block trains. These issues are just much more urgent and pressing than getting rid of drivers, even if you could work around them.

The biggest problem is honestly the lack of any modern signalling system on GO, or for that matter any mainline railway in Canada, which means we have a shocking number of train derailments, constant near misses that could easily become mass casualty events, and a rail system which most developed countries would find unacceptably unsafe.

Right now, we need two people at the front of every GO train because things like speed restrictions and differing conditions are not automatically pushed to drivers as they run the trains through different areas, but are provided as a paper book which one person must read and cross-reference with railside mileposts (really — and yes, we use imperial measures for our railways).

That technology that would stop a subway from going past a red signal and derailing or slamming into another train? It does not exist on GO, where trains can carry thousands of people. Every few months we seem to roll the dice again, as industry experts remind us this was a solved problem in Europe over 50 years ago, and our rail system would violate all manner of rules over there — rules that, as experts remind us, “were written in blood.”

While experts and regulators note that Canada’s rail systems are currently “safe” — an assertion based on the fact that we have not had a major crash — all it would take is a derailed GO train killing tens, if not hundreds of people to change that. It is something which our systems do not currently prevent in the same ways as those in places like Europe or China. A disaster like that would instantly make clearing house at the regulators and imposing rules — such as those that exist across most of the developed world — an immediate political imperative.

Fortunately for GO, a new signalling system — the very good, highly customizable, multi-vendor, and internationally used European Train Control System (ETCS) — is in the very earliest stages of deployment. This is the system that will not only eliminate most of the aforementioned safety risks and leapfrog us to a modern system not even rolled out everywhere in Europe, but creates the basic infrastructure to control trains digitally and monitor trains’ exact locations in real time. While ETCS does not make the GO trains driverless, it should let just one person operate a train. With a much lighter workload allowing that driver to control doors when stopped at a station, alongside raised platforms to allow wheelchair access at every door without a human-deployed ramp, we could in theory get trains down to one staff member. It also creates the basic infrastructure that you would one day need to transition to full driverless operation, which gets closer to reality with each level crossing we remove.

This form of labour-saving automation doesn’t mean job losses. To the contrary, deploying a system like this would mean much simpler driver training and a clear path to take those other two staff members and train them to also drive trains, enabling far more service.

The Rest

It’s worth quickly looking at the potential for automation across the rest of the country’s rails.

Other suburban train systems exist in Montreal and Vancouver, but the very limited service, lack of infrastructure ownership, and heavy freight traffic probably make any automation here significantly less likely than the already years-out GO system.

On the subway front, Vancouver is of course fully automated. Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa all have a mix of “subway” lines with no level crossings that would be good candidates, and in each city at least one line already has Grade of Automation 2 operation, enabling frequent service with minimal driver input — each within spitting distance of full automation. The deployment of such a system on Line 1 in Toronto was what helped justify removing one staff member from trains on that part of the system. Montreal, having a very similar metro system to Paris, would be a shoe-in to automate a line, particularly the under-extension and upgrade Blue Line — Vancouver importantly reminds us that this can be done without platform doors, even if those are obvious for other reasons. That Montreal is not doing this not only highlights a lack of vision and awareness for goings-on across the Atlantic, but also the huge cost savings that the city is missing out on by failing to make up for smaller, less expensive stations by running the trains more often.

For the light rail lines operating in Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton, and Waterloo, automation is unlikely to happen anytime soon since there are lots of level crossings and interactions with pedestrians and cyclists. Again, it may be technically possible, but it both seems more likely and responsible that we follow jurisdictions in Europe on this, and none of them are doing such automation at any scale, much less using off-the-shelf products. The Eglinton Crosstown light rail is a strange case because it has Grade of Automation 2 operations, but only where it is fully separate from traffic and, in effect, running as a subway.

So?

And yet, automation is still a worthwhile pursuit. For GO trains and trams, more safety systems would be welcomed and, as you can see, would lay the groundwork for future driverless operation decades down the road. For the subway systems in our biggest cities, the case, like with platform doors, is obvious. Canada is very willing to spend capital dollars on new lines and upgrades in our cities, but is stingy with operating funding that actually runs trains and buses and gets bums in seats. Investing dollars in automation upgrades where easily doable would convert capex dollars into opex, and make getting around our cities easier.

For the GO trains, let’s just focus on not having two people up front.

Keeping abreast of the transit networks across all of Canada’s big cities takes a lot of time and commitment. The Transit Brief lives and dies by your support. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Thank you.

If you enjoyed this post, consider sharing “The Transit Brief”.

Share The Transit Brief

Made with love, in Canada - 2026.

One of the more concerning things we have heard is that riding the London Underground is like smoking. Claims vary on how much smoking, but that does not sound good: After all, grandma, schoolchildren, and actual smokers, as well as regular healthy adults ride the London Underground and subway systems around the world every day.

Recently, the conversation was sparked again when an observer across the Atlantic suggested that …

“subway air is slowly killing NYC”.

Of course the reality isn't anywhere as hyperbolic as the tweet (honestly just generally true about most tweets). While the air quality in the New York City Subway could legitimately stand to be much better, New Yorkers pretty widely used the subway and live longer than the average American. The truth is, we all are exposed to things that aren't particularly healthy for us every single day, and our bodies generally handle this stuff with ease. What's more significant for cities is just how much better healthcare is, and how much more wealth exists in them.

Two Tales

In reality, subway air quality really exists in two separate dimensions: that of the individual, and that of the city writ large.

The simple reality for the individual is that most subway stations in the world which lack sealed tracks and tunnels thanks to modern platform screen door implementations (see last week’s article for more on such systems) will feature measurable, and often significant platform air pollution with fine particulate matter — tiny particles suspended in the air. Studies have found this in cities from Helsinki to Toronto and London to New York and Paris. Particles come off of brakes, wheels, and rails, and become suspended in the air, and this effect is made much worse when trains operate at high frequencies during peak periods.

Share The Transit Brief

This is obviously not a good thing — that’s a major selling point to public transit. However, it is less a big deal than it might seem, and context is important.

While the amount of particulate pollution on subway platforms ranges from totally acceptable in places like Singapore where modern screen doors are used, to admittedly pretty bad in some very busy deep stations on the London Underground, the reality of how people use these systems is similar. A passenger enters a station, waits on a platform for a few minutes, and then gets on a train; they then get off at a station at the other end. The amount of time spent in stations for most commuters is likely under 20 minutes per day.

Subway trains are actually where commuters spend much more of their time, and while not perfect, air quality on the latest trains is ofter significantly better than on station platforms. This is because trains feature powerful HVAC systems which pull cabin air through filters cleaning it. New subway models in many cities are spec’d with higher-quality air filters in part because we know subway system air quality is poor.

Overall system air quality has also often improved over time, as regenerative braking and smoother acceleration and braking curves brought by automatic operation all work to minimize wear. In Toronto’s case, using modern trains has cut station air pollution in half. And pollution level on trains, even without the most modern HVAC technology, is a fraction of those lower platform levels and while not particularly great also probably not a big deal.

It’s important to recognize the reality that people are exposed to varying levels of air pollution every single day. For the commuter, this means while you may spend a few minutes per day in genuinely poor air quality on a subway platform, the average air quality of your commute is unlikely to be particularly bad, and the average air quality of your day is probably mostly not affected.

For Cities

The first mistake people make when freaking people out about subways is ignoring the reality that people need to go places. Obviously cycling and walking do not release significant air pollution, but these modes of transportation are never going to work for everybody particularly in our largest cities. You simply cannot have a large city, where people regularly mix and mingle across social and professional lines, where people don't travel distances that require mechanized transport.

And so then looking at a polluted subway in a vacuum makes no sense, you must compare it to the alternative and in most cases the alternative is much worse. Even when you look at other public transportation options, diesel trains or buses are going to emit significantly more pollution, and yet even these modes of transportation will emit far less pollution per passenger transported than private automobiles.

Don’t miss a single post. Become a subscriber today for the latest on public transport in Canada, and beyond.

Subscribe now

It's also important to make clear that the actual amount of pollution coming off of an electric train is miniscule. The reason subway air quality is bad is not because subways produce tons of pollution, but that most subway systems have a lot of tunnels and particularly in older systems these are often quite poorly ventilated. It's worth noting that even famous subway systems like London and New York spend much of their track length above ground — London is more than half above ground — where pollution is rapidly dispersed and a much smaller factor.

By comparison, road transport is so hideously polluting that there are serious deleterious health effects to spending time around even semi-major roadways, and this is despite the vast majority of roads (unlike subways) being above the ground. Ironically, that someone can step out of a polluted subway station and onto a street with much better air quality is something which is only possible because of the subway running beneath the street. Cities without that type of rail rapid transit are dependent on far more polluting alternatives.

In this context then, the alternative to a transportation system built around subways, where passengers may briefly experience rather bad air quality in their use of said system, is still significantly better for the overall air quality of a city than road-based transport. And because subways are so high-capacity, each can replace tens of lanes of arterial traffic that permanently expose residents and workers along them to unhealthy air.

So then, subways are (for what are obvious reasons) significantly better for overall urban air quality, even if the price of this is small amounts of exposure for their users to poor air quality. Looking at the macro, it seems that the benefits as evidenced by cities generally exceeding national average life expectancies, significantly outweigh the costs.

Read more

Platform screen doors are a basic railway safety technology that prevents passengers on a platform from falling or jumping off it onto the tracks. Screen doors are sometimes called platform edge doors or platform barriers, but the system is simple.

A barrier stands at the edge of the platform, anywhere from hip height all the way up to a glass wall that runs floor to ceiling. This barrier wall is typically made of glass and will feature sliding doors on it, typically also made of glass, which align with the doors of trains. The doors on the platform barrier only open in sync with train doors, ensuring that passengers — and any object of significant size — cannot end up on the tracks.

You Elevate Me

A good comparison to platform screen doors is the outer doors on an elevator. At one point, elevators just used a retractable fence (though rare “paternoster” lifts featured no doors at all), but eventually, automatic doors were added to both the moving elevator cab and the opening in the wall on each floor where you board. One could look at the status quo for trains at stations without screen doors like elevators where the cab doors were fitted, but not the doors where you wait at each floor.

If this seems incredibly dangerous — it would be; someone might look down and lose their balance, or be clipped by a fast-moving cab, or something like a cart or stroller could roll off the edge. The thing is, the status quo at most urban transit stations is not much better, even if it might feel that way. Admittedly, death, while possible, is less certain, but injury is highly likely. For one, platforms are typically a few feet above the rails, and a fall could easily injure you depending on how you landed. But then, at track level, you could be hit by a train — which you are highly unlikely to survive — or be fatally electrocuted.

Now, we are generally supportive of platform screen doors wherever practical. In some Asian jurisdictions, they are universal or near-universal; many systems and lines were new enough that the doors could be installed from day one, and retrofitting has been done widely — most notably in Japan. While we will mostly talk about metro rail in this article, the reality in Asia these days is that increasingly even trams, regional, and high-speed trains are all being put behind some type of moving safety barrier.

In the Americas, screen doors unfortunately remain a rarity. While screen doors were first used in the late 20th century in places like Singapore, even relatively newly opened projects like Los Angeles’s B and D subway lines from the 1990s and the Canada Line in Vancouver — opened in 2009 — do not feature them. To some extent, this feels cultural: Once exposed to the doors, they become a basic expectation — like with the elevators. Transit operators who have exposure to the technology know about the delays, injuries, and deaths they prevent, and how simple they are to install. Plus, officials planning a project are more likely to look to other systems within a few hours’ flight.

But times are a-changin’. In 2015, Toronto opened its airport rail link line, and the two busiest stations at either end featured platform screen doors. This example highlights another big potential benefit: in environments where it might get particularly cold or hot (this was the major initial motivator for the installation of doors in Singapore), screen doors let you maintain station platforms as climate-controlled spaces. Just a few years later, Montreal started a phased opening of its 67-kilometre-long REM light-metro network — largely based on SkyTrain — where every single station features screen doors. The same will be true of Toronto’s new “Ontario” subway line when it opens sometime in the early 2030s.

First Mover Disadvantage

What’s interesting is that Vancouver used to be the leader in Canada on transit technology. While Toronto and Montreal are only now doing automated rail lines — both the REM and Ontario Line will be fully automated — this was a core feature of SkyTrain from its opening 40 years ago. In fact, the lack of screen doors in Vancouver is likely in no small part because it was automated so early, because the doors were just first being used around the time SkyTrain opened. It is kind of sad to think that Vancouver, which used to be a global leader on transit automation, is now in some senses behind other Canadian cities — not to mention those in Asia — on a basic safety technology.

Interestingly, almost every single other automated system has had screen doors installed from the very beginning, such as on Sydney’s new metro or Line 14 in Paris — the number that did not can pretty much be counted on one hand, and most of those have started or plan to retrofit stations.

Don’t miss a single post. Become a subscriber today for the latest on public transport in Canada and beyond.

Subscribe now

Get On With It Already

So at this point, Vancouver really needs to come up with a plan to start upgrading its stations with screen doors. This is necessary for safety, national keeping-up-with-the-Joneses, and because it is one of the (thankfully increasingly fewer) things one experiences when visiting Asian subway systems where you just say, “Well, Vancouver doesn’t have those.” Vancouver runs a world-class transit system that it can be proud of — we having looked at transit on multiple continents and in dozens of cities — but this is one major way that the system remains less than.

The Kelana Jaya Line in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia uses the unique SkyTrain metro technology, and several stations on the line feature screen doors, which are a universal feature of the newer lines in the city.

And it is not just the forward-looking reasons. Cities like London, New York, and Toronto, with older, more crowded systems and potentially rowdier populaces, regularly experience dangerous crowding and track fires that cause delays and disruptions that could largely be solved with screen doors.

That is not to mention the immense costs of people taking their lives on transit systems by suicide — a tragic reality I’ve experienced firsthand in Vancouver. This is a horrible thing that happens regularly, traumatizes people, changes lives, and costs the transit system and society a ton of money.

How To

The easiest thing politicians and transit leaders could do to get the ball moving on fixing this problem would be a forward-looking commitment that any future rail project in the region will feature platform barriers. This commitment would cost nothing and would set the tone for fixing the existing system.

Putting screen doors into a new system also unlocks some things you otherwise cannot do. Platform clutter can be reduced by embedding ad boards and wayfinding, as well as adding speakers and lighting into the platform barrier wall. You can also design climate-controlled stations that stay cool in summer and warm in winter, and even filter out air pollution from things like wildfires and the trains’ wheels.

There is also the potential to reduce station costs by placing structural elements like columns in the dead space between set train door positions — something you can see on Montreal’s REM.

The major lift is not building new stations with screen doors, but incorporating them into the nearly 70 (when the Surrey-Langley SkyTrain and Broadway Subway open) existing stations.

While retrofitting is not entirely trivial, it has been done in many places. Thousands of Japanese and Chinese subway and railway stations have had barriers retrofitted, and more recently, cities like Paris, Vienna, Sydney, Madrid, and more have been putting doors into older stations.

The work in Vancouver is also much easier than in Montreal or Toronto. For one, Vancouver’s stations are smaller. Trains in Vancouver max out at 15 doors, while those in Toronto and Montreal have 24 and 27 respectively, nearly doubling the cost to install. At the same time, Vancouver benefits from newer stations that are mostly above ground. Most stations in Toronto and Montreal were built before SkyTrain existed, and Toronto is 80% underground, while every inch of the Montreal Metro, including several of the yards, is subterranean. Working underground and on older infrastructure means worrying more about things like ventilation, and discovering other problems — including structural ones — while you are undertaking the work. Vancouver, with all of the station and system upgrade work it has done bit by bit over the years, should also be well-equipped to take a program like this on.

While these retrofits are not easy, and neither Toronto nor Montreal has done any yet, it is a bit disappointing that while screen doors have been so widely discussed in Montreal — where designs were worked up before the pandemic for an installation at 10 stations, and Toronto — where funding for them is a plank for at least one major mayoral candidate, they are barely on the map in Vancouver.

The natural question to ask is what kind of doors Vancouver should install. Floor-to-ceiling models are nice in many ways and can distribute some weight off of a platform edge, potentially reducing the amount of reinforcement that may be needed. One option widely used in Japan is hip-height barriers, but these feel like a mistake because they could still be vaulted over by someone determined. The best bet is likely a roughly head-height barrier like those used on Honolulu’s — SkyTrain-inspired — HART system, or the Sydney Metro (at least on the above-ground and retrofitted stations). These doors both create excellent security and still allow airflow over the top, removing potential ventilation issues.

The most obvious place to start deploying these in Vancouver is probably the Canada line. The route has some of the newest infrastructure in the city and a single train design across its fleet allowing constant door positioning.

You could then move on to the Expo Line. The route has many of the busiest stations in the system with the most crowding, and so it would disproportionately benefit. The challenge historically would have been the mixture of different trains running on the line, but the large number of Mark 5 trains TransLink has ordered could likely field a full service on the line and so can also provide a consistent door spacing.

In terms of price, while Toronto officials have quoted a very hefty $5 billion CAD to retrofit that entire system, the number is subject to typical “cost disease.” Vancouver also benefits from fewer, smaller stations. Even if things were as grossly inflated as Toronto’s, the price would be more like $2.4 billion. Paris has installed screen doors in century-old stations for just a few million CAD per station, so at their prices, Vancouver could do its whole system — leaping past London, New York, Toronto, and yes, Paris — for less than a billion dollars.

Its worth mentioning installation and that process as well. You tend to see that the North American transit systems — Vancouver included, are pretty conservative about new things like screen doors. They will often say things that make the process seem more onerous than it is. “If we get screen doors we would need to remove the old sensors and create new power systems” which is like someone looking at an EV and saying “well I’d need to not have my gas car anymore, and I’d need to find a plug in my garage”. Installing the doors while service continues to operate has happened in plenty of cities and need not mean frequent massive shutdowns over long periods of time. What it does mean is things like brackets appearing at the edge of the platform over weeks and a period of time where screen doors probably only cover part of a platform.

The Thales SelTrac signalling system used on SkyTrain is truly excellent and better than many newer signalling systems, and a number of other systems that use it — such as the Jubilee Line in London — have screen doors.

However, there is a catch. SelTrac has somewhat poor platform precision, which you can see with poor platform alignment on the aforementioned Jubilee Line.

Vancouver could — as London does — live with it, but a system of tags mounted to the trains and sensors on the platforms could tell a screen door system with slightly wider than needed doors exactly how much to open for perfect alignment every time.

All of this might feel like a lot, but the reality is pretty simple. Screen doors are good, and widely used around the world — virtually universally in Asia and on automated systems. Vancouver is also an unusually good transit city for North America. Pairing a good technology with an ambitious city that cares about transit while many of its peers don’t is a slam dunk.

Keeping abreast of the transit networks across all of Canada’s big cities takes a lot of time and commitment. The Transit Brief lives and dies by your support. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Thank you.

If you enjoyed this post, consider sharing “The Transit Brief”.

Share The Transit Brief

Made with love, in Canada - 2026.

The city is simultaneously building the REM (well — the CDPQ, Quebec’s public sector pension plan, is building it) for about 150–200 million CAD per kilometre, while the STM, the city's transit agency, is currently building its Blue Line metro extension for nearly ten times more — close to 1.5 billion CAD per kilometre, some of the highest prices ever seen for a subway. Both systems are “metros” in that they feature trains that travel on dedicated tracks free of cars or pedestrian crossings at high frequency. While some of the difference in price is easily explained — but not justified — by differences in train length or tunnelling, much of it is not.

The issue of booming construction costs is a massive problem in Canada and has traditionally not gotten a lot of thoughtful media coverage. You’d hear that costs were skyrocketing, budgets had been blown, and often raw numbers would be given, but they’d never be contextualized. This is fortunately starting to change. A recent Montreal Gazette article is literally titled “Costs for public transit projects in Montreal are out of control, experts say”.

While I am genuinely happy to see this getting any serious attention in legacy media, I think the article lacks substance. They are right that costs are high and at least show how much they have gone up adjusting for inflation — but they do not mention:

• Costs are now on the order of ten times higher than the global median.

• The REM, which was going to be further expanded before the city shut that down, has come in dramatically closer to those global median prices.

• The REM is also a metro system.

The paper does talk to several academics about the problem and they absolutely get the main issue right.

“The costs are through the roof for transit projects,” Siemiatycki said. “It’s out of control, and worse, it’s out of line with what our peers are doing. And this is troubling for all sorts of reasons.”

However, there are some pretty glaring holes in their analysis — or at least what went to post — which I will discuss in a moment.

Don’t miss a single post. Become a subscriber today for the latest on public transport in Canada, and beyond.

Subscribe now

What’s worse, is that they cite an STM official on the Blue Line project who gave the following almost hard-to-believe statement:

“We have proven that the costs of the project are in line with the (worldwide average),” Chartier said. “I think we’re even a little more competitive.”

To start with what I hope is obvious, it is deeply concerning that someone speaking to large metro projects in this country is either ignorant of the reality that their project is dramatically above the worldwide average, or lying to the public. I’m not sure what is worse.

Read more

Where I’m At.

Over a year ago, I started regularly posting on this blog again.

Honestly, I was unsure of what to call it and what exactly I’d be writing. I had a baby to take care of, so that was the least of my concerns. However, thanks to the CWELCC daycare program, I’ve had a lot more time in the last few months.

In that time, I’ve read a lot, listened to a lot, and thought a lot about what I care about and how I can best contribute. I love talking about public transport and cities, and I think I play an important role in it. I am not an engineer, and I’m not sure I have the answers to all the big problems of public transit, but I am quite confident in the questions.

Transit is critically important. One in ten Canadian commuters uses it to get to work, and that number is much higher in cities. Well over a million people in Toronto and Montreal — centres for much of our service-based economy — take transit every single day. Furthermore, with housing increasingly being constructed without parking, greater urbanization, and an aging population, more and more people will regularly need transit. Housing is just one of the many critical challenges we are facing as a country in which transit plays a big role. Others that come to mind include climate change and the environment, health, and productivity and economic growth.

What to do?

So then, this blog will have a new name and a refined mission, as well as an elevated look and operation. This is now The Transit Brief, and the goal is simple: be the source for news on public transport in Canada and beyond.

While there are many things I could do, elucidating the details of infrastructure builds and transit operations is just something I am uniquely passionate about — and, dare I say, good at.

A big problem is that in the old media landscape, more cities had reporters who would have covered their transit systems. That is far less common now. What is worse is that even when we do have reporters, they get thrown onto a beat that they probably haven’t spent the last two decades thinking about, and may not even be interested in. Outsiders can be good, but it also makes it hard to get into the nitty-gritty.

It’s like dropping Grandma onto an ice rink and asking her to referee an NHL game.

And so, I think doubling down on helping everyone, but especially those with deep questions—like journalists, policymakers, and those in the industry—is the right call. Fundamentally, there are lots of people interested in digging tunnels and building infrastructure. But far fewer are asking where we should dig tunnels, if that infrastructure is the best use of scarce dollars, and why we couldn’t do it for less if we humbled ourselves to the South Koreans, Italians, or Chileans!

If you want to help me get the ball rolling on this project, sharing this post and suggesting people consider subscribing helps immensely.

Share The Transit Brief

The Build.

Creating something that I hope can be an institution that pushes Canada, and perhaps the world writ large, ahead on public transit means doing more. I’ve more or less written an article every week for the last several years, but this project means committing to more — and more in-depth — articles every week. Right now my cadence is weekly, but I’d love for it to be thrice weekly. I also think I can make my critiques (and periodic celebrations) more pointed and sophisticated.

Now, part of writing more means being more timely. I will try to get articles out for most major domestic transit news events in short order, which can help people determine how they feel. My hope is to cover all the large Canadian cities — we currently have seven with rail transit, though that will increase to ten in the next decade — as well as relevant things going on in smaller centres.

While I am most intimately familiar with transit in Canada, I also have tons of knowledge of big international cities, as well as smaller centres where interesting stuff is happening. I hope to talk about these places regularly (think several times per month) to keep abreast of global transit developments, and of course, I always like to make comparisons to cities globally where I think it is relevant — especially because legacy media doesn’t seem able to do this.

I also want to improve my quality. I plan on putting a lot more effort into each piece, as well as doing more collaborations and adding more media to posts as well. I think you will notice the difference.

I have slightly grander aspirations as well. People have long asked for an audio version of posts they can listen to on commutes, and people also seem to really enjoy podcast-type content. This is something I want to do, although I would expect this around fall time, as I take time to get the setup and production right.

If you already subscribed to Next Metro, your subscription is seamlessly transferred over. A share is still helpful though!

If I want to make all these changes, I need to grow my base of both paid and unpaid subscribers — at least by a factor of two. That might sound lofty, but if everyone who read this became a subscriber, I would not be far off my goal. Free subscriptions help immensely, too! The reality is, that I can only do this to the extent people care, and want this to exist.

Subscribe now

On the paid subscription side, if you care about this mission of an independent media operation covering transit in Canada, and just generally being a force for making these systems better, your support means a lot. If my writing brings you value by teaching you new things and keeping you up to date, maybe it is easily financially justified. And maybe if you are in the industry or helping to set policy, it can be an indispensable tool. Group subscriptions for everything from friend groups to advocacy organizations to companies are available, and discounts for bulk subscriptions can be discussed at: reece@thetransitbrief.net

Get 20% off a group subscription

If you just happen to really care about the mission or want to have a transformative impact on this project, you can consider a founding membership or even a direct donation. Founding members and donors can choose to have their names placed on the “About” page as supporters. Should things grow large enough, I might even consider hiring people, but that is off in the future.

Keeping abreast of the transit networks across all of Canada’s big cities takes a lot of time and commitment. The Transit Brief lives and dies by your support. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Thank you.

Made with love, in Canada - 2026.

Now, the reality when it comes to transit is that bigger, usually does mean better. I mean, when most people think of amazing transit they do think about places like Tokyo and Paris, where the networks are not only massive but highly redundant.

I've talked about this before, but I think redundancy is a really underrated part of great transit networks. Giving you multiple ways to get from one place to another is important because when you need to shut down for inevitable maintenance, when there are inevitable problems, or when you want to reroute people because of an event or something, having redundancy is what allows you to do that. So the biggest and best transit networks tend to have redundancy, and that means that not only do you get an incredible reach of transit in terms of literal places, but the sort of consistent availability of transit to go to said places is also expanded.

And of course, even smaller cities can provide some redundancy, because at the end of the day you still have streets and roads and can run buses, but that sort of decline in quality from a train to a bus is the sort of thing you try to avoid. The best transit networks aren't really best because they provide a single static thing, but instead because they provide a sort of hierarchy of usable infrastructure that can flex over time and with changing demand and provide the best possible experience for as much of the time as possible.

Of course, like in all things, there are exceptions — New York comes to mind as a subway system that feels rather run down and that clearly needs absolute transformation, if it's to meet the standards of the city it serves. Especially when you consider that there are lots of similarly old subway systems like London, Madrid, and Berlin, which are in much better condition. That being said, it's also pretty obvious that despite New York's shortcomings that it's also the best system in the US and it's the biggest system in the US so clearly this rule does hold quite consistently. Bigger systems do really tend to feel better — perhaps because when you put aside quality-of-life, they do get you to lots of places lots of the time (New York more than most).

Don’t miss a single post. Become a subscriber today for the latest on transport in Toronto, Canada, and beyond.

Subscribe now

But while largeness often does correlate with some basic level of quality, what isn't the case is that small systems are universally bad. In fact, I think that we under-appreciate small-large transit systems (smaller cities or systems, at least relative to the multi-hundred station ten million-plus urban area cases we often talk about). In some ways, we inhibit ourselves from having a lot more good transit because we have this false belief that if a transit system is smaller it can't necessarily be great. In particular, the Anglo world — which ought to fix its near total inability to build for rational prices — need not feel that its cities are doomed to be in a different tier from the sort of cities people like to travel to on European holidays.

Take for example Stockholm with its T-bana system. Stockholm is frequently acclaimed as having one of the best transportation systems in the world, but the T-bana isn't so much larger than the mass transit systems of many North American cities, which often get far less respect — for example San Francisco, Boston or Toronto.

It's true that these cities really are more comparable in terms of significance and population to the larger cities out there like Madrid or Berlin or perhaps even London — But I think it's wrong to assume that transportation scale needs to be identical across the Atlantic. It really is the case that North American cities have astronomically larger road networks. And these road networks can move a lot of traffic including public transport traffic!

I really don't think that these cities would need to have transport networks the size of Madrid. To qualify as having good public transport, aiming for Stockholm levels would still mean that they're pretty good — definitely in the top percentiles internationally. And that's because ultimately what makes it transportation system good is less at scale, but it's ability to connect to important places and cities only have so many important places.

Sure, do I think that Boston or Toronto need to grow their Subway networks? Absolutely, but maybe more like 20% rather than 200%. There are a few key destinations which are disconnected and which are egregiously disconnected, but many places could be served with other modes of public transportation. Astute viewers might point out that Stockholm isn't just limited to its metro —system, but it actually doesn't have so much of any of the other transport modes either. There is a throug- running regional-suburban railway system which is quite impressive, but it only has a couple of lines; there are interurban trains which terminate near the core of the city, but these also are not such massive lines. Stockholm has trams too but, only a handful of lines. The point I'm making here is that all of what Stockholm has is in the achievable range for the North American cities I’ve mentioned (and I guess some other European ones) and probably even today if more funding was available, much less if you actually sorted out all of the construction cost issues we have. In fact, I'd actually argue that Toronto is pretty much on the trajectory to get there with our big new subway build.

I think a big part of the problem that leads to people thinking the thing that matters most is what your subway map looks like is that that's the kind of thing that does well on Reddit (as you can see at the top of the post). But, I think in reality the things people experience using a system are really the cleanliness and modernity of the stations, whether people are throwing trash on the ground, the level of service frequency, the ticket and fare options and general ease of use. Basically none of these are dependent on having a massive network.

Obviously a smaller system in a bigger city is going to have problems if it becomes very successful, you'll have congestion and potentially the issue of having under-built your infrastructure. But, these are problems that again and again, I try to remind people are kind of good to have. It's much better to have a system that's well used and under pressure than one that's completely deserted for much of the day and the week. The latter case is what many American transit systems currently face: they aren't necessarily insubstantial, but because they lack ridership they lack the political constituency or even the practical constituency to justify massive investments and energy expenditures in improving the system.

And you need not only look at European cities, I pretty regularly try to bring Hong Kong up with people as a system that actually isn't all that large but is famously extremely good. Now the MTR does have over 200 km of track length. But it has less than 100 stations which means that several American cities including Chicago and even LA actually have more.

The fact that it almost sounds absurd to compare the Hong Kong MTR to the Chicago ‘L’ or LA Metro Rail is the whole point. There's this massive gap in quality, which can be bridged to some extent, but only if serious and concerted effort is made. Of course to some extent it's hard to bridge a gap, when in large part the gap pertains to planning and network design. Los Angeles doesn't have rail to many of the biggest trip generators in the region and in some cases doesn't even have plans to build it, a city like Toronto, or Boston with a smaller network, but great connectivity is a lot better set up to graduate to the quality of Hong Kong or Stockholm.

Now, I can already hear friends in Hong Kong mentioning that the MTR is in a kind of relative decline and is suffering from the cost disease that prevents systems in. English-speaking places elsewhere from building much new infrastructure. But, at the end of the day, it's still the MTR. It's still an excellent system that's highly connective and which most cities in the world would happily trade for. The reality is that while Hong Kong could maybe benefit from a couple of new rail lines. It currently survives without them and thrive is probably more appropriate word. You can always have more and more is always nice. But Hong Kong for what it has is absolutely fantastic and if the world (and North America in particular) could add 5 or 10 new Hong Kongs or Stockholms, public transport and all kinds of things would be in a much better place.

Sitting down for hours each week to keep in the loop, research and write about transport takes a lot of time. This blog lives and dies by your support.

Thank you.

Cheers.

Get 30% off for 1 year

Toronto Line 5 has now been open for almost half a year, and given it’s come up a few times recently, I thought it would be good to start the conversation on fixing the things that need fixing.

I can already imagine a politician groaning or saying no more money is being spent on the Crosstown now that it’s open and given that it’s been having all these debacles, but most of the issues I’m going to raise were known problems for years before the line opened and really should be fixed if we want to unlock all the value we can from this project, which has gotten so much time and money from us already. I’ve structured the post to start with the simpler things we should do sooner, and ended with a modestly complex (okay, not really, but it feels that way in the exhausted Toronto context) engineering problem.

None of this is to say that I don’t think that Line 5 is good or useful — it’s pretty good and very useful, and as frequencies increase (in some cases dramatically) on the 5 connected rail lines (this will increase to 7 by the 2030s), it will become even more useful and highly-used.

Operations and Technology

The most obvious thing that needs to be fixed on Line 5 are the dog awful operations, and the often not working next train screens. Line 5, which I’ve largely used in its central subway section operates like a hybrid of the TTC streetcar (a bunched mess with long waits sometimes, and two trains in a row at others) and the subway. This is madness because the line has the infrastructure of a subway for more than half of its length.

I would chalk these operational problems up to a combination of the TTC’s typical lackadaisical operations, and delays from the surface section propagating throughout the line (which is partly also a TTC ops problem). The TTC and city insisted that they had to run this line because of their great expertise in running transit, and now they have even more egg on their faces. The simplest improvement that could be made is running only about half of trains to Kennedy over the surface tram section of the line, which would still be a passable frequency, while turning every other train at Laird and focusing on frequency and reliability in the section where the city’s insistence on poor signal ops and bad intersection design cannot be blamed for problems.

For the display screens, that’s on Metrolinx. This is not new technology, and Vancouver had better screens a decade ago. I get that the signalling system creates problems, but then maybe building a tram with a not heavily-used Bombardier CBTC system is something you should have put up more of a fight about.

Climate Control

This one is hard. Alex Glista recently posted about stations on the line being sopping wet. The problem here seems pretty severe because that flooring looks extremely slippery when wet.

One thing that would have massively helped this is full screen doors, which would allow the platform to be sealed off and climate controlled. Most other serious cities would have done this for a project like this, especially since the line has that CBTC signalling system I mentioned earlier.

The issue here I think is that Toronto gets extremely humid in summers, and these Crosstown stations are deep and cool, because they actually are pretty well-ventilated, that humid air condenses onto surfaces in the station. Targeting the worst offenders with insulation and possibly mild heating seems like a workable solution — but I’m not an engineer. We could have done things the right way, we didn’t, and now we need to live with it.

Wayfinding

Another thing we’ve oddly messed up is wayfinding. This one is perhaps less severe, but as I mentioned in earlier posts, and earlier in this post, some signs are obstructed, some digital signs don’t work, and everything is on an older version of the Metrolinx design standard.

It’s also the case as someone pointed out to me recently that at Eglinton-Yonge, and probably in other places, transfers to the subway are not clearly marked, and for some reason we insist on using a symbol for subway that is not the universal one, but one based on a type of train that doesn’t even run on our busiest subway line!

There are also the more active bits of wayfinding. Announcements are often inaudible and generally overzealous, and it seems still not every station has an indicator that trains stop at the end rather than the middle of the platform (something else the signalling system appears to bless us with).

Don’t miss a single post. Become a subscriber today for the latest on transport in Toronto, Canada, and beyond.

Subscribe now

I guess I’m just frustrated because the TTC drops the ball endlessly with wayfinding, and Metrolinx had a chance here to show that it could knock it out of the park and I’m not sure they did. Time will tell whether they hear feedback and make fixes, which is all anyone can ever hope for, and which has not exactly been in the repertoire in Toronto historically.

We can and should also go further. Metrolinx should incorporate GO departure times onto future train designs like they do in Berlin.

And the TTC ought to fix its maps, which dishonestly present Lines 5 and 6 as if they are both entirely subway, when in reality only one of them is partially a subway. The fix is probably a thinner or otherwise different looking line where these operate as trams, especially because we can’t even pretend that these lines are particularly fast trams. When making a change, it would also be worth considering prepending the line numbers with ‘T’, so line 6 would become T6 and the eastern half of line 5 would be T5 — with maps making it clear that T5 continues as line 5 west of Sunnybrook Park.

Trains

The trains themselves also need work and I wish we’d use the need to order more trains for the western section of line 5 to make those changes. I don’t think we will so this will need to wait ... quite a while until demand grows enough to order even more vehicles (hopefully that happens quickly, but I’m being conservative here).

When that does happen, we should order nice trains, not what we have now which feels like the cover of the train catalogue from 20 years ago. New trains should be colourful, not the horribly drab grey (the line has this nice bright red-orange colour all over that could have looked awesome on the trains, and then they just made them grey — with a surprising but nice splash of blue inside for the seats). They should be designed with modern information screens, and more of them. They should have things like onboard chargers and possibly dedicated luggage space to cater to a possible airport extension.

They also need a completely different design for passenger circulation. Ideally we would get two trains which can be connected into a fully walkthrough train, similar to what Seattle is looking at (we might want to consider Siemens ourselves). These trains could then have a centre car added to them later to use the full platform length. This should maintain existing compatibility with maintenance facilities while significantly improving capacity, by both increasing passenger space and by allowing passengers to balance out across the whole train.

This would actually probably be preferable to ordering longer 7-segment trains like Edmonton has for its Valley Line, because while those seem more logical, they may not jive well with the existing yard configuration.

At the same time, whatever new trains we get need more doors. I for years in the lead up to Line 5 opening talked about how the ~3 narrow double doors for 30 meter cars would create issues for loading and unloading, especially at busy stations (the subway has 4 wide doors on each ~23 meter car). This has proven to be the case and will likely cause real issues as the line gets even busier and we want to run more trains. Dwell times are already painfully long; the solution here is to make sure that the new trains we order also have extra doors, and that the front and rear doors are expanded to full double doors. Some of the new Siemens trams for Munich highlight how many more doors we could have.

While Crosstown cars have 3 double doors (2 doubles plus 2 singles), a Munich tram that is only slightly longer has more that double that — at 8.

Here’s a conceptual image from Nano Banana.

Platform Barriers

With new trains, you could then lock in a new door arrangement on the platforms and install screen doors at all subway stations. I’m sure someone would argue “we never designed the space for the vast equipment rooms that we need for those into the stations!” Fortunately, they mostly all have so much extra concourse space that finding some room should not be a problem. Installation would also be made simpler by the low, solid concrete platform in the stations (unlike the cantilevered design on the older subway lines), and would be extra enticing because it would allow for the elimination of the faulty and downright silly GIDS (Guideway Intrusion Detection System) that complains when people are too close to the track, but is slow and unreliable and requires tons of LIDAR sensors.

Here’s another conceptual image from Nano Banana.

This would also make automated driving (which is already used in the yard) an option for more than half of the line. Perhaps trains turning back to provide additional service in the “subway” section could be unstaffed.

Leslie

The last big change (which I have been frustratingly going on about for a decade) is the grade crossing at Leslie street. Even when working at an engineering firm, I struggled to get people to understand the gravity of this design decision.

At Leslie Street, the Line 5 features a grade crossing and a stop (Sunnybrook Park) where the street terminates in a ‘T’ intersection. In order to allow eastbound traffic on Eglinton to turn north on Leslie, and southbound traffic on Leslie to turn east on Eglinton.

The issue is, this single grade crossing is the only thing stopping the line from being fully grade-separated and independent of cars and pedestrian traffic from Laird 1.2 km to the west to Don Mills and Aga Khan a similar distance to the east. That lack of grade separation means you can’t have the CBTC system and automated driving, and thus the full frequencies you’d see from Laird west. This is a problem because Don Valley station at Don Mills is a major hub (it’s even underground!), with a huge bus terminal, the future Ontario line and its northern terminus, and tons of development (not to mention the Aga Khan).

The solution here is simple. Remove this intersection and put up a concrete barrier with a fence on top separating Line 5 from the street (and potential pedestrian incursions) from the portal east of Laird to west of Don Mills. That, a station redesign and a signalling upgrade takes the “subway” portion of Line 5 all the way to the Ontario line, several more kilometers, for a nominal fee.

Heres a concept image of what Sunnybrook Park could look like to implement this change.

For cars, the sensible thing to do is to just no longer allow the previously-allowed movements, and potentially allow new u-turns at the portals for the few that really had to go this way. You could also create a new road connection from Leslie to Don Mills through the industrial area north of the train tracks, but that is probably overkill.

Taken together, Line 5 would feel like a proper part of the subway club in Toronto, and would also end up feeling like the Ontario line’s younger sibling, with slightly shorter platforms and narrower trains, but the same high frequency automated service and screen doors. Perhaps the future trains could even take design cues from it.

I really enjoyed our conversation; it was rather unbounded — though naturally we talked a lot about transit and “RMTransit”.

While I moved to Toronto because this city was building more (and more transit infrastructure) than any other in North America, and that’s a pretty good thing —

— unfortunately its also been a bad thing. This may change, and I hope it does. A big issue you see in places that build and operate low amounts of public transit (North American cities generally) and which have undergone a low-build period (Toronto through the 2000s), is that each project gets elevated to the status of grand civilizational program. The Eglinton Crosstown for example is a modest capacity subway-surface line: it’s not really that big a deal, but because it was delivered so slowly (still hasn’t fully arrived somehow), and because it was the last serious subway in the city since the 60s, it was treated like we had built our own Crossrail (a project which is at least an order of magnitude more impressive), instead of a midnight cram project before the Vancouver Olympics (and Vancouvers project was better).

This problem is not at all unique to Toronto: I’ve seen minor light rail extensions in the States open to the same fanfare you’d imagine you might have for landing someone on the moon.

Now, celebration is good, but the nefarious character who tags along is … public interest. A city proposes even a modest infrastructure project, the media acts like it’s a modern Three Gorges Dam, and next thing you know costs are exploding and NIMBYs are out in full force. People should be interested in projects, but the energy and attention we point at big infrastructure may not actually be helpful, especially because North American media is by and large bad at covering this stuff and more or less seems uninterested in getting better.

But, we just can’t help blowing everything into a massive thing — hyperbole sells I guess — and to some degree this is a loop of doom. Major infrastructure projects, especially progressive-coded and managed ones end up getting saddled with tons of requirements that are seemingly designed to solve all of society’s ills while strangling the project like an anaconda. There’s often a real sense — one that I have seen in Toronto and Montreal for sure (and which sometimes feels like a reality in New York) — that the current projects being built, particularly anything ambitious, will be the last project we ever do, before we fully accept death by cost disease, climate change, or depopulation.

The funny thing is, outside of isolated cases of really truly major projects, this really does not happen for roads. I remember the SR-99 tunnel project in Seattle got some serious continent-wide coverage, but mostly you never hear as we spend billions building and rebuilding roads.

A friend once pointed out the lack of engagement, and endless studies, and consultation, and “trying-to-solve-all-the-worlds-problemsitis” with roads, and simply said: “our society depends on roads in a way it does not depend on transit and people would never let road building get bogged down in the way transit building has been”. This is very sad for those who’d like more transit, but seems basically correct to me.

My point in all of this is that the way we engage with these projects is probably not healthy and also probably doesn’t make getting them done easier. Roads get built because we don’t make a big fuss about them, and because so much road work gets done in the background people often don’t seem to notice how much we spend on, and orient society around them.

For transit advocates, what this probably means is trying to talk about transit projects less, while making quiet (as much as possible) moves on funding and approvals. The truth is we need to stop taking a victory lap after nailing 5 steps forward and get on with the next thing, advocates are fighting a gruelling hard uphill battle and need to act like it, we can celebrate when we are at German-level transit, or when we’ve done more than paint one bike lane.

I think it helps to take it back to the title: sewers, light standards, fibre lines, and homes — things we need and things we actually build everywhere and constantly, things that happen in the background.

I get it, transit is charismatic (in the social sciences sense), but we almost need to change that. Imagine instead of a new subway or tram we are getting a new trunk sewer, and if you want to learn about it read the meeting minutes (all the marketing and comms around transit seems to have a reverse correlation to actually building this stuff cost-effectively, which sort of makes sense. In Spain, a dollar of marketing is a dollar not going to concrete, which is far less expensive because Spaniards are mysterious infrastructure wizards). In many places, transit is much more like this: do you think every resident of Guangzhou or Shanghai can tell you about all the transit being built in their city? They probably could barely tell you what’s happening in their neighbourhood, and observing JR Urbane Network’s own observations at Chinese metro openings more people than you’d expect are surprised. It also says a lot that serious technical drawings — which we treat like military secrets — are pretty available, and sometimes basically seem to be “the comms”.

At the end of the day, part of getting more changes to the built form of our city and streets, and transit infrastructure constructed is literally making change and building things for transit normal. To some extent that means that like sewers and roads, we should always be doing things; part of why people make a fuss about a new light rail line is because you don’t constantly see that, but we as advocates also don’t need to pour diesel on the fire by acting like this is something the NIMBYs and NIMBYs-in-waiting should be watching.

If there are specific topics you’d like us to cover in the future put them in the comments!

PS: I didn’t choose the title text.

Read more

People are unfair in both directions. On one hand, it is the case that Toronto has a lot of head scratching problems: the lack of any serious road pricing, the unreasonable blowback to bike lanes in central areas, but also somewhat poorly-developed suburban road infrastructure (I'm talking quality not quantity here). On the other hand, Toronto is just honestly quite good by North American standards, which are ultimately the standards that we probably should be comparing ourselves to because the reality of this continent is that it exists within a different context than Europe or Asia. When you sort of do a pound-for-pound comparison, Toronto looks incredibly favourable when compared to a city like Los Angeles or Chicago despite being a much less affluent city and having less of a legacy of growth.

But I don't want to focus too much on other places, I want to focus on something that I was inspired to consider after a lecture last week — what if moving around Toronto was just universally excellent? What if getting here from around the world and going downtown and moving goods and seeing your friends and getting to work was just completely painless and even joyful? It's clearly just not the case that that's the experience today, even if I think we're closer to that than many people appreciate.

As it stands today, the GTHA has a comprehensive highway network that relative to the large cities of the United States does not scar the central city in the same way while also providing access to the central city — more Tokyo than London. Unlike other elements of our own transportation system, it also travels seamlessly across municipal lines. It's not excellent though because it's so often painfully congested and so travel times are incredibly inconsistent, not to mention the fact that the infrastructure isn't used to its highest and best purpose and just isn't generally super nice. I was recently using the highway system and a Google Maps travel time prediction actually told me that it usually takes somewhere between 50 minutes and 2 hours and 10 minutes to make a journey — that is complete madness!

And then there is the active transport network. We have some completely wonderful bike corridors from along the waterfront to various ravine trails, and we're increasingly seeing nice bike lanes. However, taking any space on the road for anything besides cars is seen as an atrocity here, and people are far too used to being able to drive everywhere even if it's a terrible experience; the city and especially the region does not have enough conversations about how driving just doesn't make a lot of sense for a lot of journeys and it's surprising how often people will totally ignore a far superior transit option because driving is just the thing that they do by habit. The walking experience in Toronto is actually surprisingly good and deeply underrated. Short cycle times within the city itself mean that you can walk great distances without having to sit at a lot of traffic lights; this is something you immediately appreciate when you cross a municipal boundary and need to start pressing the crossing button at every intersection and often waiting minutes to cross the street. It is of course also the case that walking isn't often a joyous experience: too often sidewalks look like highways down the middle of wide fields stretching between gargantuan thoroughfares and setback development. And in the Central city where there is a lot of interesting stuff to look at sidewalks are often far too narrow.

I get the people are often most intimately aware with the problems in the place they live and often enjoy piling on, but as someone who's been to major cities in most Canadian provinces and US states as well as in Mexico, I can tell you quite seriously that we have it very good relative to other major cities on this continent.

But I think what's more important is that we could have it similarly good to Singapore or Stockholm or one of those great global cities that people here dream of living in. I would ask instead why we don't simply make our city that good, because I really don't think it need be that hard and I think it's absolutely doable before the year 2050 — which perhaps sounds like a long time but really isn't in the scale of modern developed-world urban development and infrastructure.

Now, this document isn't meant to be a detailed plan, but what it is is an outline of what I think needs to happen to get us there. Of course all of this requires political will, but what would have a bigger payoff then taking us from where we are today to a region with the world-class transportation system that could go toe to toe with the best — fixing the mess of housing perhaps, but I don't see that as entirely separate from fixing our transportation problems. So often the issue we face is that our unified region really doesn't act like one because it just takes too long to travel from place to place.

On the road side, it just seems obvious that much of our infrastructure needs a serious redesign.

The 401 uses up an absolutely enormous amount of land, but the space hungry collector-express system seems to mostly exist as a nice idea rather than a functional design. Meanwhile, the highway does not have any consistent HOV or transit lanes — or express lanes that are managed to keep congestion low and thus ensure that they are indeed truly express. We are also building enormous amounts of housing right along the 401, which is a public health issue given the pollution from the corridor, so there are questions to be asked about mitigating impacts, not to mention the simpler impact of just crossing the route if you're not in a car. Similar issues exist across the 400 series Highway Network in the GTHA, and the reality is that fixing these problems won't be cheap, but pricing does seem like an obvious part of the solution. In fact, American cities often seem to have found a good solution here with tolled express lanes that could fund all kinds of other road improvements — you would also have the benefit of a guaranteed fast trip if things were urgent or if you deemed it economically rational.

When it comes to local roads, designs are often antiquated and intersections could frequently be improved with contemporary features like roundabouts. And while I think that some additional grade-separated expressways makes sense, these ought to be tolled (at a rate that should obviously be much lower than Highway 407 — in no small part to indicate to the public that that's a possibility, and actually the norm in many places). This actually makes even more sense when you think about our roads increasingly as infrastructure for freight transport which is what they really should be, with space for trucks to layover and designs that minimize conflicts between trucks and personal vehicles. A big reason our highways are so problematic is that they have to be unreasonably large and wide in order to fit a traffic volume that is in large part driven by the fact that the cost of that infrastructure is not sufficiently reflected to the public. Anyways, with tolls and road improvements, I actually think the arguments are very easy — they just need to be made in a compelling way to the public and the result could be a road system that is much more functional, particularly for freight transport.

Urban roads particularly in the regional are also a major issue. The literal built reality is that there is not space to expand roads and if anything roads should probably get smaller if we want to move more people using public transportation and walking and cycling — which meets the objective of better transportation overall. Congestion pricing is the solution for drivers, and it would be the solution for drivers even without more bus and bike lanes. For paying a modest fee, drivers can have very high certainty that they will be able to go from place to place at a consistent speed; sure, they will trade off the ability to drive without paying an upfront fee, but that's the reality that creates things like travel times that can vary by two times depending on the particular conditions on a given day. As someone who has spent a lot of my life driving, I would compare it to parking in a busy area: If all the parking is free, it can often be basically impossible to find a space, and sometimes your left wondering if your vehicle is going to be towed away or just frustratingly circling for half an hour. Most people who understand that experience would happily pay a modest fee if they knew that it would alleviate that experience, and I think the issue with congestion is that we just haven't shown people that it works in the exact same way. A big reason you'll find extremely little free parking downtown is because parking only works if you can get it, and if people can't consistently get parking they just aren't going to travel to a certain area; roads aren't fundamentally different and people who can avoid driving extremely congested roads often will instead of being able to make entirely rational decisions about where they need to go and whether a certain road would help them.

Of course, another major impact of urban congestion is just for air quality, which we increasingly understand leads to cardiopulmonary issues as well as conditions such as asthma. London and European cities have really led the way on this, and if we're going to do congestion pricing, we should definitely adjust the price based on the emissions coming out of a vehicle. EVs should pay less than gas cars and smaller EVs should pay less than larger EVs; this not only incentivizes reducing traditional CO2 and brake dust but also tire wear, while also making parking easier and the roads safer. It seems pretty clear to me that not pricing many of these externalities is a big reason that EV adoption is slower in Canada than it is in Europe. Driver training and getting licensed should also just be harder, the reality is we live in a region where by no means is driving essential for most roles particularly in the city of Toronto. We seem to still educate drivers as if Toronto is a minor provincial city, drivers often don't seem to understand basic rules of the road much less the modern signs symbols and infrastructure that we increasingly install to make the roads safer for everyone. And while the idea of being more restrictive on driving might initially turn drivers off, the reality is that most drivers probably would like to see the bottom 10% of drivers by skill required to do much more training.

In many ways, the biggest lift is needed for active transportation. And the reality of active transportation actually should be politically simple.

In suburban areas, bike lanes are easy to fit in, and an urban areas they are just an obvious use of limited space. Drivers have to be reminded that they're just isn't enough space downtown for everyone who could drive or wants to drive to drive, and that no matter what we do, those who desire to use limited space will need to pay some price — either directly or in their time (a market system is preferable because it makes the cost more legible and easier to plan for). In suburban areas, fitting in bike paths along large streets shouldn't be a major issue, though where possible we should try to put bike paths off of major corridors if they can remain fairly direct so that people cycling are kept away from heavy traffic and breathing all of the exhaust and tire dust. Meanwhile in urban areas, we are mostly on the right track, but the provincial government needs to get out of the way and stop engaging in what is ultimately an illogical and counterproductive populist battle over the reality of limited space, and the most efficient ways for people to get around a dense area. Bike lanes might feel like a political lift, but the reality is that they actually skirt our biggest infrastructure problem which is punishing costs and timelines — because we actually know how to do them incredibly quickly and cheaply and how to make them nice over time.

A real missing link for bikes is that we haven't made storing them as painless as it should be. Locking your bike up on the street comes with a high risk of it being stolen, and while many buildings to offer some form of bike parking, they sometimes require people to schlep their bike through various doors or down an elevator, which is such an unpleasant experience that people just don't use it. Clearly, new developments should be encouraged to make cycle parking very good, and much like we do it with car parking and to a much greater degree we should build public bike parking locations where people can keep their wheels for a long time or just for a few hours. Making cycling downtown as seamless an experience as driving in the suburbs is part of how we make more people get on a bike which as I'll remind everyone frees up more road space for transit and drivers.

Improving the pedestrian experience is the other half of this point. To some extent, that means universal pedestrian sidewalks and walkways, but it also means things like shorter cycle times, multi-stage crossings, pedestrian bridges and pathways, and where possible protection from what are often harsh elements. In the suburbs, allowing people to walk through quieter side streets while still efficiently crossing arterials could seriously mitigate the dehumanizing experience of walking along a pseudo-highway, while downtown we just have to have an honest conversation about how we allocate space. For example, on a street like Yonge, it seems we're waiting far too long to give the pedestrians that far outnumbered cars adequate space (and this is painfully obvious to anyone who isn't being intentionally obtuse by simply walking down the sidewalks of Yonge Street on a pleasant afternoon and frequently being forced into the roadway because the sidewalk is narrow and used not only for pedestrians but also for street furniture and utilities among other things). Having any system whether it be roads or sidewalks at 120% capacity guarantees that that system doesn't function the way it should, but the solutions are not always the same, we can afford more space for those walking because walking doesn't take much space, pricing tools are the obvious solution for roads because real estate in the GTA is obviously incredibly expensive! It's also clear that we should have more pedestrian-only streets (more is used generously here because we almost have none at the moment); pedestrian-exclusive streets would be a boon for retail and all kinds of other businesses, but are also seen (including by destination Toronto) as a potential huge draw to our city — perhaps so that other North Americans can see that they too can have cities that make movement effortless. Of course, having a number of very nice dedicated pedestrian streets would also probably lighten the load on some streets with sidewalks that would otherwise be too narrow to handle demand, effectively moving demand around in the same way that something like congestion pricing moves car traffic around.

Public transit is obviously my area of greatest interest, and to some extent, the solution here is to expand the level of service available in suburban Toronto to the entire region. But in doing that. we should also make improvements. Right now the City of Toronto wastes a lot of resources by just throwing buses at major suburban streets without diligently managing them; if headways and service with more-carefully monitored and less buses would be required to provide the same excellent service frequency. Of course, frequency isn't everything even if it is probably the most important thing — suburban buses are often slow because they stop far too often. Queue jumps and opportunistic bus lanes should also exist virtually everywhere and would help speed things up. Bus shelters should be omnipresent and should provide not only protection from the snow and rain but also the sun. Bus vehicles should be nice and modern and buying at least some of them from Europe would probably create a real incentive for everyone to up their game.

The streetcars and modern trams we've built across the region also need a complete overhaul which to some extent is frustrating given the modern trams are, well … brand new. Like with the buses, the vehicles should probably be about 30% nicer. But we should also look at standardizing stops at a wider spacing, operating vehicles more aggressively to shorten trip times, improving signal priority, and having the Europeans who consistently operate very reliable and quick street railways audit our systems and suggest road and rail redesigns. Done well, all of this infrastructure should be a huge boon for the region particularly in the urban core where all kinds of connectivity between dense development, public spaces, and then other modes of transportation can be enabled by the streetcar network. More major rethinks like the King Street project should be executed to both enhance active transportation and public transportation on key urban corridors. There should also probably be — if not overwhelming — strategic expansion of the street railway systems for example extending the Finch light rail to Pearson, the Hurontario light rail to the Mississauga waterfront, and the Toronto streetcar network to all kinds of neighbourhoods on the edges of the urban core.

Rail rapid transit, whether that be in the form of subway, or regional rail needs to be a major focus, because while buses are almost universally available across the region, they simply do not have the capacity, economics or pure speed offered by rail rapid transit — which more or less acts as the highways of the public transport system.

Before we even think of massive expansion to the network (and after all this is already happening) we really need to just operate our system better. The subway should have screen doors at the very least at the busiest stops, as well as modern systems, and higher levels of more reliable service. It's easy to go and look at the world's best subway systems and generate a list of things that we could and should do better. The regional rail network requires an even bigger lift but with even more potential payoff. The bones of the system are actually pretty nice but service levels are just far too low. Within the contiguous built-up urban area there's no reason GO trains should not have a default off-peak frequency of every 7 minutes or so, and I think the inevitable ridership and development changes that would happen from that level of service would take us on a path to even higher levels in the future. Electrification is not a nice environmental initiative but inevitable requirement for operating this level of service reliably. Beyond the core GTA, there's no reason that trains shouldn't run every half hour, and for major destinations like Hamilton, Kitchener-Waterloo, and Niagara, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to just show up to a station and get on the way in 15 minutes. Across all rail transport stations should constantly be up for improved accessibility weather protection and amenities and we need to better match these improvements to actual use. No station should be barren and miserable but it isn't a good use of resources to make very lightly used stations Cathedral-like.

Expanding the rail network is probably the biggest lift of anything I'm proposing here. To a large extent, a major expansion requires us to address our longstanding cost problems which mean that we build infrastructure for large multiples what it is built for in other developed countries. While this isn't a detailed plan of every policy we should enact and piece of infrastructure we should build, it seems clear that an East-West route across the north of Toronto, as well as a route from the north of Toronto to communities like Oakville and Burlington via Pearson airport (Pearson Airport should clearly be much more connected to transit, especially given it central location, though modes and exact designs are up for debate) are obvious. We should also probably build more rail to the core of the city so that dense communities are always near rapid transit, while also upgrading our busiest bus corridors. It's also the case that we should always be watching planning projects like the Ontario line that simultaneously address urban growth and congestion. To some extent, our next major round of urban rail projects should respond to new traffic flows from our last round, as well as new dense urban communities.

We also need to change the way we run our transit system. Delays and disruptions should be clearly communicated, and with a better network they will be less frequent and painful. The interfaces by which the public interacts with the transit system should also just be better: there's no good reason that a grocery store should have a better website or customer service or wayfinding signs than a public transit system. The fare structure also needs to be modernized: transit should always remain accessible to those on stretched incomes, but the reality that it remains far more affordable than the widely-adopted alternative of driving should be kept in mind when setting fares. The current hodgepodge system of different fares and operations in each city clearly needs to be tossed in the bin even if only from a public-facing perspective (bus operations could still be operated by municipal organizations even if the actual routes paid no mind to municipal boundaries), fares like virtually all transportation costs should reflect that more time and distance incurs more cost to the operator of a service — something which would also encourage compactness by reminding people of the cost of distance.

Ultimately, if our transportation system is to be among the best in the world all transport modes should be functional and allow people to go virtually anywhere in the region (this is already achieved for the car and to a lesser extent by transit) but different areas should obviously be tuned for different types of transport, when downtown drivers shouldn't expect to be able to move quickly and park easily without paying — and in fact, even identifying people by the mode of transport they prefer makes a little sense, in the ideal organization people simply take the mode of transport that makes sense. To a large extent, because we don't have cultural battles over them, cyclists and transit users already have to accept many of the the inherent limitations of these modes of transportation.

Intelligently combining transportation modes should allow people to move quickly almost anywhere, but not for free and that doesn't just apply to driving but also transit. We need to remind people that a better transportation system isn't free, but that it is a great value.

Is all of this doable in 20 years? I think much of it is doable in just a decade. To a large extent, pedestrian and cycling improvements can be made in a scrappy manner and then hardened as part of the normal infrastructure rebuilding cycle. More parking and new pedestrian bridges plazas and spaces aren't projects measured in decades.

Road improvements are likely to take longer, but even massive projects can be done in less than a decade. If we were to spend a few years planning aggressively, and a decade implementing, even at our current slow and unrefined construction pace we could make all the transformative changes without a problem in 20 years. Many changes like road pricing, improved driver training, improved the local roads, new lite-expressways, and facilities for trucks could be implemented even faster. Of course you're not going to rebuild every intersection or retrain every driver in 20 years, but I think people would be surprised what a large percentage could be done and how noticeable the impact would be.

Completely overhauling transit operations is a project that could be completed in 5 years, some things like more minor infrastructure improvements like screen doors and better switches on the streetcars would take longer and would probably be rolled out slowly tackling the biggest problem areas first not unlike various road or cycling improvements. Major transit projects are definitely the longest timeline thing in this vision, but even those should have no problem being completed in less than a decade if we work hard to improve our construction management and design for cost effectiveness. We are actually running a ton of transit projects in parallel right now, and it seems plausible to me that in the next 20 years we actually do less major projects, perhaps just continuing apace with improving the regional train system, and doing two very large rapid transit projects.

The reality across the board is that this need not cost very much. Road improvements could largely be funded by new road pricing, with the grand deal for drivers being that they might sometimes have the option to pay and by accepting that option they would get a lot of road improvements. Congestion pricing and slightly-higher fares could put a huge dent in improving transit infrastructure and service. But it's important to remember if it's so many of the improvements I'm proposing here really aren't that new cost but different philosophies and allocations for funding.

Of course, you can't comprehensively reconstruct the entire transportation system of the GTA in the next two decades. But what matters for people is trajectory. If every other bus stop is suddenly much nicer, the subway stations you actually use have screen doors, and major road work is occurring all across the region — people will understand the benefits and more importantly see the trajectory that we would now be on, to fit in a class of cities that we currently can barely imagine being named alongside.

And I mean it! The Island Airport is a neat vestige of the past, like when Chicago or famously Hong Kong had airports right near “downtown”.

The government of Ontario wants to expand the airport to handle jets and more flights and for other less clear reasons that I want to dig into, but one does have to ask from the jump: what exactly Chicago and Hong Kong — certainly excellent world cities — got wrong.

What feels clear to me, and what I think is the most obvious reason an expansion doesn’t make sense, is that the things that make the island airport cool mostly have to do with its smallness. Now, that smallness might not be economically sustainable anymore, but it would be good if we could just be honest about that instead of pretending that scaling up this cool small thing wouldn’t ruin what makes it cool and good.

On the face of it, the expansion for jets feels neat. I like planes as much as the next dude and planespotting A220’s from the waterfront would be cool. Unfortunately, a lot of things that don’t make sense, like a Waterslide from the top of the CN Tower, or a house with a big backyard at Queen and Spadina just happen to be “cool”.

Is a waterfront airport totally unprecedented in a developed world city with decent urban principles? Kind of. Vancouver does have its cute seaplanes after all — but that operation is at least an order of magnitude smaller, much more so than even the current airport. Perhaps more comparable, London City Airport does exist, but like a lot of London airport names, this one is a lie and the airport is actually like 10 kilometres from the city — like if Billy Bishop was at Long Branch or Woodbine Beach. This is still decently useful for London given the excellent rail links (imagine taking a streetcar from Woodbine or the West End — of course, adding a regional rail station would be deemed unthinkable), but at the same time as anyone in London will tell you, city airport is not really for the commoners, and as locals will tell you, it makes a real racket. Look, my point is that planes aren’t touching down on the Thames by Tower Bridge or in Sydney Harbour and anyone who proposed it would be laughed out of town (obviously it’s a bit different when the airport already exists, but those cities would 1000% be talking about winding it down).

I thought a lot about how to best frame this, and I think it comes down to four or five major issues, let’s look at those.

1. New York?!

One of the things that stands clearest in my mind is hearing the minister of transport talk about how the Island Airport expansion is about being competitive with New York ... what?

Toronto is actually much better situated than the big apple when it comes to airport planning, as it’s plagued with multiple competing, not quite complementary airports, which weakens their hub status because not all flights go to a single massive hub. This weakens connectivity, makes trip planning annoying, worsens connection and hub potential, and spreads resources inefficiently across multiple sites — duplicating all kinds of expensive things.

The outcome of these things is that connecting through these cities in not great, and the facilities are a real mixed bag, LaGuardia is nice now, (well besides all the delays and other issues, and lack of good transit) but only after years and years of being miserable.

And then theres the transit. LaGuardia has no rapid transit, Newark has a people mover to incredibly hit or miss service from commuter trains on the Northeast Corridor, and the New York Regions prime airport? Another people mover, albeit at least the JFK Airtrain connects to good rail service.

And somehow, our solution is to add another major airport where even when you put aside all the externalities will weaken Canada’s biggest hub airport (which desperately needs attention and investment), while simultaneously ruining what made that airport good to begin with?!

Read more

It was a bit of a shock then moving to Toronto, where there is the Toronto Transit Commission, Mississauga Transit (now generally known as MiWay), Brampton, and York Region Transit (among others). It felt a bit like getting off a plane into a place where there isn’t a minimum wage, or road signs aren’t standardized, or people eat with their feet.

Cinq Personnes.

Swimming, Bad Trains, and the Allure of Tech.

This post is not about public transit; like other posts on Cinq Personnes, it’s about me, and about growth, and about personal struggles. As someone whose day job — besides being a dad — is blogging about public transit and sometimes writing on it in the media, and who retired from…

Read more

5 months ago · 20 likes · 2 comments · Reece

The crazy reality of transit in the GTA is that it frequently just ends at the end of whatever city its operating in, so you can’t just keep taking the same bus down the same old street; buses are tied to cites, so want to take a bus in that city? You’ll need to take that city’s bus.

This totally backwards way of operating is representative of many things in Ontario, and is one of the reasons I find it hard to take some transit activism here seriously. Months will be spent so that transit riders can save a few dollars a month on a transit fare, but nobody bats an eye on the much greater cost of shuffling from one bus across a suburban intersection in the rain to wait 20 minutes for another.

A few years ago, we finally got a system of fare integration, so that you at least don’t pay a premium for an often crappy experience, and while that’s obviously an improvement, the screaming about not having a zonal or distance-based fare structure (like Vancouver) and a desire from cities and transit agencies to protect their (rather poor) fiefdoms, means that it’s a janky system of free transfers and inter-agency and government billing instead of a coherent, easily-understood system.

Now, what I am going to suggest is in the eyes of many here radical but, an entirely natural idea — a single regional agency modelled on Vancouver’s Translink.

Governance

While it’s super boring, unified governance would be huge and hugely important. Instead of important transport decisions that affect the whole region being made diffusely, these would be centralized and could draw on standardized best practice — so that every decision would be to the best standards of the bunch. Decisions being made in secondary parts of the region would no longer need to be so much worse than those in the core.

Region-level governance would also create a clear forum to highlight discrepancies. For example, right now, very little is made of York Region having less than half the transit service of Toronto, because those making the decisions in York only have their own mediocrity to benchmark against. In a regionalized system laggards would get a kick in the butt.

And yet, I don’t think the regional leader in the core — Toronto — would be reduced to some pitiful mean. For one, in the Translink model, Toronto would have disproportionate influence as by far the regions most populous city — it just wouldn’t have absolute power, but this already is the case — the province ultimately calls the shots in our system. Being in the lead would give Toronto outsized influence to set policy and standards, and it might be the motivator to fix its problems, like poor operations and maintenance practices — a detail it might learn from the smaller systems who have been able to maintain discipline and who have had to in a more hostile suburban environ.

Of course, as part of this, Metrolinx would likely be rolled into this organization, and the province would have a seat at the table, but this would just be acknowledging the reality of the coordination and funding role that the province already takes on and the province’s interest in the transportation system for its biggest urban region that encompasses half its population.

I guess my ultimate argument, especially to Toronto people (and in my eyes this is something the TTC turned away from leading historically, which is a black mark on that agency in my mind) is that it’s better to own a big share of something massive and full of promise, than to have total ownership of something much smaller and broken.

Operations

Of course, a huge benefit to transit regionalization is better operations. The scale of purchasing vehicles, parts, and all kinds of other resources would grow, while the actual things being purchased would standardize. Employees could be more rationally organized, and a larger organization that would combine subway, trams, legacy streetcars, regional trains and all manner of buses would have both a greater breadth and depth of competency.

Being able to operate regionally would also critically allow resources to be used more efficiently. Garages could truly serve a rational geographic catchment with less regard for invisible urban boundaries, and a unified agency could better take advantage of things like lower land costs in outlying areas. It could also formalize existing gentleman’s agreements, doing stuff like sending a bunch of resources to one part of the region for a special event instead of having to negotiate these things every time — an acknowledgement that the “city” is really a region.

A larger agency would support more internal expertise, which would have been a huge asset instead of relying so heavily on private external consultants as the GTA built and builds numerous inter-compatible, but not standardized tram systems from Toronto to Hamilton.

And while there would be “redundancies”, that doesn’t need to mean job losses. Instead of each system having a few sign guys, a large regional agency could have a world-class wayfinding department that does far more with the same resources — and which would inherently produce a regionally standardized system of signs, which obviously should, but does not exist.

Would municipalities lose a direct source of revenue in the form of fares? Yes. But fares already come nowhere close to funding the system, and creating a regional system of collection and distribution would likely be more fair and cost-effective. It could also finally be paired with a rational fare structure for users.

Ultimately, the case here in terms of resources is to stop bickering over the size of your slice and start baking a larger cake.

User Experience

All of this would come down to a better user experience. There are the basic things — like the fact that an agency maintaining twice as many buses is probably better at it, and is better able to field a working bus at any time, or that a bigger organization can both try more new things and try those things in more places, but there’s also the direct benefits to integration.

A regionally-integrated system would work across the region — the way people intuitively expect it to, not unlike roads. People would use the transit system, not a transit system.

Navigating would be made easier still by better, consistent signs and communication, but also by a fare system which provides a consistent and predictable price to riders that aims for fairness while also reflecting the reality of what things cost. The types of services offered would also probably be more clear, with local, express, and regional buses instead of the current mess of numbers, brands, and names that change wildly from one city to another.

If a rider had a problem or wanted an improvement, it would be entirely clear where they should go and who they need to talk to, instead of current transit governance being a mess of different agencies, government bodies, and buck passing.

All of this stuff is possible, but only if those in charge and with influence ask not only what they or their organization might lose, but what they stand to gain.

One of the examples they were showing was actually the Miami Central station (which because modernity, Brightline insists on calling Miami Central), which is actually a pretty cool facility up on an elevated guideway with high-rise condos built on top in what is basically the platonic ideal of transit-oriented development. I figured that the rail service — having been open for a few years now — was something I really had to check out given it's kind of the biggest thing to happen in intercity rail for North America in the past 30 or 40 years, so I recently took a trip with my family on Brightline from Orlando to West Palm Beach.

The idea of the line is pretty interesting, and I admit I was pretty skeptical when I first started looking. My experience growing up of Florida was one of suburbia and driving a lot, and so the idea of a train service in the state seemed a little questionable. But the reality is, it actually makes a lot of sense even despite the suburban car-oriented reality of most of Florida. For one, congestion here (because of the lack of alternatives) is really bad, and so a train that can provide you not only a quick but also a consistent travel experience is a big deal. On the other hand, there is actually some transit and Brightline links in with it pretty well. In Miami for example, you can take the metro and people mover system to Brightline as well as to the airport. In Orlando, the transit is not great, but the train at least lands you at the airport where you can get all kinds of tourist-oriented coach buses all over the place. Several of the intermediate stops actually drop you in pretty pleasant walkable urban areas, albeit ones that are bifurcated by an at-grade rail line that has a pretty high body count at this point.

One gets the sense that Brightline is pretty sensitive to the number of fatalities that have happened since train service ramped up. Its level crossings are pretty aggressively set up to try to prevent people pulling the sort of sketchy maneuvers that they probably wouldn't in most places but for some reason happen in Florida, with extra lights, signs, and barriers. On the other hand, the corridor is frequently wide open and you could walk right in front of a train from the sidewalk even where a fence could easily be put up, so it's not exactly clear to me that this issue is being taken super seriously.

Of course, the level crossings probably are the bigger problem, because they are where people are actually meant to cross the tracks. There isn't really an easy solution here: you could grade separate a lot of them, but Florida being Florida makes below-grade construction difficult, and so you'd probably be looking at either ugly road over rail crossings or an elevated viaduct for the train. This honestly probably makes the most sense just because there are such a high density of crossings in some places that trying to tackle them individually doesn't make a lot of sense — there are sections where there are seemingly crossings every 100 m as well as frontage roads. But this is the fundamental issue with a rail system like this in a place where people get up in a fuss about the idea of paying taxes (Florida has no state income tax): people don't like trains hitting people or cars, but you also hear again and again that it's mostly their fault and not a collective failure to create a safe transportation system. A service like this definitely wouldn't have so many level crossings in most other parts of the world, but that would require money for engineering solutions, and the whole point of Brightline is it's a private service and anywhere where public dollars actually enabled it to exist is something we mostly shouldn't be talking about. Another solution would probably be to close the almost countless minor level crossings with only two lanes and seemingly very little traffic, but Florida just seems like a place where compromise like that isn't allowed, and so while people will complain about the outcomes of a dangerous situation nobody's actually willing to compromise to fix that.

On a more positive note, as I said before, I think the service is actually quite well connected. You have some okay transit options, and where you don't you typically have an okay walking or cycling option (by Florida standards). At the same time, there is a lot of parking available, and rideshare has absolutely exploded onto the scene since Brightline was conceived; in fact, Miami even has Waymo now. I know there's a lot of ideologues who think that transit and cars can't really work together, and while it's perhaps not optimal, it certainly is better than a world where cars exist alone. Even if you have to drive to the station, it's nice to be able to relax for a few hours traveling a significant distance, and it's clearly a viable model because it's exactly how Toronto's very successful regional rail got its start.

The trains are quite nice. I'm not going to go and say they're the nicest trains in the world because they just aren't, but they're certainly up there with any new train you'd find in Europe. Seats are spacious with multiple table options as well as fold-down tray tables in more than one size, there are lots of amenities including a little bench near the washroom where you can take a call, you can easily stretch your legs and walk down the train, there are all kinds of food and snack options, and the windows are huge with really nice screens you can pull down if you don't want the Florida sun beating into your face. There is enormous amounts of room for small airplane carry-ons and a large luggage rack at the end of the cars for bigger bags. We took a stroller on our trip and had no problem rolling it easily onto the train, which had a big section for wheelchairs and strollers. This was especially easy because there is fantastic level boarding between the high platforms and the trains, aided by a pop out step which is fairly novel on this continent. The trains are pretty interesting, because they are book-ended by Siemens Charger locomotives which do looks snazzy and are fairly high-speed, and at this point they feel a little less silly because they are pulling eight passenger cars where previously they were pulling just four — a third of the length of the train was just locomotives.

Unfortunately, I get the sense the trains might have gotten a little less nice over time. Since again this is a private service, they are looking for any way they can grow their revenue (and to be fair it seems like this is pretty existential for them) and that means an ugly wrap that obstructs the view out of the windows, and wayfinding screens repurposed for ads. There's also something a little weird about seeing a train line have to advertise a stations on Google Maps (I've literally never seen a sponsored transit stop on the service and didn't even realize it was something that could be done). People who say the private sector often operates more efficiently aren't always wrong, but it's things like this that highlight that there are actually some inefficiencies to using that model as well. When the transit system is treated not as a private service but as the basic infrastructure of a place, the need to advertise is pretty clearly not there.

As you might know, Brightline is also capable of fairly high speeds. This isn't High-Speed rail in the sort of contemporary sense because that requires full grade separation and electric trains, but trains do travel at up to around 200 km/h (125 miles per hour) like you'll see in many places in the Northeast US and across the UK. It probably takes the wind out of the sails of rail fans to hear that it's not really high speed, but the reality is that the high-speed section of the line that runs between the east coast of Florida and Orlando along an expressway has trains traveling roughly twice the speed of traffic on that same expressway. Even when you're traveling through the fairly urban or maybe rather suburban-industrial areas with lots of level crossings on the East Coast of Florida, you are topping out at speeds that are around where speeding drivers on the nearby parallel interstate travel at, and on the train, these speeds are actually reached consistently — the average speed is actually a very respectable 110 km/h along the whole route. In terms of ride quality, I actually didn't notice a huge difference between the dedicated passenger line and the tracks that are shared with freight, and it's pretty smooth by North American standards (although a step below what you'd find in other parts of the world).

That high speed section between the coast and Orlando — which admittedly isn't very long — is particularly interesting to me because as I mentioned it was built along an expressway and yet manages respectable if not world-class high-speed rail speeds. It's quite interesting to see how the rail line sort of bobs and weaves around interchanges to maintain speed and also potentially space to expand those interchanges down the road. Tracks also often end up elevated off the side of the highway to fly over connecting and crossing roads. I guess the point here is that we now have a pretty good example to point to of a contemporary high-speed railroad built in North America which manages to use an existing highway corridor to deliver really good rail service, and a positive touch is that even while most of the line here is single track, it is all set up for future expansion with a second one.

Service on the line in terms of trains you can actually take is definitely more limited than one would hope. During peak periods (think commuting hours) trains run slightly more frequently than hourly, and then for much of the rest of the day trains seem to run roughly every hour and a half and sometimes a little less frequently than that. Running a service so focused on matching demand to service seems like it might be another private operation thing that introduces some inefficiency. because it makes it basically impossible to remember when any given train might show up. That being said, at least the infrastructure appears to be set up to allow service to run at an hourly frequency without too many problems and even more frequently if some simple improvements are made.

I'll also say that the ticketing process is pretty good: You can buy tickets online or using a well-made app or using pretty nice in-person ticket machines. The prices are definitely not cheap, but the reality that nobody wants to admit is that driving is also really expensive and so when you compare it like for like, it's not so bad (especially because there are a lot of toll highways in Florida). The prices felt pretty similar to Via Rail in Canada (which people complain about and are objectively high by international standards) but with better, more reliable, and faster service. Weirdly, despite having face gates to check your tickets and an incentive to have less huge numbers of employees telling you how to read signs and the like, the station was still absolutely packed with staff, including someone who is just standing there pressing the elevator button for people. I guess I would chalk this up to poor station design since there is also a sort of light airport-style security at the entrance and it was quite a mess with a bunch of fairgates jamming people into a single security queue that was somehow way too tight for people with their luggage despite the fact that it was entirely composed of movable retractable barriers. The operations definitely feel like they could use some tuning up, and this just provides a good reminder that just because the private sector does something doesn't mean it's going to be entirely logical or efficient. Often the same cultural problems that prevent a public sector organization from operating in a rational way are just going to transfer over directly to the private sector.

One positive element of the operations is that despite sharing tracks with freight trains for the majority of the route, Brightline operates fast, fairly frequently, and reliably. In this case it's because there are common financial interests, but it highlights the point that there are models that could allow North American freight operations to coexist with fairly good passenger service, and like with high-speed rail along an expressway this feels like something people should really be studying.

Now, putting aside the backwards operations, the stations are really nice, with cool mid-century modern designs, tons of lounge space (it was pretty nice having my ticket sent to my phone with a QR code and then actually being able to tag into the lounge via faregate with that QR code). If you get one of the nicer tickets, you are truly going to be traveling in style, and you get to board the train early as well (hilariously, this means that you also do have to line up for Brightline which is one of those dumb inefficient rail operation mindworms North Americans are infected with). The train stations honestly end up feeling a lot like what you'd find in most developed countries around the world but with particularly attractive architecture and nice amenities like restaurants and lounges and huge washrooms. The station at Orlando airport in particular kind of reminded me of modern rail stations in China. And of course you have all of the obvious things you'd expect, like a large pickup drop-off area and loads of parking to make getting to them actually practical.

If I had to complain about one thing, it would be having level crossings right next to stations, which would be the most obvious ones to remove because they are particularly high-impact. This seems particularly obvious at West Palm Beach where the main drag of the town runs directly north of the train station over a level crossing (it is nice that you get super easy access to the main street from the train station).

So then, where do things stand? Well, I think Brightline is definitely a net positive for the whole continent. It's clearly having a very positive influence on Amtrak and VIA rail, which is and hopefully continues to push up the quality of those services. At the same time, the service levels — while not amazing — is better than most intercity corridors on the continent. It seems like a real possibility that Brightline dies, after all they shut down during COVID and looming debt problems are bearing down. At that point it will be pretty interesting to see whether the government of Florida buys the infrastructure up and rolls it into a bigger public rail system. It would be a mistake not to, after all you would be buying surprisingly good infrastructure (that benefits everyone including drivers) at what would likely be a discount price — but again, the ideology of not being seen to support a public service seems to run pretty broadly here.

Assuming an adult is in the room and the right decision is made, then I think Brightline will basically become one of those corridors in North America that has maybe not world-class but passable rail service, along with the Northeast corridor, Quebec City-Windsor, San Diego-Los Angeles, Portland-Vancouver, and a few others. Given the train frequencies offered and the higher speed on the expressway section, it might actually slot in right after the Northeast corridor as being the most impressive service, which would be funny given eastern Florida's history being built along the railway.

In the future, I would like to see the system expand. Extensions to Jacksonville and Tampa via Disney are totally obvious and could potentially allow you to tie in with some more transit systems. The network also obviously ought to be electrified when the trains come up for replacement, and you could probably do that piecemeal with battery trains advancing as quickly as they are; that might mean slightly faster service but also ideally much more frequency. More stations should definitely be added, with Cocoa being a particularly obvious one at the junction between the line to Orlando and a potential branch to Jacksonville. There should also be combined public transport tickets offered with your Brightline ticket to make the last mile feel a bit easier (this might already exist, but if it does, I don't think it's being particularly well communicated). The last and perhaps most obvious thing is that some level crossings really need to be removed. I think it makes sense to start with the ones that are the most dangerous and closest to stations and work out from there, but it also seems obvious to just close a lot of level crossings where the traffic levels are low enough, especially because in many places the crossings are incredibly close together, so closing a few near a major street and then investing in making that crossing safer or removing it seems obvious.

Overall, Brightline is pleasant and effectively a modern rail service operating in North America. The frequency isn't amazing and there are lots of little nitpicks I could make, but it's clearly had a positive impact overall and probably will continue to do so for quite some time.

The system — a line, really — is in effect a roughly 5 kilometre, 5-stop rapid transit line running through the city, along the Monongahela River and to various buildings of West Virginia University.

To a sort of uneducated observer, the system basically would look like an automated people mover you’d see at an airport: rubber-tired cars run up and down a concrete guideway that runs grade-separated from traffic, often on elevated structures. But to someone familiar with such systems, the oddities are impossible to ignore.

The cars are just that: single cars the size of mini-buses which sometimes run alone and sometimes in packs, queue up at stations.

And those stations are unusual. Most have bypass tracks, but there are also numerous platforms at each (somewhat surprisingly without screen doors), sometimes with as many as a dozen vehicles sitting at them, and periodically arriving and departing. The tracks at the stations also point every which way, and flyovers and ‘unders abound.

When you go through a turnstile (the line was free when I tried it, which is sure to excite some, even if free transit remains a dubious prospect, though I suppose if the alternative is needing exact change in coins in 2026 then free might be less crazy), you select the station you are heading to, and then a vehicle arrives to take you there … directly, and quite possibly by yourself. That’s really what makes “personal” rapid transit unique — you choose a destination and a trip is provided specifically for you, not stopping at intermediate stations.

Riding the system, which turned 50 last year, is absolutely remarkable; it’s quick, automated, and feels efficient — I can only imagine how much it must have felt like the future in the 1970’s.

Unfortunately now, it mostly feels like the past. The stations as I mentioned don’t have screen doors, and they barely have wayfinding either. I hope you like stairs because there are no escalators to be found. And the ride quality is shockingly bad for fixed guideway transit, especially without a driver to press stop if the rocking and bumping throws you off your feet, or honestly, out of your seat (yeah it’s that bad, surprisingly so even with rubber tires often giving a system a “bouncy” feeling). I’ve certainly seen guideways that look worse, but this system had multiple sections where two bits of guideway came together where the vehicle had to basically slam into (or drop off of) and bounce over a visible vertical alignment gap between sections. While the vehicles seem to be in decent condition, the guideway alone makes me think this system might not be around long; ride it while you still can!

That this thing isn’t exactly the backbone of transport in the city was apparent from when we arrived: traffic was bad, parking was plentiful and free (and I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many massive new parkades in such a small city), and while at first I was impressed by the throngs of people using the Medical Center station, upon closer observation the reason I wasn’t seeing more vehicles operating is because while I saw about five people use the PRT, the throngs were actually just passing through the station from the hospital to get to the parking. At least I did also see some public buses (albeit serving a transit “center” with no benches or schedules) which were wrapped with PSAs suggesting some sort of transit funding ballot was passed semi-recently.

And I don’t entirely blame them: while the system is cool, it doesn’t seem like its really gotten all that much better in the last 50 years, in fact it might have gotten worse!

Meanwhile in that same time …

The reality is, putting aside the rough shape the system is in (kudos to those keeping it running at all, it seems like a small miracle), the whole PRT aspect doesn’t even make sense. Some of the time the line runs fixed routes between major stations based on historic demand, and at other times it runs like a conventional rapid transit line, stopping and picking up passengers at all stations.

It does feel smart that stations are designed as to enable sort of conventional and personal operations, but this also makes the intermediate stations ridiculously gigantic, with bypass “tracks”, numerous platforms, and lots of turnaround routes.

And this hits on the painful reality — there is just no good reason for this to be PRT. All of the stations are connectedly linearly so the only “benefit” of PRT is 1) not forcing you to stop at intermediate stations and 2) allowing you to get on an empty vehicle at an intermediate station (so long as the system is in “PRT Mode” when you ride).

The issue is, these “benefits” are not real: the services take corners so slowly and have to run so slow in sections to navigate complicated tracks that I think a “smoother” alignment with regular trains stopping at all stations (which would have screen doors) would be at least as fast — probably faster. This would also ultimately be way higher capacity than the “terminate and begin journeys at any station option. The benefits of PRT are mostly about vibes and denying the efficiency of conventional mass transit so people don’t have to share space with someone different from them or look at a map of a line. Even the supposed immediacy is questionable, because on several of my and others journeys I observed a five minute timer start when passing through the turnstiles to try and “batch” trips. And half-decent rail or people mover service would come frequently enough for you to never wait like that, and the stations would probably also be smaller even with additional capacity.

Now, Morgantown was in some senses only the first major PRT system, and later systems have come along and made major improvements that address some of the issues here.

The most obvious of these is the ULTRA PRT at Heathrow Airport, which people love (probably because it’s much more accessible to a large number of people, as anyone in London can go to Heathrow Terminal 5 and try it for free).

ULTRA for one is way lighter weight. The Morgantown PRT is powered by subway-style third rail, and has cars with a loading gauge (profile) not far off a light metro, so the structures are big and the curves are relatively wide. ULTRA vehicles are truly personal and closer to the size of a golf cart (with a small onboard battery); this means the elevated guideways needed for them are also much simpler.

The stations are also quite different. ULTRA’s might be a tenth the size both because the vehicles are smaller and because they are more manouverable, meaning they can simply back out of a “platform” at a station (they are angled at roughly 45 degrees like some street parking you might have seen) and onto a “mainline”. This cuts the need for bypass tracks and redundant station tracks.

And then everything is just nicer, the UI at stations is good, and the vehicles are more pleasant. Oh, and the PRT thing makes some sense because there are multiple interconnected destinations that are not in a line.

There’s bad news though. Despite improving on literally everything from Morgantown by being clever and using modern technology to drive down costs, only one ULTRA system has been built and I doubt it gets more use than America’s mountain pod system.

And I mean, those are the balance of operating PRT systems in the world. It’s usually not a good sign when most of your kin are on the brink of shutting down, or were just never opened.

There is maybe hope though. The technology never really seemed like the problem here, it was the scale and application. Done wrong, PRT is just a parking lot shuttle or a glorified bespoke automated people mover, but that could change. Large tech, medical, or academic campuses, airport terminals, or giant malls or convention centres all seem like prime candidates — but these are different clients than cities with different needs and constraints, and so looking at PRT like conventional transit is probably a bad idea. This also isn’t replacing transit, it’s augmenting it, like a 3D elevator.

Whether these systems ever reach escape velocity is yet to be seen. The most likely contender to pull it off appears to be Sillicon Valley based Glydways which has projects on the books, money and seemingly another round of technology refinements. Watch and wait.

The media covers minute details (albeit rarely important ones) so regularly that I’m surprised they don’t have someone on standby to race out when any random bus catches a flat.

Unfortunately, this love of talking means that once the right people get a project on the roadmap, it gets a lot of talk, whether or not it is a good project. I think this is part of why Toronto just keeps developing mediocre stuff: a bad project gets on the roadmap and then well, we just have to build it right? This is more or less the path the Eglinton East LRT is on: if it ever made sense, it no longer does with the new projects we are building, and yet onwards it goes, with the city using what little transit directing energy it has left to try to push it forward. I talked about this more last week.

There are — interestingly — some fairly compelling projects that we do not talk about, and so don’t move forward because nobody thinks to include them (don’t get me started on how obvious projects somehow often don’t arise to folks responsible for plotting out future projects) — I talk a lot about examples of this, such as a proper Spadina station, Sheppard subway extensions (westwards in particular), and the topic of today’s post: extending Line 2 to Mississauga City Centre.

A Subway to Mississauga.

It's really crazy that we aren’t currently planning a subway to Mississauga City Centre. Right now, we are building subway lines to Richmond Hill Centre, which looks like this …

and Scarborough Town Centre …

North York Centre has long had a subway …

and Vaughan has developed a lot since it got its subway (most is recent and not pictured, so it looks at least as dense as Scarborough) …

And yet, Mississauga City Centre is getting a typical Toronto suburban streetcar, with development like this …

To be perfectly clear, I am not saying that the subways we are building, or have built were not justified. I love North York Centre, Scarborough Town Centre has major densification plans (and tons of buses), Vaughan has actually done huge TOD at their main subway station, and Richmond Hill Centre gets oodles of current subway terminus at Finch.

But, it is straightforwardly nuts that this absolutely gargantuan cluster of homes, employment, a huge shopping centre, government offices, and amenities is only currently planned to be served by a pretty mediocre tram (literally the same vehicles as Finch West) and some buses. The density is at least at the level of North York Centre which has three subway stations!

Now, the sort of technocratic way to solve this problem that gets talked about to death is a diversion of the Milton line. I do not disagree that in a sort of “impossible sane world” this would be the way to go, but the issue is it’s just super contingent. You need to get frequent trains on the Milton line, and they need to be electric, and they need to be high performance to make building a diversion cost-effective, and I think that we’ll be lucky if some of those things happen in a decade or two. If getting dedicated tracks and frequent trains on the Milton line was something we were going to do, I just sort of think we would have done it by now.

The Hurontario “LRT” streetcar is not a solution. The capacity is equivalent to a few bus lines and only half that of the Eglinton Crosstown when it’s running at grade in the golden mile; it’s a small fraction of what a subway could handle — 10% maybe. The streetcar also does not solve the issue of rapid transit, or linking this dense node of development to the region’s densest node of development — downtown Toronto. Sure, it will be nicer because now you’ll be able to take a tram to a GO train instead of a bus, but the trip will be slow, and many people will need to transfer multiple times. It’s the kind of transit solution that is common in the US, and it won’t change the reality that in Mississauga even in these dense environs most people drive.

There is, however, a solution to that — extending the subway. Right now, we are taking the subway network up to Richmond Hill Centre and Scarborough Centre, and while a lot of people complain about subways to the suburbs, these lines will be well-used and will shorten a ton of commutes, getting people off of buses so that those buses can bring new riders into the system. I think these projects would basically be impossible to criticize if it weren’t for the outrageous prices, which are multiples higher than what the French build through Paris for (that’s something I’ve long-discussed though).

So more or less, what I’m suggesting is just to do something similar to what we are currently doing on the Danforth and Yonge lines, a ~10 kilometre, ~4 station subway extension that brings a ton of density, but also a ton of single-family home dwellers who could hop on a frequent bus or a bike, onto the subway network. It really does not compute that this isn’t on a radar given Mississauga is bigger than Scarborough (and outside of Toronto — so where is the “Toronto … and its burbs … gets all the transit?” dynamic), and even more lacking for transit since it has one less GO train line.

Now, the project is not perfect. Line 2 already takes a long time to get to Kipling, almost 40 minutes from Bloor-Yonge so getting from Bloor-Yonge to Square One would be a one hour trip. By comparison getting to Richmond Hill Centre will be more like a 40 minute trip. Speed could obviously be addressed to some extent with better maintenance, and there are some lightly-used stations that could be turned into stops that get bypassed by every other train, speeding up some trips. The reality though is that even with a somewhat long travel time, the alternatives are not particularly better: a bus to Kipling isn’t very quick, the streetcar + GO combo has the same problem, and while the Milton Line is fast, it’s only fast for like 8 trips during a 2 hour period of the day!

Still, this is less of a problem than some suggest. For one, if you’re going to the financial district, the new connections to GO train lines at Bloor-Dundas West and Lansdowne give lots of capacity and a very fast trip. For two, there is still a lot of office space and the University of Toronto on Bloor, so for some people from Peel this will be more direct than some alternatives.

Cost is the obvious question, and honestly while I think our costs are outrageous, to some extent if we are going to build these other subway extensions for the prices we are, then extending Line 2 to Mississauga is just as sensible — in fact, I’d argue it’s better. For one, the first ~5 kilometres of a 10-11 km overall alignment (basically straight over to Hurontario and then up to some site around Square One, maybe two if we get fancy) can be built elevated or at grade. The environment around the Milton GO line (which the end of Line 2, and the extension would run along) is super industrial and if anywhere was the place for not digging a tunnel it would be here. The cost savings could even enable the line to swing down and serve Sherway Gardens and the Hospital - which is another mark in the “elevated” column. In fact, given how much of this line could be done above ground I think you might have a total cost similar to one of the shorter current extensions, just because in this case you can do 50% of the track and stations above grade.

Making this happen really should be simple. Mississauga should just start demanding it. Make it about housing, make it about fairness with Toronto, make it about shifting people out of cars — there are no shortage of reasons why this project would make a lot of sense. Scarborough wanted a subway, people spoke up about it and it happened, this project makes even more sense.

While for many years many Toronto transit watchers convinced themselves that replacing a bus route with a median-aligned surface tram made planning rapid transit easy, I was never convinced because I had seen how a similar “LRT” project where I grew up — the Surrey Langley light rail line — would only have improved travel times over buses by 1 minute.

Similar data didn't seem to be made widely-available in Toronto, cynically because this would have made the projects we were developing look much worse. However, now that they're open, we've kind of learned this the hard way. Eglinton to be fair does seem to be performing much better than Finch, but still, even just simply beating the bus doesn't feel like a great value when you've spent billions of dollars on a new transit project.

As has been heavily covered, a lot of these problems come down to weak transit signal priority. What I think has been appreciated less is that the extent to which we can have good transit signal priority is limited because of the way we've designed our projects.

And speaking of design, even if everything was working well and perhaps more so if people didn't have the big issue of the lines not working well to think about, they are just pretty ugly. These lines might have looked okay if built 20 or 30 years ago, but Europe has been building more attractive infrastructure for over a decade now and it's disappointing that our brand new line lacks many features that were commonplace in other cities long ago (for example, the trains have low-fidelity LED screens which would be acceptable 20 years ago but now feel very dated).

And then downstream of the weak priority and design decisions made on these lines, the speeds just aren't great. Beating traffic feels good, but it's not special when you have an entirely dedicated Lane in front of you with no other vehicles in it to block you. The thing I've been repeating for years is that Toronto doesn't have a problem with transit availability, it has a problem with the availability of fast transit, and at the most generous, these lines are quick some of the time — they are not transformatively fast in the way subways have been.

I think we could have predicted a lot of this, and I've talked about this at great length over the years as well. Suburban Toronto is certainly covered and served by transit, but it's still a car-oriented locale with conservative-leaning politicians. I'm not sure how we thought we were going to nail things like transit signal priority here when we can't even get the downtown streetcar network working properly where the politicians should theoretically be much more supportive, and where we already have the rails laid!

So the natural question is, how could we be deluded into thinking another project like this is a good idea, and that's more or less with the Eglinton East light rail line is.

I’ve heard someone previously try to sell the project a connecting so many destintions, Malvern, UTSC, GO stations, and the like! But the issue is that these are just random destinations, Guildwood GO and Eglinton are somewhat redundant with one another, it's not clear to me that this is the best way for most people to get to UTSC, and Malvern residents might benefit so long as their destination is on this route, and as long as it’s actually much faster than the bus — there are a lot of big ifs.

Now, to their credit, the city and mayor have been talking about grade separation (it makes me really frustrated after talking about this for years that the riders of Finch West need to be trapped on a slow tram before leaders would listen). However, the issue is that the ground has shifted, and this is why you have to interrogate your ideas today and not years down the road, if you don't present great ideas, people might not entertain them and so you won't get the chance to adapt them later.

The Scarborough transit version of this is that the Scarborough Subway makes the north-south part of the Eglinton East light rail line much less relevant. For a large quantity of trips, it will be faster to take a bus to or from the new north-south subway; sure, you will have to get on the bus, but because the subway is so much faster than the tram, and because the tram is at best only slightly faster than a bus, bus-plus-subway still ends up being the fastest option. Furthermore, it seems like there's a very good chance that the shepherd subway gets extended at least to McCowan, and if it gets extended further east, perhaps along elevated guideways, then you eliminate most of the remaining trips where the light rail line might have made sense because now you can go both east-west and north-south much faster on these new subways, connecting to final destinations with short hops on buses.

What's funny about all of this is that there is definitely a bias against buses, and while politicians obsessed with subways always get treated like elitists, I don't really see a difference between being obsessed with the subway because you think buses are for poor people and being obsessed with the tram because you think buses are for poor people. There has been so much language over the years and decades about how Scarborough needs transit, but anyone who's actually been to Scarborough will know that it's absolutely laden with it — again, fast transit is what's needed not transit.

I guess my point is, the city should have recognized that when the province wanted to get much more involved in transit in Toronto that it needed to pivot, but it's pivoted late and the pivot is about 1°. And I'm just not very sympathetic — the city of Toronto doesn't actually seem focused on what makes transit and mobility best for residents, but instead building political plans that city politicians and I guess some city staff believe elevate the status of the city. A good example of this is GO: there are already in north-south and east-west GO lines in Scarborough, and if the city of Toronto didn't have such a strange attitude that treats GO as if it is exclusively for suburban residents outside of the city, it might have spent the last several decades creating great bus connections and pushing the province to enhance service on these lines sooner. I can totally imagine a world where much like with the subway network, there are stations at the major arterials with big bus terminals that let people from almost anywhere in a place like Scarborough get to a train station that lets them get on a train that helps them get places quickly.

What's funny is that to some extent, the city is doing the right thing by creating a sort of master plan, the issue is that it doesn't seem like the city of Toronto realizes that the GTA isn't just the city of Toronto anymore and that it doesn't really make sense for one single city to plan things in a vacuum. Funnily enough the whole “we have a master plan!” thing, while not actually acknowledging the realities of funding, population dynamics, and changing priorities takes me from sympathetic to irritated with the city's efforts.

So to just reiterate, what we end up having is a bus that is more or less turned into a bus on rails along Eglinton East. And with the biggest trip generator along the route, the University of Toronto Scarborough campus instead sending most of its trips to the new subway being built via buses. This means that this project basically just exists as a rail replacement of the existing local bus for local trips. Maybe that would make sense in Europe where they're good at building trams and they can do stuff in expensively, but it doesn't make a single lick of sense in Toronto, because we haven't picked so much of the low-hanging transit fruit.

But I don't want to rant for this entire post, so like I mentioned from the front, I want to talk about five conceivable things the city of Toronto could put its efforts into that would provide better transit for Scarborough that I think would be better plans (more benefits, more reach, lower cost) than the current Eglinton East light rail line.

Idea 1: The Scarborough Express

My first idea is one that’s been kicking around for many years. It's essentially a BRT-lite grid that would serve Scarborough, and if I'm being honest, ideally the service could continue up north to Highway 7 so you end up getting seamless connectivity into York region as well. I get that that's an absolutely insane proposal if you are used to the way Toronto does things, but as it turns out, people living north of Steeles also need to get around, and it's absolutely ludicrous that suddenly when you go into York region the buses run every 40 minutes. Part of this is obviously conservative York region politicians not wanting to spend money on transit, but I think it's also partially a sort of Toronto attitude that the city doesn't need to lead the surrounding region and can instead exist on a sort of island separate from it.

Anyways, the point of this network would be to cover basically the whole eastern part of the city with 12 different routes: 6 east-west, 5 north-south, and a short route connecting Malvern to Scarborough Town Centre. These routes would connect Scarborough's major hospitals, numerous GO and subway stations, York Region’s Viva on Highway 7, and the University of Toronto and Centennial College.

Now, these routes would not be over-the-top like VIVA with massive glass structures, and more importantly would not be like VIVA because they would probably each have buses every 8 minutes or so from early in the morning until late at night and then 15 or 20 minute service in the overnight period. The stops would also still be nice, with larger canopies, bike lockers so that people could actually get to a stop more easily, next bus screens, and designs that make them visible on the landscape so that people can easily actually find the nearest stop.

In terms of actually making them Express, the key detail is extremely limited stops, but of course you would also do transit signal priority, queue jumps, and dedicated lanes where they would actually help bypass traffic (saving cost where you don't actually need them).

In terms of the bus vehicles, I would suggest all articulated electric buses; it would be especially nice if we could manage to get some nice European buses, and extra points if we protected for bi-articulated buses if that is a road we decide to go down. In terms of propulsion', electric is obvious, and I really think in-motion charging makes the most sense especially because you can determine easy sections of each suburban arterial to put up wires on, leaving tight underpasses and other stretches of the route without wires to the extent that the battery capacity of the buses allows.

I've written out roughly what routes I would implement, though if it's of interest perhaps I could do a follow-up post where I go through this in more detail. While I mentioned specific arterials, The routes would likely turn onto other streets at the ends to connect with nearby stations and the like, and they would also divert off of these arterials to serve major destinations where applicable.

• North-south

  • Birchmount (SX2)

  • Midland (SX4)

  • McCowan (SX6)

  • Markham (SX8)

  • Morningside (SX10)

• East-west

  • St. Clair-Kingston (SX1)

  • Eglinton (SX3)

  • Lawrence (SX5)

  • Ellesmere (SX7)

  • Finch (SX9)

  • Steeles (SX11)

• Connector

  • Malvern (SX12)

I think if we actually did this stuff properly, then these routes would be just as deserving of being on the TTC map as the streetcars. And I'd actually think a Scarborough-specific transit map showing all of the subway and GO stations and the grid of new express bus routes would be valuable.

Idea 2: The Scarborough Liner

The Scarborough liner idea is inspired by the automated people movers widely used across Asia, especially in Japan. The concept here would be to connect Scarborough Town Centre with Centennial College, Centenary Hospital, and the University of Toronto-Scarborough. Most of such a line could be built elevated above ground, which would seriously reduce its costs, and the yard could perhaps even be built where the old Scarborough rapid transit yard was. This system would be automated and would use small trains, which would mean along with the elevated construction, costs would be very low. Service could run every 4 minutes and stations would have platform screen doors.

As a second phase, you could extend the line south — albeit with some tunneling — to Guildwood GO station, creating direct links to Scarborough's most important destinations from the east south north and west.

Idea 3: SmartSpur

The SmartSpur idea would sort of be a variant of the Scarborough liner idea, however it would substitute the automated people mover technology for a spur off of the Stouffville GO line. This would likely cost more money, as stations would need to be larger and you would probably need to do more tunneling, however it would create more direct links across the region.

In order to facilitate this project, GO would need to have finally started rolling out EMUs (ideally also in a shorter format because we do not need 300m platforms at Scarborough Town Centre and UTSC), and would also need to have all trains stop at Scarborough to facilitate connections to the Lakeshore east line that would not be available at Guildwood.

Idea 4: Accelerate Sheppard Subway to Pickering and Line 2 Extension

Another option would be to strengthen the subway “cross” within Scarborough. Line two is already going to extend fairly far north, but could go all the way to Steeles Avenue or potentially beyond if York region wants to kick in funds and build a ton of housing along McCowan and near the Markville Mall site. This would add new interceptions to the finch and steals bus routes.

At the same time. the Sheppard Subway could be extended further east, reaching McCowan at Scarborough Town Centre and then roughly continuing on Ellesmere past the hospital and Centennial College to the University of Toronto.

Obviously with this solution you don't get rail transit a short distance from most people in Scarborough, but the reality is you also don't do that with the current Eglinton East plan. On the other hand, a Subway “cross” would mean short bus trips to get to the subway for many people, and the ability to get across Scarborough quickly, with many destinations not requiring a bus on at least one end of the trip.

Idea 5: Just Better Transit

The last idea I'll put out there, is just spending the money on making transit in Scarborough nicer. That could mean screen doors at all of the subway stations, enhancements to the GO stations that haven't been enhanced yet. Proper bus exchanges akin to the ones that have been built in York region (to serve like one or two buses an hour as opposed to the one or two buses every minute you see in Toronto) could be built in locations that aren't on the rail network. You could work to aggressively upgrade and electrify buses across Scarborough. You could build new affordable housing and TOD sites, and you could also build out a fantastic bike Network.

My point in saying all of this is not that we shouldn’t build and improve the transit ofsScarborough, but just that I know we can come up with better ideas than what we currently have, which admittedly was a plan created long ago.