An Obvious Toronto Transit Project People Don't Talk About.

Trying to steer a conversation.

Toronto, its politicians, and media love talking about transit.

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 …

Credit: Google

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.

Can we also please remember when talking about speed and travel time that this subway would run at more than triple the average speed of the Finch LRT, and someone going from Mississauga City Centre would have faster access to downtown Toronto than someone at the end (or probably even middle) of “Line 6”?

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.