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Sometime later this year, Toronto’s rail network will grow more than it has in 60 years when both the Eglinton Line 5 Crosstown LRT and Finch West Line 6 LRT open for service to the public. These two lines — one a modern tramway and the other a tramway-subway hybrid — will add rail service to two busy bus corridors, creating new links to important destinations across the city.
These “light rail” lines are not Toronto’s first foray into street railways. The city famously kept its legacy streetcar network while cities around the world from Los Angeles to Paris tore their networks out, but even more recently — at the launch of the Spadina, Harbourfront, and St Clair streetcars — the term “light rail” was used to describe them; it’s even still visible on signs if you know where to look.
While some in Toronto have tried to draw a hard line between the streetcars of old and the new “light rail lines” that will, controversially, appear on the subway map (even when in the case the line on Finch looks more like the St Clair streetcar than a subway), the reality is that these services all exist along a spectrum of street railways, running from the tourist streetcars of American cities, to the high-capacity “stadtbahn” lines operating in Calgary and Frankfurt.
What is certain is that Toronto’s streetcars have great potential for improvement. Some of this is simply returning them to their state in the past where service was more frequent, consistent, and most importantly, reliable, but much of the improvement potential can be seen in these newer lines, which lie somewhere further towards rapid transit on the street railway spectrum.
What's funny is that while these are meant to be something different from the streetcars, more inspiration can be found in the streetcars than other places in the world, and not all of that inspiration is a good thing.
For example, the Toronto streetcars are characterized by a lot of stops, sometimes only 100 metres apart, and the Finch and Eglinton lines both have areas of extreme stop density. Albion Mall on Finch will have three different light rail stops, while the eastbound Hakimi-Lebovic platform on Eglinton is just about 75 metres (less than the length of an eventual 90-metre train) from the westbound Golden Mile stop (and only about 220 metres from the eastbound). The Toronto streetcars are also known for virtually always running in the middle of the street, and for the surface sections of both Finch and Eglinton, the lines are solely in the middle of the respective corridors, even in places such as Eglinton at Leslie street, where an alignment to the side of the street would have removed an intersection with vehicles, allowing for more frequency and no signal delays. And of course, who can forget the fact that both the streetcars and the Finch and Eglinton lines all suffer from insufficient signal prioritization.
Now, to be clear, not all the emulation of the streetcars is necessarily to the detriment of these newer lines. For example, both Finch and Eglinton duck below grade at the ends of their surface running sections like the Spadina streetcar, while Eglinton dives below ground at Don Mills in a way that personally reminds me of St Clair at St Clair West, for what will be an interchange with the Ontario Line as opposed to the Spadina subway. For better or for worse, squint at our new definitely not streetcar lines, and you’ll see all kinds of elements of the streetcar network. You’ll also see different ideas, and I’m going to argue some of them are very much worth stealing and applying to the huge existing network of street railways in central Toronto.
One thing that's immediately obvious as you scan the routes is the rather nice surface stops. To be clear, some tram systems internationally — such as Sydney — have outdone us here, but still, the average stop on the Eglinton or Finch lines is nicer than the best surface streetcar stops in the core. Of course, you can’t expect to create a mini-station at every one of the over 600 streetcar stops in Toronto, but something we really ought to do more often is treat different parts of the streetcar network differently based on context. The busiest streetcar stops in the city will surely be busier than the least busy stops on Finch or Eglinton, and these stops should have just as much shelter and other nicer amenities offered on our new lines.
What kind of amenities? Well, off-board fare payment is one: one good way to speed up boarding of streetcars at extremely busy intersections would be having people tap while they wait for the car to arrive and not tap on the car itself — something that could be encouraged with signs.
Level boarding would also be a game changer. Stepping up into the streetcar is an age-old tradition, but it actually also slows boarding down. Perhaps more importantly, a lack of roll-on, roll-off level boarding hurts accessibility on the streetcars, and when someone has the gall to use the ramp so they can actually get onboard, it’s a whole production that seriously delays the car.
It also really wouldn’t hurt to have next vehicle screens mounted perpendicular along the platform face; even throwing aside the many practical benefits of these, emotionally it would make using the streetcar a little nicer and more predictable. You could even tell people the time!
The learnings can go far beyond the stops as well. TTC has much to learn from these lines, and since it will be operating them, one would hope those learnings happen. An obvious one would be operating the streetcars more like the subway, that is more carefully monitoring vehicle spacing and service, and actively adjusting things to keep service reliable and vehicles properly spaced — this is a critical issue with the streetcars right now, but presumably won’t be on Finch or Eglinton. What seems clear is that if a route is substantial enough to have rail along it, we should put more energy into that corridor, treating rail like the substantial thing that it is.
Those lines also offer the ability to show the TTC the type of modern technology that street railways typically have in 2025 (and in 2005 for that matter). The switches used on the lines will be dual-blade, as in virtually all tram systems internationally, and there will be reliable electronic control of those switches as well as train protection to prevent collisions.
The vehicles also offer potential for learnings — while Toronto’s new streetcars are far larger than the old ones that graced our streets, most tram systems have at least some trams that are even longer, often at around 45 metres (the TTC’s modern streetcars are 45 metres) and sometimes even above 50 metres as is the case in Budapest. Finch’s vehicles will be single-units around 45-metres in length, while Eglinton will use coupled trams in sets of 2 (60 metres) or 3 (90 metres). In the future, it may make sense to slightly reduce service on a busy, and very frequently-served line like Spadina — in concert with providing still frequent and consistent headways, and utilising even longer vehicles.
It would also make sense to acquire vehicles going forward, which, like those on Finch and Eglinton, have doors on both sides and operating cabs at both ends. Over time, this could enable the conversion of some streetcar loops into crossovers, freeing up valuable land and also reducing the cost of system expansion. It would also enable the use of island platforms on routes, which had been further converted.
All of these changes would add numerous tools to the toolbox that is used to build out the streetcar network we have in Toronto. One can imagine a network that, unlike today, is much more tailored to local conditions, with longer cars on busier routes, nicer stops in busier locations, and reliable service network-wide.
Some things supersede almost all practical considerations and would just make our city, and transit more beautiful — like the green track on Eglinton that replaces some grey in a sea of grey with more green, which also helps reduce rain runoff, the urban heat island, and noise.
A better streetcar network is possible, and soon we’re going to have even more examples to point to right here at home of how we can build it.
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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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