Toronto's new LRT can become even better

Yesterday, Toronto finally opened the Eglinton Crosstown Light-Rail Line, also known as Line 5. Construction on Line 5 began in 2011 and was supposed to finish in 2020, only to become one of the most chronically delayed infrastructure projects in Canada. Since 2020, various opening dates have come and gone. In 2024, Metrolinx, the Ontario agency leading construction, simply stopped making announcements about the line's completion. Enormous amounts of ink have been spilled about the project's disastrous construction timeline, terrible PR, and problematic design flaws.

Now that it's finally open, Line 5's delays and debacles will soon be a thing of the past - the public memory of a delayed infrastructure project always proves to be surprisingly short. The design flaws though, will probably still need work. Fortunately, I think they're pretty solvable, so I wanted to envision what a better future for Line 5 might look like.

A Quick Overview

Line 5 is a tram line that runs along Eglinton Avenue, one of Toronto's main east-west roads. The western two-thirds of the line are tunnelled beneath the street. The eastern third runs at-grade in the median of the road.

The Good

Toronto has needed Line 5 for a long time - probably since at least the 1960s. Everyone and their mother knows that Toronto's rapid transit network serves far too little of the city and Eglinton Avenue has long stood out as a key corridor without rapid transit. Toronto built almost no rapid transit from the 1970s to the 2010s, and as a result, there just isn't any in a lot of places where there should be.

Ultimately, rapid transit in Toronto needs to do two main things: get people downtown and allow people to cross the city east to west. Line 5 does the latter by providing a connection along what may be Toronto's most important east-west route. It also links several existing rail and subway lines, meaning that it will enhance the overall transit network by opening up new connections. Line 5 is still being expanded even after yesterday's opening, with a western extension towards the Airport under construction.

The (Likely) Bad

Trams Are Small: Line 5 was planned in an era where subway construction seemed impossible in the minds of many Toronto planners and politicians. Subway building efforts in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s went poorly and light-rail was seen as a viable low-cost alternative. Unfortunately, experts at the time didn't grapple with trams' lower capacity. Trams generally can't carry as many people as a subway because they're narrower and shorter. Line 5's trams (below left) have a maximum capacity of 490 passengers compared to almost 1,500 on Toronto's existing subways (below right). That's a huge capacity deficit based on the vehicle choice alone.

Images: RailJournal & JustKen87 via Wikimedia

At-Grade Operation: One of the purported benefits of building a tram instead of a subway was that a tram line can be built at lower cost above ground, where there's space to do so. For this reason, Line 5 was built at-grade on its eastern end, where Eglinton Avenue is quite wide. As a result though, the line intersects with road traffic at 14 intersections along this stretch, which really limits the speed and reliability of the line. The City of Toronto is overly cautious and requires trams to operate at about 15 KM/H through road intersections, and has also limited the amount of signal priority trams will get at these intersections, out of fear of annoying drivers. This looks like it will change in the near future, thanks in part to advocacy by a few friends.

Image: NamuWiki

Too Many Stops: Line 5 has a few too many stops, especially on the eastern at-grade segment. Several stops are under 500 metres apart meaning trams will spend too much time slowing down and stopping where people could easily walk a little further to a station. The Golden Mile and Hakim Liebovic Stations are so close together that it's probably possible to throw a ball between them. Line 5 is 19 KM long but has 24 stops and takes about an hour to travel from one end to the other - a sign of just how much excessive stop density can slow a line down. Anytime transit is at risk of being outrun by a jogger, things like stop spacing should be questioned.

Solutions

Frequency Increases (?) : There's little that can be done to address the capacity challenges posed by running small trams on a line that should have big subways. Line 5 is already built to allow three tram units to run connected to one another, and platforms are not getting any longer. Frequencies can perhaps be increased from every four minutes, as will be the case currently, to every two or three if necessary, but this could prove tricky if more vehicles, storage space, or major signalling improvements are required.

Removing Intersections: I'm a 'benefit of the doubt' guy so I'll wait to see how Line 5's at-grade segment works in real life. If the City can remove speed restrictions and provide good signal priority, it may be possible to run trams in the street at higher speeds. If street-running does have long-term negative impacts on speed though, I think the fixes are pretty clear. Early reports suggest that eastern segment is fairly slow.

Image: Jeff Allen

Of the 14 road intersections, along the line, eight seem like they could be closed to cars without major impacts to automobile flows. Kevin Rapusinghe has already done a nice dive into how intersection closures could work. The remaining six intersections would require some sort of grade separation. Grade separations seem to cost around CAD $100 million each these days, but $600 million to fully solve this issue is cheap by current Canadian standards.

Closing A Few Stops: Line 5 has 24 stops, of which I think six can be consolidated into three. These are:

• Hakim Liebovic & Golden Mile > Hakim Liebovic can be removed.

• Ionview & Birchmount > Ionview can be removed.

• Aga Khan & Don Valley > Aga Khan can be removed.

These stops are close together and consolidating each pair into one would pose little inconvenience to passengers, who would at most have to walk an additional eight minutes. Assuming that each stop on the line adds two to three minutes in run time, eliminating three stops would likely save between six and ten minutes in total, bringing the average end-to-end journey time below one hour.

Takeaway

It's great that Toronto has finally managed to open a new transit line. It's unfortunate that some design choices weren't optimal, but with a several easy interventions, and a few hard ones, the City and Province can get Line 5 running faster and more reliably, which will be all the more important if the area along the line develops as planned.

Image: Stephen Velasco