Finch West LRT promises faster, more reliable transit for one of the city’s busiest routes. Will it be worth the wait?
On Sunday, when the first train on the Finch West LRT leaves the station at 7:30 a.m., one question will loom over its long-awaited launch: will the light-rail line be faster and more reliable than the bus it’s meant to replace?
In many ways, Finch West is a test case for LRTs — a role that unexpectedly falls to Finch instead of the long-awaited Eglinton line — which will have to prove that they are more than glorified Toronto streetcars their detractors claim. Ridership on those historic vehicles remains abysmal, drawing the ire of commuters who say they are too slow and unreliable in a city with this much traffic.
As Toronto and the province pour billions into more LRTs, including the Eglinton Crosstown, the Waterfront East and Mississauga’s Hazel McCallion lines, riders will finally find out Sunday if the $3.5-billion Finch line has been worth the headaches, disruption and congestion that were endured in exchange for the promise of faster, more reliable transit.
Although the website of Metrolinx, the provincial transit agency in charge of the construction of the new LRT, promises it “will cut down travel time and increase transit reliability,” preliminary data suggests that may not turn out to be the case — at least not in its initial phase.
Commuters in the area have waited several years for the LRT, which will run from Finch West Station to Humber Polytechnic’s north campus. Its success depends on how well it can meet the demands of the growing neighbourhoods that have been starved for transit.
Journey to the Finch West
The pressure to run a fast, effective new line — the first new TTC line in over a decade — is real, said Laurence Lui, head of service planning and scheduling, for the public transit agency. The hope is that the Finch West will prove to everyone that “we don’t necessarily only have to build subways,” said Lui.
“We’re really hoping that this does set a bar, of things that we can do faster and hopefully build momentum to reintroduce LRTs as an effective middle ground, or middle mode, for rapid transit in the city,” added Lui.
Politicians, planners and commuters have long fought over the efficacy of light-rail transit as a “Goldilocks” solution to Toronto’s lack of transit infrastructure — an acceptable compromise between expensive, high-capacity subways and cheap, yet often crowded, buses.
Both the Finch and the Eglinton LRTs were first proposed as part of then-mayor David Miller’s 2007 Transit City plan, which would have included a network of light-rail lines in Scarborough, on Sheppard East and on Jane.
The Finch West and Eglinton LRTs were originally part of then-mayor David Miller’s 2007 Transit City plan.
When Rob Ford took over as mayor in 2010, he scrapped Transit City. “Ladies and gentlemen, the war on the car stops today … Transit City is over,” Ford told reporters. “We will not build any more rail tracks down the middle of our streets.”
Instead, he argued in favour of burying any new light rail or train systems underground. The rationale: underground transit systems are quicker, don’t get bogged down in traffic and, more importantly to Ford, don’t take away a lane from cars.
The late mayor’s decision was overturned by city council in 2012, and Metrolinx took over construction of the Finch West line, first expected to open in 2020, but later pushed back to 2021. Major construction didn’t actually begin until 2019, at which point the opening date was expected to be sometime in 2023. The line was delayed due to vehicle delivery delays, the pandemic and a lawsuit.
Unlike its older sibling, the Eglinton Crosstown LRT (which has been delayed by five years and counting), the Finch West line is opening only two years past its originally projected opening date.
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It’s a pattern for Canadian transit projects, especially in Toronto, where construction tends to take longer than originally anticipated.
“We start and we stop,” said Matti Siemiatycki, a professor at U of T and director of its Infrastructure Institute. “That has a cost in terms of inflation, in terms of everyone being burnt out before we start — and then once you’re actually physically under construction.”
A route bursting at the seams
In the meantime Finch, a neighbourhood caught between downtown and the northern suburbs, has been left to languish with a bus service that has, increasingly, been choked with congestion. As far back as the 1970s, transit proposals have been promised — and reneged on — for neighbourhoods like Finch that are home to many of the city’s immigrant and low-income Torontonians.
Almost 40 years ago, Star columnist Rosie DiManno wrote of the area: “One of the biggest criticisms levelled at Jane-Finch, as designed by the urban planners, was that there were no support services within the community and that residents had to travel up to 25 kilometres on an inadequate transit system to have their needs met.”
So finally, in 2007, when Transit City promised a Finch West LRT, there was hope. But over the years, original proposals to have the line extend to Finch Station on the east side of Line 1, and even possibly connect to the Sheppard Line, were whittled down to today’s Finch West LRT.
“Time and again when the chips were down … the projects serving the inner suburbs in particular fell off the agenda and didn’t go forward,” said Siemiatycki. “The impact of that is significant, because you just end up with widening social and economic gaps.”
Ridership on the Finch West bus has grown to where it is one of the city’s busiest bus routes.
And as those plans have been debated and dragged out, the 36 and 936 Finch West bus (which the LRT will mostly replace) has only become busier — with a population that’s increased by nearly 2,500 per cent in some neighbourhoods — and more bogged down with traffic. An average of 40,000 people rode the Finch West bus on weekdays in 2024, the most recent year for which there is data available, making it the sixth busiest bus route in the city.
Spectre of the slow streetcars
For both Siemiatycki and transit expert Steve Munro, it all comes down to how the TTC will run the line.
“Streetcars and LRTs in other places — they just work better. Whether that’s in more suburban parts of Amsterdam, whether it’s in parts of France, they just run faster and more reliably,” said Siemiatycki. “If the TTC can operate the service in that way and operate it like an LRT rather than like a streetcar … it should provide better (service).”
Toronto’s downtown streetcar system has an “overly conservative operating philosophy” that hampers its speed — everything from a lack of transit signal priority at intersections to an outdated switch system, Munro said, which has made the TTC’s streetcar system one of the slowest in the world.
If that philosophy “infects the Finch line,” people may wonder why the line was even built.
While it’s a positive sign that it has finally arrived, said Munro, who advocated for the line, if it isn’t as fast and reliable as promised, people may wonder “why did we spend all this money when we’re only getting half the loaf?”
During the new line’s opening months, when it will operate under what the TTC calls “soft opening” conditions of reduced hours and reduced frequency, the Finch West operation doesn’t look much like the original vision of faster, more reliable transit.
The trains on the Finch West line will have priority signalling, allowing it to pass through some intersections before motor vehicles.
Though the trains are much larger than a bus and use an exclusive right-of-way, they will run less frequently than the bus — every six and a half minutes for the LRT, versus five and a half minutes for the bus.
The TTC points out that offsetting this is the fact the trains can carry more people per trip — a maximum of 336 compared with only 77 for a long, articulated bus.
How fast all those extra passengers will be able to make the trip, though, is unclear. A Metrolinx webpage says that trains will run with an average speed of 20-21 km/h, with an end-to-end trip time of about 33 minutes.
But Munro, analyzing the TTC’s schedule data, calculates that the average speed of the LRT is expected be only about 13.5 km/h. At its current speed, the LRT will, at times, be slower than the current bus it replaces — and significantly slower than what was originally promised in when the line was being built.
The TTC didn’t dispute Munro’s calculations, but said that the LRT schedule was built on travel times “observed through the testing phase,” where new infrastructure and technology is used in real-world conditions.
“As we move towards full service and beyond, improvements to average speeds are expected through operational familiarity and confidence and adjustments to corridor operation in collaboration with the city of Toronto,” added TTC spokesperson Adrian Grundy.
The TTC’s Lui also pointed out that the new LRT line will not only have its own right-of-way clear of traffic congestion, it will also have priority signalling at intersections — meaning trains will be able to pass through some intersections before motor vehicles — to ensure they don’t get bogged down waiting at red lights like streetcars frequently do.
As a result, an end-to-end trip on the LRT is expected to take 46 minutes Lui said, a “marginal improvement” over the bus by about five to six minutes.
For the burgeoning neighbourhoods in the area, the new LRT has another clear advantage over the old, overcrowded bus route — room to grow. According to Lui, the current demand on Finch is about 700 riders per hour, but the LRT, because of its size will be able to handle up to triple that ridership as demand increases.
“This is really about getting people who are just travelling within their neighbourhoods and not just the commuter,” said Lui. “How do we build a city around transit, where people use transit not just for commuting, but for living.”
