my thoughts on line 5

15 years after shovels hit the ground, the Line 5 Eglinton finally opened to riders on February 8th, 2026.¹ Years of delays, cost overruns, and significantly slower-than-anticipated end-to-end time soured what should have been a day of celebration.² What frustrates me, as a lifelong transit enthusiast, is just how avoidable the whole situation was.

Just a few years before construction began on Line 5—then branded the Eglinton Crosstown—Vancouver opened the Canada Line in time for the 2010 Olympics, ahead of schedule and on budget.³ The two projects are comparable in length and intended role: both are rapid-transit spines designed to move large numbers of people through constrained urban corridors.³ Yet their design philosophy—and their outcomes—could not be more different. The Crosstown’s problems were not an inevitable quirk of Toronto’s geography. They were largely the product of planning choices, procurement incentives, and political indecision.

Procurement: fragmentation vs. incentives

To understand why the Eglinton Crosstown struggled to get built and open on time, it is important to understand the project’s procurement. Line 5 was delivered under a DBFM (design-build-finance-maintain) contract.⁴ In practice, this means Line 5 splits major responsibilities among Metrolinx, which owns the line; Crosslinx, which maintains the line; and the TTC, which operates the line.⁵ The line has been the subject of multiple lawsuits, the most recent in 2023, when Crosslinx sued Metrolinx due to operational disagreements between the TTC and Metrolinx.⁶

This fragmentation matters because it creates gaps among who makes design decisions, who bears lifecycle costs, and who runs the service day-to-day. When problems emerge—construction defects, commissioning issues, schedule slippage—each party argues that another party is to blame. The results are disputes, lawsuits, and public finger-pointing instead of problem-solving.

In contrast, the Canada line had a DBFOM contract structure, where the consortium that created the winning bid operated and maintained the line for a long period of time.⁷ This actually incentivized the winning bidder to complete a functional line on time because payments are directly tied to timelines and actually having passengers moving through the system.⁸ Eglinton’s contract, like its design, was a poorly thought-out worst-of-both-worlds compromise between a traditional DBF or DB and a DBFOM, creating a situation where no one was responsible but everyone was to blame.

Design: the worst of both worlds

On the design side, Eglinton made the fundamental mistake of trying to compromise between a tram and a subway, and got the worst of both worlds. The Eglinton Crosstown was born from the Transit City plan in 2007, which, due to the then-recent experience of the Sheppard Subway, made a politically popular but incorrect assumption: LRTs are cheap, and subways are expensive.⁹ What planners failed to realize is that putting an LRT label on what is essentially half a subway does not make that subway cheaper—in some respects, it actually makes it more expensive.

Because of the lack of grade separation on the eastern portion of the line, the Eglinton Crosstown must interact with surface traffic, and therefore, its headways (frequency) are constrained in practice—official materials describe peak service planned at about every 3 minutes and 30 seconds.¹⁰ Unfortunately for the Crosstown, the design capacity of the line and the choice of light rail vehicles dictated platform length, which in turn dictated the complexity of underground station construction.

Vancouver looked at the expensive Sheppard subway and correctly concluded that the main driver of cost was not the “subway” label or grade separation, but rather deep station construction and long platforms. So, instead of designing a bloated light rail line with an identity crisis, they designed a lean light metro that has exactly the right capacity to serve the region.

The Canada line is automated and fully separated from traffic with no at-grade crossings, matching the capacity of the crosstown by using wider metro trains and higher frequency, with platforms roughly half the size.¹¹ What the Canada line planners understood was that station construction—not vehicle choice—is the most expensive part of a subway, and if you want subway-style service for cheap, large expensive stations are the first thing you should cut.

The missed lesson

What frustrates me is that the Canada line was built before the Crosstown, and transit planners everywhere praised it for being delivered on time and within budget.³ Since opening, the Canada line has reliably carried passengers for 16 years with few operational snags.³ In creating the Crosstown, Toronto misunderstood everything the Canada Line showed about how to build good transit.

If Line 5 were simply designed from the start as a medium-capacity light metro line, Toronto wouldn’t need to build cavernous stations to fit 90m trains. The massive amount of money saved could then be used to elevate the eastern portion of the line and used to extend the line to Scarborough. The relative ease of small cut-and-cover boxes would have alleviated, if not outright avoided, the massive delays and cost overruns that ultimately plagued Eglinton, and Toronto would have had a faster, more useful, and less controversial line for a similar price.

This is not just an abstract argument about aesthetics or ideology: The promised end-to-end time was 40 minutes, ¹² the current end-to-end time is about 52–54 minutes.² Compared to the 32 km/h average speed of the Canada Line, the Crosstown only achieves a 20km/h average speed. Despite costing several billion dollars more than the Canada line, the Crosstown is slower, less frequent, and less useful.

Ultimately, the designers of the Canada line understood what it took to build a fast, cheap, and useful transit line, and the specific contract they were given incentivized them to create the most efficient line possible.⁸ In Toronto, years of political indecision and governments flip-flopping led to a deliberate—and frankly bafflingly bad—compromise that undermined every lesson the Canada Line taught transit planners, leaving commuters with a handicapped, overpriced, overpromised, and underperforming transit line for decades to come. Line 5 Eglinton didn’t have to be bad—it is bad because of poor compromises, lack of political will, poor design, confused contracts, and a lack of understanding of what actually matters when you want to move people fast.