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Finch West Line 6 LRT

Per a recent poll by Liaison Strategies, 70% of respondents said the new Finch West LRT line has been unsuccessful including 62% who said it was very unsuccessful.

Some reviews of Line 6 from online

The line had service disruptions (as in part or all of the line was offline) in 14 of its first 29 days.
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Bravo….oh right this is just a “sOfT” Tac…..I mean “sOfT OPeNinG”.

This "soft launch" excuse is utter nonsense. There was no plan to improve service until massive public backlash forced the mayor to get involved. No city on the planet does a "soft launch" where they intentionally run their trains without TSP and at half the suggested operational speed.
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For people that don’t use it it’s an eye sore as it’s a reminder of the tax dollars wasted. For the people that do use it, they wish it would function as intended, then move on to take other more time efficient ways of transportation
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The terminus station at Humber College is terrible. Open air platform?!? That's going to get flooded during a severe thunderstorm, or a massive melt after a huge snowfall.
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…and it’s closed now.

Yeah it's a downgrade, unfortunately. As a Humber student, it's actually faster for me to go further south, and take the 96/996. Still optimistic that the city will fix it, but only time will tell.
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And probably the best comment I’ve read and the most prevalent one I see repeated again and again on YouTube, Reddit and Discord and media outlet comments sections. Torontonians are so done with LRTs…..and all it took was 3 weeks of a soft taco to do it.

Good. This needs to happen to shut down any future LRT or other exotic technology talk. I don't care if they work in other cities. Other cities aren't Toronto. Want a city to compare to? Try Chengdu which had nothing in 2005, yet 20 years later has the 4th-largest subway system in the world. Unfair comparison due to various reasons? Fine. That's how I feel about LRT comparisons. I also have no confidence about Line 6's potential "transit signal priority" when the TTC touted "automatic train control" on Line 1 for ages, which ended up taking years to fully install and actually slowed it down. Line 6 can't even stay functional at the moment, as seen earlier this week. A little snow or rain shuts it down.
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This isn’t “teething issues” or “first LRT problems.” It’s a technology–role mismatch baked into the design from day one. Calling it a success because it technically opened just lowers the bar for what transit riders should expect.
 
nightstreak said:
Holy shit, was Rob Ford right after all? 😄

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I was never a fan of Rob Ford, but Josh Matlow’s relentless push for LRTs makes him look pretty foolish in hindsight. Ford was right about one thing: Toronto should have been building more subways instead of LRTs. The Finch West LRT has turned into a textbook example of why - so much disruption for a deeply underwhelming result. I’d genuinely love to hear Matlow try to defend this mess.

I'm glad Line 2 is being expanded further into Scarborough instead of what Matlow wanted.
 
6ixGod said:
The headlines speak for themselves I don't even need to say anything anymore. The rage on discord and reddit is even better.

Fitting that my suspension at UT forum lifts the day the grey streetcar suspends all service due to....checks notes...

...snowfall.
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You need to follow the (secret) 10 Commandments.
I haven't figured them all out yet, but here are the first 2.
1. You shall worship no other transit above LRT.
2. You shall not say the name LRT in vain.
 
The new Line 6 Finch West LRT has been shut down for the second day in a row because of yesterday's snowstorm! Given all the mishaps over the new transit line and how other LRT lines like Waterloo's ION run fine in the snow, who feels it's time to call for a public inquiry?
✋
🚊


Alternatively, I would also be open to covering both Finch West and Eglinton at the same time when the latter opens given Councillor Josh Matlow has been calling for one for a while now.

 
I don’t see another non grade separated LRT being built in this city. Goodbye to that Eglinton East LRT, it will never be built. Any extensions of Finch LRT to the Woodbine GO station and further to the airport and also Eglinton to the airport will be grade separated.
 
narduch said:
Rob Ford was a joke. He didn't even know what he was talking about.
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he was hilarious and his soundbites will live on forever. but his common sense approach was bang on when it came to grade separated vs not for transit (which I think was what the subway v lrt debate from that era was about). the "downtown elites" overcomplicated transit building by incorporating a social engineering to it.

the proof is in the pudding - I agree w other posters here that Finch West LRT will kill any political will to ever build at grade transit again. a painful lesson that cost ~ $4bn, and I feel for the people who rely on Line 6 and soon to be Line 5
 
mrgrieves said:
he was hilarious and his soundbites will live on forever. but his common sense approach was bang on when it came to grade separated vs not for transit (which I think was what the subway v lrt debate from that era was about). the "downtown elites" overcomplicated transit building by incorporating a social engineering to it.

the proof is in the pudding - I agree w other posters here that Finch West LRT will kill any political will to ever build at grade transit again. a painful lesson that cost ~ $4bn, and I feel for the people who rely on Line 6 and soon to be Line 5
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Exactly. If the Finch West LRT remains a circus and the Crosstown delivers more of the same, good luck convincing anyone to support way-down-the-road future LRT projects - particularly when they’re being sold by fools like Josh Matlow.
 
The LRT vs Subway debate was the wrong framing to the right fundamental question, which is at-grade vs grade-separated, with grade separation being a prerequisite for something to be considered rapid transit. Thus, it all comes down to a philosophical view of the objective of transit: slow vs fast. While no credible person is saying that transit has one-size-fits-all solutions, when it comes to cross-town, city-knitting main lines, fast transit is the way to go and that means grade separation.
 
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Milaisacat said:
The LRT vs Subway debate was the wrong framing to the right fundamental question, which is at-grade vs grade-separated, with grade separation being a prerequisite for something to be considered rapid transit. Thus, it all comes down to a philosophical view of the objective of transit: slow vs fast. While no credible person is saying that transit has one-size-fits-all solutions, when it comes to cross-town, city-knitting main lines, fast transit is the way to go and that means grade separation.
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In a public debate, you need short words.
Everyone understood "subways" to be grade-separated fast, reliable transit.
"LRT" meant the Transit City plan that was developed in the 2007 to 2009 era. On street, interactions with vehicles, close stop spacing, slow.

I always thought the "subway" supporters did not have enough knowledge to know the various types of subways that exist - but had common sense to know the LRT would not work.
and I though the LRT people were smarter, and deliberately never mentions mini-metros as an option since they wanted the options to be on-street LRT vs. 100% underground, 150m long train, subway. That way their LRT looks better in comparison. and that they had zero common sense.
 
CharmAlarm said:
Weather affecting Ottawa LRT and Montreal REM as well: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto-montreal-ottawa-lrt-winter-snow-9.7047495
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Delays like the severe ones on Line 2 Bloor yesterday is nowhere close to being as bad as a full shut down. Please let's stop this pedantry over the last two days. "Ummm acktchually, Line X was delayed by 10-50 minutes in City X because of the snow".

Look at that, day 2 and the subway is back to its usual on-time performance, compare to yesterday and the TTC CEO's report::
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1768581050109.png


but Line 6 is MIA again...

TwoWheelPoli said:
The new Line 6 Finch West LRT has been shut down for the second day in a row because of yesterday's snowstorm! Given all the mishaps over the new transit line and how other LRT lines like Waterloo's ION run fine in the snow, who feels it's time to call for a public inquiry?
✋
🚊


Alternatively, I would also be open to covering both Finch West and Eglinton at the same time when the latter opens given Councillor Josh Matlow has been calling for one for a while now.
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narduch said:
Rob Ford was a joke. He didn't even know what he was talking about.
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Even a broken clock is right twice a day. A clown saying random things will eventually say something mostly correct. A monkey mashing a keyboard for an infinite amount of time can produce any text, including Shakespeare. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

Westey said:
In a public debate, you need short words.
Everyone understood "subways" to be grade-separated fast, reliable transit.
"LRT" meant the Transit City plan that was developed in the 2007 to 2009 era. On street, interactions with vehicles, close stop spacing, slow.

I always thought the "subway" supporters did not have enough knowledge to know the various types of subways that exist - but had common sense to know the LRT would not work.
and I though the LRT people were smarter, and deliberately never mentions mini-metros as an option since they wanted the options to be on-street LRT vs. 100% underground, 150m long train, subway. That way their LRT looks better in comparison. and that they had zero common sense.
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1768581412170.png


Forget the impending capacity problem, driverless metro of any rolling stock width would've been cheaper to maintain and operate than Line 5 Eglinton.
High floor vehicles are much easier to maintain. Labour costs are ~70% of the TTC operating budget. https://stevemunro.ca/2024/06/12/ttc-draft-financial-results-for-2023/
 
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SJD_Toronto said:
I was never a fan of Rob Ford, but Josh Matlow’s relentless push for LRTs makes him look pretty foolish in hindsight. Ford was right about one thing: Toronto should have been building more subways instead of LRTs. The Finch West LRT has turned into a textbook example of why - so much disruption for a deeply underwhelming result. I’d genuinely love to hear Matlow try to defend this mess.

I'm glad Line 2 is being expanded further into Scarborough instead of what Matlow wanted.
Click to expand...

My comment about Ford being right was very tongue in cheek. He was absolutely clueless. The issues we're seeing now on Finch are a direct result of his meddling. The St. Clair streetcar ROW has no issues in winter weather and neither does the Spadina ROW, both of which operate very much like an LRT. At the time it was devised, David Miller's Transit City LRT project was meant to connect the entire city with the very limited budget he managed to convince the province to fund. We didn't have $50B to build subways everywhere.

His view was spot-on prophetic: connect the city with light rail transit in anticipation of an affordable housing crisis we were inching towards at that time and inevitably arrived at unprepared because he was ignored. A TTC-built LRT line would not have come with the PPP issues of a private developer, including technology disconnects and private litigation that delayed both Finch and Eglinton. We would have been riding LRTs on Finch, Eglinton, Jane and in Scarborough since the mid-2010s had Ford not cancelled everything.

One critique of Miller's views is that he could have and should have also pushed for a downtown relief line (a subway) while also prioritizing transit city. Subways aren't bad, they're just very very expensive and LRTs all over the city was what we could afford to quickly catch up on the backlog before moving to long term subway development.
 
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