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516 Harnessing Development for a Better Transit System
Toronto has famously-high levels of development, and people — including recently, Ontario’s premier — love to trot out construction crane facts and the like as proof. And while the construction and real estate industries ebb and flow, the fundamentals are strong. Toronto is a multicultural city with a dynamic economy, tons of immigration (and a general openness to it), a reasonable climate, great post-secondary institutions, and a lot of other appealing characteristics… so one can imagine that people will keep coming here and keep driving demand for development for a long time into the future.
Much of the dense development that has characterised growth in the city over the last two decades is built on top of transit infrastructure built decades ago; most of the subway dates from the 1970s and earlier, and the streetcar network crisscrossing the urban core is over a century old. Suffice to say, for Toronto to keep growing the way it has in recent decades, we will need to rethink the infrastructure that undergirds this growth, and reassess the relationships between transit and development, both so that we can have more sustainable transit-oriented development, but also so that we have a larger and better transit system.
Already, the Toronto subway system is growing more than it ever has before. Right now under construction are enough subway stations (I am only talking about grade-separated rapid transit here — there are also lots of light rail stops that take the form of a modernized streetcar stop in the style of those seen on St Clair or Spadina) to take Toronto’s total station count to over 100. There are also over 20 regional rail stations in the city — some new, some existing — that are effectively morphing into rapid transit, as rail service continues to increase year after year from the once rush hour-only levels, to today’s hourly and increasingly half-hourly pulse, and soon enough, fifteen minute or better service.
While all of this growth is fundamental to creating a larger and higher-quality transit system that will be more useful everywhere as people can use it to travel to so many more places, there are huge opportunities to harness the enormous development we are seeing to drive the transit system forward into the future.
A major recent trend in Toronto — and the GTHA more widely — is a series of mega developments, taking up larger and larger sites, building a whole series of towers in quick succession, generally near rapid transit or future regional rail stations. Examples include The Well (beside a future Spadina regional rail station), Hazelview and Fitzrovia’s development at Bloor and Dufferin, Mirvish Village (Bathurst Station), and more like the 2150 Lake Shore “Christie Site” development (at the future Park Lawn regional rail station), and Republic Development’s Scarborough Junction projects are also on the horizon. This is of course in addition to the already omnipresent clusters of development that one can find at transit nodes from North York Centre, to Eglinton-Yonge, Scarborough Centre, and Kipling. However, what makes these coordinated multi-tower projects so interesting is that they are led by a small number of proponents, masterplanned to a greater extent, and given their contemporary nature are more transit-oriented, more cycling and walking-forward, and more parking-lite than large-scale developments seen in a generation in the region.
At the same time, a new class of vertical mega development, almost like these tower clusters all stacked up, are emerging at a surprising pace. Already well under development are One Bloor West at Bloor-Yonge, Pinnacle One Yonge (in close proximity to Union Station and a potential Waterfront East Streetcar extension), and Concord Sky (just north of Dundas station). It seems every few months yet another major supertall development is announced, most recently with a reworking of College Park.
Growth of any kind is exciting as it provides a vector for change, and new development can be used to drive forward city-building objectives, but while so much of the enablement of major development has come from the transit system over the decades, it seems not enough benefit from major development has been used to improve and expand the transit system itself, so it’s worth asking how things might work better.
One big and well-understood problem is that Toronto and other city governments across the nation can be hard to work with, slow, and inflexible with their requirements. This often means a somewhat arbitrary process gets in the way of acquiring significant benefits. It could be worth asking whether prioritizing maximum benefits would be worth putting aside maximum procedural adherence. Some benefits from private developments adjacent to transit like new station entrances have already been realized, but better processes could make delivering this kind of improvement and other bigger ones a more serious reality.
Station Upgrades
Station upgrades are probably the the most obvious and practical transit improvement we ought to be seeing with major developments, especially since so many stations in need of a makeover have serious developments planned at or already completed near them, including Eglinton, College, Dundas, Main Street, Kennedy, Kipling, Downsview Park, and many more.
Probably the simplest improvement you could imagine is just major station renovations. At the minimum this could look like deep cleaning, refreshing equipment, and installing new public art, but we should also be looking at the modernizing of wayfinding and digital systems, using development to help fund improvements like screen doors, expanding spaces to reduce congestion, and even doing modest expansion to fit new retail space in newly modernized stations.
Even if new entrances and other more direct benefits to developments can’t be had, if a major development is going in down the block from a rapid transit station, it’s still pretty clear that the benefit will accrue to that development and its inhabitants, and enhancements in a similar visual style to the development, as well as wayfinding to the development, could make that even more obvious. Given all the supertall skyscraper proposals occurring along the stretch of Yonge street south of Bloor — the oldest section of subway in Canada — it just makes sense that these projects might also uplift the tired and cramped subway stations in the area.
Obviously new entrances specifically are also a very nice feature, and we should make building these easier for developers. A new entrance is not just positive for a single development, but it also helps expand the catchment for a station, growing the reach of rapid transit, and potentially saving local residents time on their journeys. New entrances also help grow the visual presence of transit in the city, and if one can be built in the middle of a development, it can set the tone for transit use. It seems like a missed opportunity that with all the massive developments going on along the Bloor-Danforth corridor, largely on the south of the streets, where the subway runs consistently north of the street, only one project is being undertaken to add a pedestrian tunnel connecting the development on the south side of Bloor at Dufferin to Dufferin Station.
Infill Stations
Infill stations are another exciting opportunity, and one Toronto has actually done before with North York Centre Station. While there is limited potential for infill stations on the existing subway network given the tight spacing of stations, there is more room in future expansion. For example, Cummer station could be roughed in as part of the Yonge North Subway extension and constructed should funding be identified in the future.
Regional rail seems like an excellent opportunity for more infill stations in the GTHA, especially when compared to the subway. Stations should be able to be built much less expensively should Metrolinx keep requirements reasonable and cost issues be addressed, and there are also many potential sites where new stations could be added given the wide spacing of existing stations and the existence of local and express tracks on key corridors. The main issue with infill regional rail stations is that they don’t feel compelling while GO service remains infrequent, but this should change over the next several years, and you can already see this manifesting in the new stations being built with development tie-ins on the Lakeshore and Kitchener lines. Of course, this is also just a muscle we need to exercise. Once we’ve built a few infill stations as part of developments, it should be easier to do similar projects down the road.
Infill stations are such a compelling project because they can allow a previous unforeseen development to come in and finish up an already primed station for which there was insufficient funding in the case of a rapid transit project, or even an entirely new station.
London has a number of interesting examples of this which we can look at. For one, London has done all manner of infill stations, from on the Docklands Light Railway to on mainline rail. Major developments have even directly funded London Overground, and even Underground extensions – for example the Barking Riverside extension of the Overground and the Battersea Power Station extension of the Northern line. However, what may be even more interesting is the way developers are sometimes made directly responsible for delivering transit infrastructure. This makes a lot of sense, because while developers might not be experts in linear infrastructure, they typically are very practiced at delivering structures like stations cost effectively. In the case of the Crossrail Station at Canary Wharf, the Canary Wharf developer not only advocated for the addition of the whole southeastern branch of the line, but also directly for a station with over site development at Canary Wharf – including with specific input on how the station costs could be dramatically reduced from initial plans based on learnings in developing in the area, and general development expertise.
Extensions
It is worth noting that while extensions of the Toronto subway are probably a stretch purely as a development tie-in, the streetcar network, and to some extent the new light rail lines do offer a fairly simple higher-order transit solution that should be able to be extended or integrated into a major new development at manageable costs. We’ve already seen that the 2150 Lake Shore development will include a new loop for turning around streetcars at a new GO station, and it’s certainly conceivable that new developments in Port Lands could also integrate or extend streetcar infrastructure. In the suburbs, it seems conceivable that major new developments in Etobicoke or Scarborough could try and get short light rail extensions built as well. Regional rail extensions, albeit minor ones, are probably also possible, though this should become much simpler when Metrolinx modernizes the system with smaller but more frequent electric trains that will require lighter infrastructure and smaller stations.
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Reece Martin is a well-known advocate for good transit, worldwide. He is based in Toronto and blogs at nextmetro.substack.
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UrbanToronto will continue to follow progress on this development, but in the meantime, you can learn more about it from our Database file, linked below. If you’d like, you can join in on the conversation in the associated Line 5 and Line 6 Forum threads, or leave a comment in the space provided on this page.
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UrbanToronto has a research service,UTPro, that provides comprehensive data on development projects in the Greater Golden Horseshoe — from proposal through to completion. We also offer Instant Reports, downloadable snapshots based on location, and a daily subscription newsletter, New Development Insider, that tracks projects from initial application.