Toronto’s extends its subway even further into car country

I spent several days in Toronto this month. This was perhaps my twentieth trip to Toronto since 1966. I had been a witness over the years to Toronto’s astonishing transformation from a socially conservative place whose inhabitants were mostly of British “stock” into one of the world’s most ethnically diverse cities. More than half of the Toronto area’s inhabitants are now immigrants themselves or else are the children of immigrants. Toronto’s immigrants come from everywhere, but particularly from China, South Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.

Toronto’s massive immigration has not only increased its diversity; it has also enormously increased its size. Toronto has grown faster than any other big urban place in eastern North America. Depending on where you put the boundary, the Toronto region now has between six and a half and perhaps nine million people. It is thus the fourth or fifth largest urban area in North America, and, if only because the Toronto area is by far Canada’s largest metropolitan region, it plays a substantial role in the world’s urban hierarchy.

On my recent trip I made a point of exploring Toronto’s new subway line to Vaughan. This extension is only 9 km long, but even that modest length appears to make it the longest completely underground rail transit extension in North America for quite a number of years (possibly decades).¹

Toronto’s public transit system has been reasonably good for quite a long time. It relies heavily on a subway whose total route length (79 km) is not enormously high, but that attracts more passengers a day than any other North American subway except those in New York and Montréal, that is, more than the much larger systems in Chicago, Washington, and San Francisco. In addition to the subway, Toronto has an extensive streetcar network in the inner city as well as the GO train system of suburban railroad lines. In recent years, the TTC (the Toronto Transit Commission) has also worked assiduously to improve bus service. Buses run on ten-minute-or-better headways on numerous lines, including many in the outer city.

Toronto’s new subway line is an extension of Line No. 1 (the western branch of the U-shaped line on the subway map), from Sheppard West to Vaughan Metropolitan Centre.

Map of Toronto and vicinity, with a focus on urban rail lines and pedestrian facilities. The latter include footpaths and bicycle paths other than sidewalks. GIS data from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap, modified a great deal.

The line opened last December. The spacious stations are pleasant and in some cases are joined to elaborate bus terminals where it’s possible to wait indoors. The new line takes passengers well outside the area where older subways in eastern North American cities usually bring their customers. The stations are all deep into car country, and, except for the stop at York University, are not likely to be close to the places where most passengers are traveling to and from.

The terminus, at Vaughan Metropolitan Centre, for example, features a single office building, acres and acres of parking lots, and a rather elegant bus stop. There are big box stores and some medium-rise apartment and office buildings in the distance, but threading one’s way on foot through the parking lots on a cold winter day would not be much fun. The station seems to serve chiefly as a stop for buses to numerous suburban destinations, and, when I was there, a large number of passengers were indeed making transfers between bus and train.

Vaughan Metropolitan Centre. The main subway station entrance is the exotic building to the right of the image center. The bus station is the rounded building to the left of the image center.

Some of the other stations on the line are even more clearly located in outer-city places. The Highway 407 station sits in the shadow of a freeway across a major highway from a cemetery, the only nearby destination to which most people would be willing to walk. The station’s southern and western neighbors are fields. Across Highway 407 (a formidable walk among a tangle of fast highways) is a neighborhood of auto-repair shops. There is parking. Still, this is not the kind of place where subway stations on older lines are usually built.

The Highway 407 subway station.

Toronto’s last subway extension, the Sheppard Line (2002), also took one outside the comfortably walkable parts of Toronto. It runs parallel to Highway 401, a kind of beltway, which, like similar roads in the U.S., has acquired office buildings along much of its length (there are apartment buildings too). The thought in building this line was that it would serve workers in and residents of these highway-oriented structures. The catch is that the eastern four-fifths of the subway runs under a wide road that is not at all inviting to pedestrians. It does have a well-maintained sidewalk, but hardly any of the buildings along the road have sidewalk entrances. They were built to be accessible chiefly by automobile (this is even true of the buildings built since the line opened). Not too surprisingly, the billion-dollar Sheppard subway attracts only something like 40,000 passengers a day.

Along Sheppard Avenue. This is not pedestrian country despite the presence of a subway line and numerous apartment buildings. Photograph taken August 2014.

The two ends of the hybrid subway/light-rail line that is now under construction under Eglinton Avenue are also located in territory where walking is uncomfortable. The line will run through several kilometers of strip malls and big-box stores and intersections that you can cross on foot only after waiting a very long time for a walk signal.

Meanwhile, the inner portions of Toronto’s subway system suffer from terrible overcrowding. A “relief line” has been planned for decades but hasn’t yet even been started.

It turns out that there are some pretty good reasons for the odd geography of Toronto’s recent subway construction.²

Toronto’s distinctive socioeconomic (and related political) geography has played a major role. The so-called “great inversion,” in which the well-off come to occupy urban centers and the poor move to city edges, has affected Toronto as much as anywhere in North America.³ Toronto’s congenial central city, while remaining a socially complicated place, has been the scene of a considerable amount of gentrification over the last fifty years. It’s Toronto’s suburbs—or at least its inner suburbs (mostly located within the boundaries of the amalgamated city)—where urban problems including transportation problems are often felt to be most acute. Not only are these the areas with the most serious traffic jams; they’re also the areas where recent immigrants—who sometimes have no access to cars—have been most inclined to settle. An argument favoring the extension of the subway into the suburbs is in some ways an argument in favor of transferring resources from the well-off center to the not so well-off city edge. Or so a left-of-center politician might put it.

In Toronto’s idiosyncratic politics of the last couple of decades, however, it’s often been right-of-center politicians who have had the more decisive role in favoring subway extensions, although they most certainly don’t talk in terms of redistribution of wealth. This statement requires some explanation. As elsewhere in North America, the left in Toronto has typically been more inclined than the right to favor investment in non-automotive transportation modes. In the 2010 election battle between the notorious Rob Ford and George Smitherman the former even argued that the left had been engaging in a war on the car—and managed to win the election. But Rob Ford did not dislike all public transport. Arguing that “streets are for cars,” he revealed something that it’s fair to call a hatred of streetcars and bike lanes, but he strongly favored the building of subways. Rob Ford’s brother Doug Ford, just elected premier of Ontario, has continued this tradition, arguing for an extension of the subway to far-suburban, low-density Pickering, 16 km from the current subway terminus and already served by GO trains.⁴ In other words, the Toronto area’s populist, right-leaning politicians have actually been in favor of extending Toronto’s subway system to the outer city even though doing so is at odds with their obsessive interest in saving taxpayer money. This is partly a tribute to the high regard in which the TTC is often held—and also due to the fact that supporters of right-leaning politicians tend to live in the outer city and would like better access to the subway.

Subway extensions to the outer city make sense for reasons connected to Toronto’s urban morphology as well.

Apartment buildings in the years since World War II have generally constituted a much larger proportion of the new housing stock in Toronto (and a few other Canadian cities) than in the United States. There have been a number of reasons for this. Canada has never allowed mortgage interest deductions on income taxes, and there has thus been less incentive to spend lavishly on housing. This tendency has been reinforced by the fact that Canada has almost always been a little poorer than the United States, and apartments (other things being equal) are cheaper than single-family houses (which are as expensive in Toronto as anywhere). Canadian cities including Toronto have also generally had a stronger planning apparatus than U.S. cities. While Toronto’s planning history is formidably complicated,⁵ planners have sometimes in recent decades been able to push for denser, sprawl-avoiding housing (although there is still plenty of sprawl around Canadian cities). Toronto’s large immigrant population may have played a role here too. People from China and Iran, for example, may be less likely than native North Americans to think it’s normal to live in a large house on an enormous lot (although there are plenty of exceptions). The point is that much of Toronto’s massive suburban growth in the last several decades has been influenced by planning directives and economic and cultural forces that have worked together to push toward dense building that can be served reasonably by public transit. The catch is that there hasn’t always been much coordination between the building of rail transit and the siting of apartment buildings, and this fact, in conjunction with the pedestrian-unfriendly landscape mentioned above, means that the potential synergy between density and transit is only partially realized. But it still exists.

North York—especially the two kilometers between the Sheppard-Yonge and Finch subway stations that includes the area known as the North York City Centre—is the place that most clearly demonstrates the power of the subway to create pedestrian-friendly density when both government officials and property developers are on the board with its doing so and when social forces help matters along. When the line to Finch was being planned in the early 1970s, the area consisted mostly of modest single-family homes. It now has dozens of skyscraper office and residential buildings. The inhabitants of the apartments consist disproportionately of immigrants.

North York from the Yonge and Lawrence area to its south. The Don Valley lies in between.

It’s significant that many of the original commercial buildings on Yonge Street have survived and that many of the new buildings also come with street-facing shops. Much of the commerce on Yonge consists of surprisingly modest storefront ethnic restaurants instead of the banks and chain stores you usually find in new developments. Thus, not only is Yonge Street in North York lined with high-rise buildings. It also has places you can walk to, and there are people walking there at all hours of the day and evening.  I don’t know whether North York is really an “edge city,” but, if it is, it must have the best pedestrian environment of any edge city in North America. A healthy pedestrian life is as always connected with high transit use. The Sheppard-Yonge and Finch stations are two of the three busiest non-downtown subway stations in Toronto.

Along Yonge Street in North York. The commercial buildings presumably date back quite a number of years; note the ethnic restaurants.

For the moment, North York seems to be an exceptional place, but in the medium run it’s not supposed to be. One of the goals (dreams?) of many planners in Toronto for years has been to turn the Toronto area into a region with multiple high-density, walkable centers all connected by transit. The hope is that even places like Vaughan Metropolitan Centre will become something like North York City Centre. Of course, while planners are perfectly capable of making maps showing where dense regional nodes should go, they generally don’t have the funds actually to construct them. It’s an open question whether developers will really build such places on a large scale.

The move to improve transit in the outer city has nonetheless become pretty well entrenched. Public transportation in the Toronto region has been overseen by an organization called Metrolinx since 2006. The subway extension to Vaughan was built with the full support of Metrolinx, which has planned a truly massive increase in the amount of public transportation in many parts of the Toronto area. Work has started on light-rail lines in Mississauga, Hamilton, and northwest Toronto;⁶ the Eglinton crosstown line in Toronto; and several BRT lines. In addition, Metrolinx also plans to electrify Toronto’s GO suburban rail system and to increase the quantity of service substantially on its main lines. The 15-minute all-day service on the GO line along the Lakeshore would make this something like North America’s first S-Bahn/RER service, although I don’t believe that there are any plans for complete fare integration or for simplifying transfers between the GO trains and the subway.⁷

The building of all these lines is intended to transform Toronto into a 150-km-wide urban area where high-quality public transport is available nearly everywhere and where walking and bicycling are possible in many areas other than the central city. It’s a very ambitious goal, far beyond anything planned seriously in any U.S. metropolitan area in so far as I know. I have no idea whether the new line to Vaughan Metropolitan Centre—and all the other planned new suburban lines—will one day serve the kind of dense suburban places that they’re supposed to help create, but Toronto is certainly moving in an interesting direction.