News   Dec 08, 2025
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Finch West Line 6 LRT

Did we just built the slowest rapid transit line in the world?
I tried answering this question searching online and found (please forgive me) an article from the DailyMail, though I can already imagine the Toronto Sun headlines this week.


Seems like all the same failings occurred in Sydney's LRT, reaching speeds just over 11km per hour. The Finch West LRT is doing around ~12km/h so the title for world's slowest may still be nudged by Sydney's LRT. The article is from 2019 so naturally I was curious if things got better for Sydney since.

As per below screenshot from Wikipedia, it appears they ended up removing some traffic and turn signals to speed up things. I have a feeling such improvements won't be coming along the Finch corridor.
1765146386211.png

Alas, these improvements did not seem to help with operating speeds. I looked up statistics from the transit agency and according to here, the route (Line 2, Randwick to Circular Quay) actually went from 34 minutes (when reported at opening in 2019) to 38 minutes and 30 seconds today.

Which does not aspire me with great confidence for our line.
 
If you weren't already depressed enough, I did a little fact checking and compared it to another LRT system, Calgary's CTrain. ***** CAUTION*****..........those with heart conditions may want to look away.

Finch is traversing just 11 km with 18 stations and takes 50 minutes. Conversely, the Red Line CTrain traverses 32 km in 59 minutes with 28 stations and this INCLUDES going straight thru the downtown core. yurt2022 is wrong, LRT is not garbage but rather Finch is. The CTrain is LRT done right. Funny how the supposed right-wing car loving cowboys put transit first while left-leaning "transit friendly" Toronto does everything in it's power to make taking transit as painful as humanely possible.
At the risk of sounding pedantic, who thought it was ok to round up 10.3 to 11 km in the marketing? One of the least objectionable things about the line but still funny how they tried to oversell the line this way.
 
This project was bad when they announced 34-38 minutes. Now this is disaster territory being a 50 minutes ride for only 10,3 KM. No excuses for the low speed. The TTC, the city and the Provinces need to address it quickly and work on solutions ASAP.
Aprox. 5 min per KM is just below (above? Lol) the average runners speed per km at 6 min...

That seems honestly INSANE....


I truly am praying that crosstown is not this bad ...and yes I know it will be this bad maybe worse on the east end.
 
Rode today and marvelled at how many sfd are ready for intensification. Also, it took ~6 minutes to go from Humber College station to Woodbine by bus so I expect many workers to continue using this route.
 
I tried answering this question searching online and found (please forgive me) an article from the DailyMail, though I can already imagine the Toronto Sun headlines this week.


Seems like all the same failings occurred in Sydney's LRT, reaching speeds just over 11km per hour. The Finch West LRT is doing around ~12km/h so the title for world's slowest may still be nudged by Sydney's LRT. The article is from 2019 so naturally I was curious if things got better for Sydney since.

As per below screenshot from Wikipedia, it appears they ended up removing some traffic and turn signals to speed up things. I have a feeling such improvements won't be coming along the Finch corridor.
View attachment 701327
Alas, these improvements did not seem to help with operating speeds. I looked up statistics from the transit agency and according to here, the route (Line 2, Randwick to Circular Quay) actually went from 34 minutes (when reported at opening in 2019) to 38 minutes and 30 seconds today.

Which does not aspire me with great confidence for our line.
The article you linked cites a ~11 km/h average speed for Sydney's L2 Randwick line in conjunction with a 58 minute travel time, not 34 minutes.
This article concurs and mentions a 11.16 km/h average speed, implying a 10.788 route length (actual route length source needed):
But since opening, Sydney's L2/L3 lines have improved in their scheduled (and actual) speed.
1765150190465-png.701332

Source: https://transportsydney.wordpress.com/2021/09/30/sydney-light-rail-l2-l3-speeds-up-unannounced/

Consider the fact that the timetabled journey went down to 31 minutes, and commenters report actual trip times of ~35 minutes, it appears that the average speed has increased by up to 66% to ~18.5 km/h. Assuming the 52 minutes average trip time that I heard from a TTC instructor was correct, 10.3/(52/60)= 11.88 km/h. EDIT #1: Even if speeds got worse since 2021 and trip times climbed up to 38.5 minutes, >99% on time performance means trip time is at least reasonable compared to Line 6: https://www.transport.nsw.gov.au/da...-travel/sydney-light-rail-performance-reports

EDIT #2: For reference, Google Maps is showing trip times of 32 minutes from Randwick to Circular Quay and 36 minutes from Circular Quay to Randwick. Take that with a big grain of salt, since Google Maps is often overly optimistic *cough* Line 1 TTC.

TLDR: Sydney L2 Randwick Line is actually 18.5 km/h with 35 minute actual travel time for 10.788 km (as of 2021). Toronto Line 6 Finch West is 11.88 km/h with 52 minute travel time for 10.3 km.

4 minutes walking time:
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If you weren't already depressed enough, I did a little fact checking and compared it to another LRT system, Calgary's CTrain. ***** CAUTION*****..........those with heart conditions may want to look away.

Finch is traversing just 11 km with 18 stations and takes 50 minutes. Conversely, the Red Line CTrain traverses 32 km in 59 minutes with 28 stations and this INCLUDES going straight thru the downtown core. yurt2022 is wrong, LRT is not garbage but rather Finch is. The CTrain is LRT done right. Funny how the supposed right-wing car loving cowboys put transit first while left-leaning "transit friendly" Toronto does everything in its power to make taking transit as painful as humanely possible.
LRT is a spectrum not a specific type of service.

On the low end, it’s an urbanized “rapid” transit aka glorified streetcars.
On the high end, it’s a metro like system reaching subway like speeds.

The C-Train is on one end while this line is on the other. I’m not sure how much has changed after the pandemic but before then, the C-Trains reached 80 km/h constantly and is faster than the TRs on Allen. Yeah TTC is shameful. However, snowfall causes massive delays. TTC is better in that regards.
 
I checked a few stop pairings in Prague (and I focused on the straight ones). Again it seems to hover around 17-19km/h. Better than Finch West, but its far from amazing. I haven't seen anything that reaches the promised 22km/h speeds on Finch West.

I'm not sure which stop combos you looked at, so I'm not saying you're wrong, but my frame of comparison is the high speed services that run in the outer parts of town, comparable to the Finch line, so those are the representative examples I'm going with. All travel times and distances are sourced from the official website at dpp.cz, and the location given is the exact stop name you can find on their site yourself.

All searches are for 9:00 am on Dec 8, so that they represent a workday schedule and not a Sunday evening one.

Dědina - Dejvická: 7 km, 16 minute travel time = 26.25 km/h average speed
Výtoň - Libuš: 12 km, 28 minute travel time = 25.71 km/h average speed
Sídliště Barrandov - Slivenec: 2 km, 4 minute travel time = 30 km/h average speed
Sídliště Řepy - Anděl: 8 km, 18 minute travel time = 26.67 km/h average speed
Bílá Hora - Malostranská: 8 km, 20 minute travel time = 24 km/h average speed

As an aside tidbit of note, their longest route, the 26, is 23 km long, but takes only 1 hour and 10 minutes to travel its complete route. Contrast that with the 501.

We have all the tools we need, we're just not taking advantage of them.

As I responded to you earlier today, just because something can be done in a hypothetical sense doesn't mean it ever will be done. Has anything been done about 510 and 512? No. We've had shitty speeds for years and years. And you expect something different this time? You think that all of a sudden that this time something might be better? That's like a woman dating a guy thinking "I can change him, with me, it will change". Just because it is possible in theory doesn't mean it will ever happen.
A compelling argument to never do anything about anything that has historically been terrible.

A more apt dating analogy would be "I've been ****ed over by so many people in my life, that must mean I will never be able to find a healthy relationship".

I obviously can't guarantee anything, but right after opening day is the perfect time for lots of people to complain and maybe hit a critical mass. Remember all those trial balloons of policies politicians like Ford put out that are walked back after sufficient outrage? It may not be enough to change the operating procedures for the legacy streetcar fleet, but bad PR for a brand new transit project may be enough to push them to make changes, in the same way that those trial balloons are walked back even while society more generally remains a neoliberal hell with no concern from any major political party for the average person.

Not to mention, you could have similar outcomes with a bus on it's own right of way without the $3.5 Billion pricetag, and you could build a lot more bus rapid transit for the cost of this white elephant.
Until you run out of capacity on that BRT. What then? There is a wide spectrum of ridership between what a bus can carry and when it starts to make sense to have a subway, and an LRT can be scaled up in a way that BRT cannot.

But it looks like you don't want to acknowledge reality, and just be bitter when you see an argument you don't like by trying to discredit me like you did some posts ago or just be sarcastic while ignoring my previous points.

Yes, when people discredit a legitimate form of transportation just because our own application of it is poor, I have a problem with it.

I didn't ignore your previous points, by the way. I'm subscribed to a lot of threads and sometimes I miss notifications. But hey, if it makes you feel better to have a grievance with me, bully for you. But hey, let's go over your previous points:

Congratulations on being vague and ambiguous on what your point was.
I spelled out my point for you quite clearly.

"if you have a bunch of circus clowns at the helm, being a subway instead of an LRT is no guarantee of speed or reliability."

That is my point. Read it, then read it again, then read it a third time before you start accusing me of stuff again.

Whether the slow zones are an issue of policy, as on the streetcars, or just bad maintenance, as on the subway, doesn't matter one bit. Deferring maintenance is as much of a policy choice as running slow LRTs is, and when you have people who make that decision, you will get slow zones, even though they don't run the subway like a streetcar!

It doesn't matter what the cause is for the slow zone, all that matters is that the journey is made slower because of human decisions that need not have occurred!

Have I made my point crystal clear for you?

But the GTA is no better at subway operations than buses and LRTs? What planet are you living on. TTC might not be the best at subway operations, but there's hardly one that comes 15 minutes later followed by 5 coming right behind each other. Subway service is pretty regular and still relatively good and reliable despite the slow zones.
Subway service may be more regular than surface transport by virtue of being in its own enclosed environment, and dealing with less external factors than a mixed traffic bus or streetcar. But make no mistake, it happens, and not at all unfrequently, that the subway runs extremely unreliably too. I've lived it, I've seen it. I've seen trains that tail each other through line 1 stations and leave an enormous gap between them. I've seen trains that are so crowded I can't get on - usually after a big gap. I've waited 10-15 minutes for trains with no explanation as for the service gap.

It may be that it was an act of chance and that nothing could have been done to prevent it - but if I argued like you argue, I could say that this means that subways are trash and we shouldn't build them.

I have not once said that it would be a good idea to put a subway there. Nice try with your assumptions.
OK, and if we had built your proposed BRT, what would you propose as a solution once we had maxxed out capacity there? Which is not hard to do, buses, even artics, offer far lower capacity than a single LRT car, never mind multiples of them coupled back to back to back. If BRT has been maxxed out, and LRT is bad... then either we build a subway, or we evacuate the whole area. So your argument will lead to advocating for a subway eventually, just not as fast.

Prior to LRT opening, buses on the 36 were running every 3:25 minutes in the morning rush hour, the majority of them artics. There isn't a lot of additional capacity you can squeeze out of the mode before the line becomes absolutely chaotic to run. That's why the Yonge and Bloor subways were built, you were having streetcars running every minute or two at peak, in MU configurations, and they still couldn't keep up with the demand.

I meant to say most buses/streetcars/LRTs in Toronto. European LRTs have signal priority, stops further apart usually, and are often grade separated.

You are just saying whatever shit comes to your mind to discredit my posts which, which is just plain disingenuous.

Then you should have clarified that, no? How can you get mad at me for taking your argument at face value?

See what we said about realistic expectations of the line?
No.

People have been predicting this outcome for years, without evidence.

Now that we have the evidence, it makes sense to criticize. But all the Nostradamus posts going years back predicting this based on zero available information were not remotely helpful and contributed nothing to the discourse.
-infantile meme redacted- Just give it up son. LRTs are garbage
Go away, the adults are talking.
 
I tried answering this question searching online and found (please forgive me) an article from the DailyMail, though I can already imagine the Toronto Sun headlines this week.


Seems like all the same failings occurred in Sydney's LRT, reaching speeds just over 11km per hour. The Finch West LRT is doing around ~12km/h so the title for world's slowest may still be nudged by Sydney's LRT. The article is from 2019 so naturally I was curious if things got better for Sydney since.

As per below screenshot from Wikipedia, it appears they ended up removing some traffic and turn signals to speed up things. I have a feeling such improvements won't be coming along the Finch corridor.
View attachment 701327
Alas, these improvements did not seem to help with operating speeds. I looked up statistics from the transit agency and according to here, the route (Line 2, Randwick to Circular Quay) actually went from 34 minutes (when reported at opening in 2019) to 38 minutes and 30 seconds today.

Which does not aspire me with great confidence for our line.

The article you linked cites a ~11 km/h average speed for Sydney's L2 Randwick line in conjunction with a 58 minute travel time, not 34 minutes.
This article concurs and mentions a 11.16 km/h average speed, implying a 10.788 route length (actual route length source needed):
But since opening, Sydney's L2/L3 lines have improved in their scheduled (and actual) speed.
1765150190465-png.701332

Source: https://transportsydney.wordpress.com/2021/09/30/sydney-light-rail-l2-l3-speeds-up-unannounced/

Consider the fact that the timetabled journey went down to 31 minutes, and commenters report actual trip times of ~35 minutes, it appears that the average speed has increased by up to 66% to ~18.5 km/h. Assuming the 52 minutes average trip time that I heard from a TTC instructor was correct, 10.3/(52/60)= 11.88 km/h.

TLDR: Sydney L2 Randwick Line is actually 18.5 km/h with 35 minute travel time for 10.788 km. Toronto Line 6 Finch West is 11.88 km/h with 52 minute travel time for 10.3 km.

So what we have here may quite literally be the slowest rapid transit line on the face of planet earth.
 
I don't understand how the LRT can be that slow. Why do low floor LRT's seem to operate below the speed limit.
Simple answer is that designers see grade separation as less of a requirement with LRT. Less grade separation inherently means less speed. Their are also many contexts where slow is more than an acceptable outcome - think LRTs traversing a tight corridor in a padestrinized area.

However, NA more or less ignore such urban designs so the practicality of using low floor lrts are not realized to the same degree, making such slower operations almost insulting to the mind.

When you use high floor trains, your station design becomes more elaborate, meaning that station location are theoretically more limited and certainly more expensive. This encourages larger station spacing, which definitely improves speed. From an athestic perspective, I think ppl see high floor trains as less safe and therefore deserving of more grade separation, which too allow for higher speeds. That being said, nothing stops anyone from treating high floors like low floors and low floors like high floor LRTs.
 
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Aprox. 5 min per KM is the average runners speed. That seems honestly INSANE. I truly am praying that crosstown is not this bad ...and yes I know it will be this bad maybe worse on the east end.

I know we all think it the fault of cars and not having signal priority, but I'm going to offer another theory.

I think all doors boarding is actually slower than boarding through a single door up front. Everyone just seems to lazily get on off these (and the new streetcars) instead of showing a little hustle and initiative. Heaven forbid they have to deploy the wheelchair ramp! When that happens you're about to miss 4 or 5 light cycles.

Streetcars/LRTs are a romantic notion that doesn't work in real life. What we need are lots of subways and lots of diesel buses.
 
Streetcars are a romantic notion that doesn't work in real life.
No they actually really do work in many contexts...but if you're operations prioritize the car ...then you will be disappointed in many ways.

For instance, I think the Ion in waterloo works very well and there's very little reason why toronto cannot operate ion like LRTs in the outer burbs of toronto.

Similar to how paris uses LRTs in its outer burbs to great sucess (i personally have used line 9 in paris and found it rather pleasant)
 
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I think all doors boarding is actually slower than boarding through a single door up front. Everyone just seems to lazily get on off these (and the new streetcars) instead of showing a little hustle and initiative.
Nonsense. I was out on the line for several hours today, and the exchange of passengers was universally pretty quick just about everywhere except for the termini. The LRVs took their sweet time leaving the stations for reasons entirely unrelated to boarding time. There was one tram that idled at Stevenson for around 3 minutes, long after the last passenger had boarded.

And, of course, people famously never took their time when boarding through the front door... should the subway trains have front door boarding only, too?

Heaven forbid they have to deploy the wheelchair ramp!
The stations are all level boarding, so there is zero reason to do this.

Streetcars are a romantic notion that doesn't work in real life.
You need to travel more before making claims like this.

If I was using Canada as my representative example, I would be justified in saying that nothing at all works. And only in Canada is it actually controversial to suggest an intermediate capacity transit solution between buses and subways should exist!!!
 

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