As predicted months ago, the problems were never going to magically disappear once Line 6 or Line 5 opened. You can build the nicest LRT in the world, but if you don’t give it proper Transit Signal Priority, you have kneecapped the entire line on day one. And that is exactly what people are complaining about now.
Here in York, VIVA does the same nonsense: the bus sits through a red, inches into the intersection, and then stops again at the BRT station. That is not “rapid” transit, that is just a bus in a fancy jacket. And look, I will be generous and play along with the whole “Line 6 should be an LRT” framing, but let us be honest, a city the size and density of Toronto has no business relying on surface-running LRTs to do the heavy lifting of public transport. This is a 6 to 8 million metropolitan area with gridlock baked into every arterial road. An LRT forced to interact with traffic signals, turning vehicles, pedestrian cycles, construction, emergency vehicles, and weather is simply the wrong tool for the job.
Toronto needs heavy-rail, grade-separated subway infrastructure. No intersections, no surface-level conflicts, no signal delays, no bottlenecks from traffic, and consistent headways that are not at the mercy of whatever chaos is happening above. The Ontario Line is exactly what we needed.
Put bluntly, you cannot serve a global city with infrastructure designed for mid-sized cities. LRT only works when it is fully separated or given absolute priority, and Toronto refuses to commit to either. So we end up with expensive, politically “safe” half-measures that give all the cost of rail with the performance of a local bus.
Until Toronto stops treating rapid transit like a compromise project and actually builds heavy rail where it is needed, we are going to keep repeating this exact same failure cycle.
