Line 5 Eglinton finally opens

From 2010 to 2025, Shenzhen (China) opened about 590 kilometers of new metro track¹. Shenzhen went from having almost no metro system to having one of the world’s best. Meanwhile, Toronto (Canada) spent the same amount of time to build 19 kilometers of new track². Of course it has to be said that Shenzhen is a much bigger city than Toronto, but the point is that Toronto’s transit expansion is extremely slow. Plus, the two projects that compose this 19 km had mixed receptions.

And today, February 8, 2026, is the opening day of another 19 km of new track in Toronto: it is the opening day of the legendary Line 5 Eglinton. This 19 kilometer-long, half-subway half-tram that runs through midtown Toronto. It started construction in 2010, making it already 16 years old. It cost at least $13 billion CAD to construct. And it’s the living nightmare of everyone who lives or has lived here.

Background knowledge

Line 5 Eglinton is a light rail/tram that runs along Eglinton Avenue, through midtown Toronto. Eglinton is a busy road with lots of development and is a high-ridership transit corridor. An attempt was made in 1994 to construct a subway along the western part, but it was cancelled after a change in provincial government. Below is a map of Toronto’s rapid transit system as of today, with Line 5 in the red rectangle.

Orange is for underground sections, while blue is surface-level. The dark part to the west is an extension currently under construction. I’ve marked some of the most important stations on the line.

1. Mount Dennis: The current western terminus. Connects to the Kitchener GO line (GO is a Toronto regional rail/commuter rail line) and UP Express (airport rail link)
2. Caledonia: The future interchange for the Barrie GO line
3. Cedarvale: Interchange with the western branch of Line 1
4. Eglinton: Interchange with the eastern branch of Line 1. With Cedarvale, this provides a quick way to get across the branches of Line 1
5. Don Valley: Future interchange for Line 3
6. Kennedy: Eastern terminus, interchange for Line 2

As for why Line 5 is not a subway, the over budget construction of Line 4 was the main cause. The thinking was that light rail is cheaper than metro, and building surface-level is cheaper than tunnelling. The core midtown area around Line 1 is quite busy, so a long tunnelled section was planned there. The desire to reduce construction costs, which are notoriously high in Canada, would ultimately compromise Line 5 and result in a bunch of problems.

A big appeal of light rail is its lower build cost and faster build time, because it can run on the surface. Light rail doesn’t need deep tunnels and underground stations, which are the bulk of capital costs to building subways. The trade-off is capacity and speed; light rail moves fewer people than a proper metro. It’s almost a middle ground between bus and metro. But when you force a tram underground for more than half of its length with subway-like infrastructure, you spend roughly similar money as a proper subway but with the lower capacity of light rail. At that point, it might be worth spending a little more to get a proper subway. It makes sense on Eglinton Avenue, the corridor is busy and has plenty of room to grow.

Plus, the surface-level sections will slow down the whole line. Operating at street-level means that Line 5 trains need to share space with cars and pedestrians, which is obviously a big problem. Toronto’s subway is already very prone to having large sections shut down due to trespassers on tracks, and those are fully underground. Imagine what a rail line running parallel to thousands of cars will experience, especially with aggressive drivers trying to make left turns or speeding through red lights. Line 5 doesn’t have signal priority, which means it will have to wait at red lights like a regular car, slowing it even further. Most cities with trams give them signal priority so that red lights can be completely avoided, but not Toronto. Signal priority improvements are said to arrive over the coming months, but it is very disappointing that it was not ready from day one and no further details were shared. A busy train carrying hundreds of people should absolutely get priority over a few left-turning cars.

Another consequence of being a subway-tram hybrid is station spacing. A metro should focus on moving as many people across a long distance, which means having just enough stations at key locations. More stations increase ridership, but also increase construction costs and travel times for everyone. Lower-order transit, such as buses, should fill these gaps created by metros. Because trams are a middle ground between metro and bus, their station spacing should follow accordingly, and Line 5 indeed does. But because the surface-level section has much tighter stations, it causes a huge speed difference from the underground section. This leads to gapping and bunching, where multiple trains all arrive within a minute, then there’s nothing for the next 20.

Then there’s the extremely long construction time. When Line 5 was officially announced, it was anticipated to open by 2020. Again, Shenzhen took 16 years to open nearly 600 km of new subway track. Toronto spent the same time trying to open a 20 km long tram. When Line 5 began construction, I was in 5th grade. By the time it opened, I had already graduated from university and was a few years into working. Some potential riders have literally died waiting for the line to open. And in the 16 years since construction began, Toronto has grown significantly. The Eglinton transit corridor is already very busy and population growth is not going to slow down. Will the capacity of a tram be enough in the long run?

In short, Line 5 Eglinton is a tram built like a subway, and it gets the worst of both worlds. It looks like and costs as much as a subway, but can’t carry as much people and is slower than a subway. The surface-level section is much slower than the underground section, becoming a bottleneck. The capacity being much lower than subway lines means that demand might outgrow it quicker than expected; will it take another 16 years to build another tram? And perhaps the most painful part is that the whole line could have already been operating as a full subway for many years at a fraction of the cost, had the 1990s construction completed. If the goal was to really save money, Line 5 should have been a bus rapid transit system (which ironically as you’ll see later on, was the starting point of this line). Otherwise, it should have been a full subway, not something in between. Toronto waited longer and spent more for a worse project.

Ride experience

There’s too much controversy and bad news about Line 5 to fit in a single post. Heck, I’m supposed to be writing about the opening day experience of the line, yet here I am rambling about the problems instead. But even though the project deservedly gets a lot of hate and distrust, I’m still glad it finally opened. Toronto sorely needs any kind of transit expansion it can get, and even one as poorly built as Line 5 will be appreciated. I am both very frustrated and very happy with Line 5, and I think that’s ok. So with the critical history of the line explained, now I’ll talk about how opening day went.

The vehicles themselves are from the same family as the downtown Toronto streetcars, so they look very similar. Instead of red like the streetcars though, the Line 5 trains are a somewhat dull grey. They’re also coupled in 2 vehicles and the stations are designed to handle up to three trains when demand catches up. But from what I saw on opening day, it may not take long for that third vehicle to start seeing some use. The trains were generally full and had hardly any open seats. While opening day may have provided a quick spike in ridership and the real, lower baseline will emerge later, it is still concerning to see the trains being so full from day one.

Dwell times (how long the trains stays stopped) were fairly long, and this is an easy way to speed up trains. Sometimes the doors stayed open for up to 20 seconds after the last passenger boarded or disembarked. This extra time will compound into wasted minutes, especially in the line’s eastern section.

I measured the time taken to complete a one-way trip; the surface-level section took 30 minutes and 25 minutes for the underground part. The latter being nearly 2 times longer yet being faster shows that the eastern surface section is hindering the line’s potential. While the underground section runs like a subway, the surface section is slowed by red lights and lower operating speeds. I could see cars and even buses pass by the train, which really shouldn’t happen. Signal priority is an absolute must for this line to succeed, and operating speeds should be raised. Service frequency was quite good, I saw no more than a 5-minute gap between trains. Rush hour frequency is a train every 4 minutes, and the slowest off-peak rate is every 10 minutes.

The underground section is buried really deep beneath the surface, it’s no wonder why construction was so complicated and expensive. The boarding areas are built like caverns, and an underground concourse sits on top of those. And then there’s still an escalator or set of stairs on top of that to get to the surface. In the picture above, you can see the boarding area and parts of the concourse. To get to the surface, you need to go up another level.

I thought the station designs were overall quite nice. They’re nice and clean, spacious, wayfinding is clearly marked, and there are even some stations that can host stores. You could argue that they perhaps feel sterile, but I’ll take clean and sterile over dirty. The new bus terminals are large and provide plenty of indoor space to wait in. The cleanliness is especially notable in interchange stations with lines 1 and 2, where older and newer parts are clearly distinguishable. Though for some reason, all of the underground stations were extremely cold, as if there was no heating. I hope this isn’t the actual case, otherwise it would be bad in both winter and summer.

Meanwhile, the above-ground stations are much more modest, they almost resemble fancy bus stops. My biggest concern about these stops is fare evasion. To prevent congestion on the train, passengers are expected to pay their fare before getting on the train. This way, people don’t get clogged at the doors trying to tap cards. But these surface-level stops aren’t enclosed by fare gates, you can simply walk into them and just board a train without paying. The downtown streetcars work in a similar way and fare evasion is a big problem on those.

Overall, I was pleasantly satisfied with opening day service. Line 5 will personally be useful as part of my commute, so it was relieving to see it running in good condition. The only significant issue that I haven’t already mentioned is trespassers on track. While my train was moving to an underground station, the emergency brakes activated. The train squealed to a halt quickly, so at least that’s proof that the brakes work. The reason was because someone had stepped onto the tracks at the station ahead and triggered the system. This isn’t a problem exclusive to Line 5, every subway line in Toronto suffers from this issue frequently. I really wish platform screen doors were installed to solve this, because a single person can ruin the movement of thousands.

Network 2031

In 1985, the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) created a rapid transit expansion plan called Network 2011. This was an ambitious subway expansion plan to expand the transit network in Toronto and surrounding cities, collectively known as ‘Metropolitan Toronto’. Back then, the real City of Toronto was much smaller, and Metropolitan Toronto would eventually become the current City of Toronto. As implied by the project name, it was predicted to have been completed by 2011. Here’s what it would have roughly looked like, had it been built.

There are 5 major differences compared to today’s network.

1. Line 1 has a shorter western branch, though this may have been built given enough time. That extension opened in 2017, after all
2. Line 3 existed. It was closed in 2023
3. Line 4 was supposed to be much longer
4. Line 5, the Downtown Relief Line (Network 2011 prioritized this over the Eglinton West line, which makes today’s Line 5 actually Line 6), was planned
5. Line 6 (Eglinton West) was originally supposed to be a busway, but it got upgraded to a subway. It’s also missing much of the eastern part that today’s Line 5 would end up taking

All of Network 2011’s planned projects didn’t get very far. Line 4 was much shorter than intended, Line 6 (Eglinton West) was cancelled, and Line 5 was never attempted at all. But there was a reason this plan was made in the first place: there were issues the current system would have to overcome. Line 1 was reaching maximum capacity, and Bloor-Yonge Station (a key interchange of lines 1 and 2) was overcrowding. The Downtown Relief Line was proposed as a solution. The urban population was growing rapidly, which meant transit needed to connect suburban communities. This was the main reason for Line 4’s existence.

Fast-forward several decades without substantial construction, the issues from the 1980s only got worse. This is the main reason why a transit construction boom hit Toronto, and suddenly there are multiple projects underway. Particularly the Downtown Relief Line, which morphed into the under-construction Ontario Line (now Line 3), was a requirement for any further expansion to take place. Line 6 Finch West, another light rail, opened in December 2025. Line 5 Eglinton opened today, February 2026. Extensions to lines 1, 2, and 5 are under construction; all scheduled to open by 2031.

In one way or another, Network 2011’s plan did end up coming to fruition. Toronto ended up getting a transit line on Eglinton albeit smaller, a better version of the Downtown Relief Line, and there are finally studies seriously looking to expand Line 4. so a fair title to give to these would be ‘Network 2031’. The main difference is that the original plan was at least an order of magnitude cheaper to build, and I hope that is a lesson that isn’t forgotten again: the best time to build transit is today.

If I’m still around in Toronto and take transit by Network 2031’s completion, I look forward to writing about them.