We’re weeks away from the Eglinton Crosstown LRT finally opening in Toronto (extremely, extremely belatedly), and it’s perhaps predictable that some people want to pick at the barely healed wounds Toronto’s civic culture sustained over the previous decade. With the underwhelming-so-far performance of the Finch West LRT, a variety of voices have decided to relitigate the decision to build light-rail lines in Toronto at all, arguing that the city would have been better served with different choices.
In the Globe and Mail, Marcus Gee says that Finch West might have done just as well with rapid bus lines instead of light rail. In the Toronto Star, Reece Martin says bluntly that the late Rob Ford was right and that Toronto should build subways instead of surface-level light-rail lines. Elevating this out of the realm of merely “people on the internet disagree”: Toronto city councillor and once-and-future mayoral candidate Brad Bradford concurred with Martin’s assessment. Bradford stands a decent chance of being the city’s next mayor (better than you or I do, anyway), so if this becomes the conventional wisdom in this cursed city, it could affect how we build transit in the future.
So let me push back strongly on this attempt at revisionism about a bit of history we actually lived through and should remember clearly: whatever the hypothetical merits of building subways in Toronto (I’ll basically cosign any attempt to build more and better transit, in principle), the actual poisonous politics of transit in this city through the 2010s need to be left in the dustbin, and nobody should be trying to resuscitate the reputation of the people responsible.
A brief civic refresher: after David Miller won re-election as mayor in 2006, he turned his energies toward a transit-expansion plan for the amalgamated city (only a decade old at that point) that would bring higher-order transit to areas unserved by the subway lines built to that point. But reaching into the far corners of Etobicoke, and especially Scarborough, is just geographically daunting: trying to do it entirely with subways was never seriously discussed, because the cost-per-kilometre is so high. (This was already true in the 1970s, when the TTC initially proposed light-rail lines into Toronto’s suburbs; it’s triply true today thanks to a generation of policymakers who haven’t taken cost containment seriously.)
Miller and city council faced a choice literally every jurisdiction has to make, regardless of what technology they choose: whether to build for the highest level of service or for geographical coverage. The Transit City LRT plan tried to split the difference but inarguably focused more on geographical coverage than on speed. That wasn’t an error or incompetence; it was a conscious choice made by policymakers because the alternative wasn’t subways under Finch — it was buses for the indefinite future in a part of the city elected officials thought deserved better.
Rob Ford ran and won in 2010 railing against LRTs, but he failed to kill the plan in its entirety, because Toronto’s geography and geometry aren’t up for debate. Which, alas, didn’t stop several more politicians covering themselves in disgrace on this file. Premier Kathleen Wynne, in order to win a byelection in Scarborough in 2013, blew up the tentative peace settlement council had just barely arrived at; she and her transportation minister promised a subway extension deeper into Scarborough that would open before the Scarborough RT needed to be retired. (Spare some shame for the NDP’s candidate in that byelection, Adam Giambrone — Miller’s onetime TTC chair — who refused to defend his own transit plan, because he hoped to win an MPP’s seat.) When John Tory won the 2014 mayoral election, he confirmed the new consensus for a Scarborough subway and promised “SmartTrack,” essentially adding GO stations and service levels to complement the TTC’s subways.
Well, it’s 2026, so where are we with the Scarborough subway, SmartTrack, and the Scarborough RT? The tunnel-boring machine that’s hypothetically building the extension of the Bloor-Danforth line deeper into Scarborough spent much of 2023 stuck in the ground because it turns out this stuff is actually more difficult than drawing lines on a napkin; when the subway will actually open to passengers is anybody’s guess. The province doesn’t even pretend that SmartTrack is a thing anymore, and it’s in no hurry to achieve even the levels of GO service that were being discussed aspirationally a decade ago.
There are a thousand different reasons for the current state of affairs. But if there’s one fundamental cause, it’s that the actual people who actually sold the public on subways wrongly claimed, for years on end, that building subways would be both cheap and easy — and voters repeatedly endorsed a costly delusion rather than grapple with reality.
I have my own reservations about some of the ways LRTs were sold to Toronto, but they pale in comparison to the utter mountain of dishonesty used by the hall of shamers on the transit file during the previous decade. If you want to say, “Rob Ford was right about subways,” then try to make the case on the merits that misleading voters is a good thing, because that’s what Ford, and Wynne, and Tory actually did. I’m more than happy to move on to the transit fights of the present and future, but the past isn’t so distant that I’m willing to let these sins be forgotten, much less forgiven.
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