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At first glance
- Expanding transit systems in Canada may take much longer than the same process in European Union member states like Denmark and the Netherlands.
- “One of the factors is politics, and another related factor is what kind of transit are we building?” says Shelagh Pizey-Allen of TTCriders.
- Some experts say the prevalence of NIMBI (Not in My Backyard) sentiment is a significant obstacle to building new infrastructure in cities.
Canadian governments of all party lines in all parts of the country are ambitiously planning to expand public transportation in the name of climate change and quality of life. There are only a few challenges: building public transportation such as elevated rail and subways in Canada is enormously expensive and takes decades to complete.
Well-developed public transportation is certainly not absent in Canada. Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver made the top 10 Business Insider2017 Ranking of North America’s Best Transit Systems
However, expanding transit systems in Canada may take much longer than the same process in European Union member states such as Denmark and the Netherlands.

In 2021, the City of Winnipeg released a public transit “master plan,” which involved building a massive new network of rapid transit corridors. However, the corridors will only have buses and are expected to take 25 years to complete.
O-train, Ottawa’s light rapid transit service, has faced problems in recent years, the most significant of which is the 2021 derailment.
In Edmonton, structural problems on the still-under-construction LRT line connecting to the southeast part of the city have now delayed a project that was already delayed indefinitely. The $1.8 billion line was originally approved in 2009.
Toronto’s Eglinton Crosstown LRT line was approved in 2011 and was originally slated for completion by 2020, but is still under construction, with 2023 fast approaching and over budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Shelagh Pizey-Allen of TTCriders, a public transit advocacy group in Toronto, says there is no reason for the often decades-long process of building a new subway line in the city.
“One of the factors is politics, and another related factor is what kind of transit are we building?” says Pizzi-Allen. “Transit that is very deep underground is much more expensive and there are several other factors.
According to Hub contributor Chris Spook, the politicization of transit proposals, often tied to construction choices, is a major source of disruption for such projects.
Spoke says political will is needed to overcome local opposition if higher levels of government want to see new transit built.
“You have to depoliticize it, which probably requires a higher level of government,” says Spoke. “We just need a province that is willing to do it.” We could do it by next week, but that’s obviously a political issue.
Kyle Owens, president of Functional Transit in Winnipeg, says the eagerness of people and governments to discover signature projects often results in them being approved without proper consideration of costs.
“Everybody loves ribbon cuttings … but it’s very difficult to commit financially to those projects because of the resources involved,” Owens says. “The solution for many municipalities is to just spread that investment out to extend the deadline, so they never have to make a significant commitment early on, but can still reap the benefits of project approval.”
The Eglinton Crosstown LRT has drawn criticism from residents along the planned route. Many of these critics also oppose the development of denser housing in their neighborhoods, as well as the potential loss of a local Tim Hortons due to the construction of the LRT, stating that it would be a great loss to the community.
Spoke says the popular choice of “cut and cover,” the process of digging up road surfaces to build shallow transit lines before resurfacing, is more efficient than tunneling at deeper depths, but attracts more opposition from local residents.
The Ontario Line, a 15-stop subway line unveiled by Premier Doug Ford in 2019, has been criticized by local residents along the planned route. One city councilor said the line would resemble the US military detention center at Guantanamo Bay if trees along its route were removed during construction.
Steven Wickens, a transportation researcher, says such opposition may lead transit planners to favor submerged, deep tunnel boring over the more efficient cut-and-cover method.
Both Wickens and Spoke say the prevalence of NIMBI (Not-In-My-Backyard) sentiment is a significant barrier to building new infrastructure in cities.
“There has always been NIMBIism in cities, people who opposed riots and property expropriation,” says Wickens. “But people seem less willing to make sacrifices at the level of people of that generation that endured the Great Depression and fought in World War II.”
Shelagh Pizei-Allen says there are more obstacles to building new transit than just NIMBIism, such as relying on the public-private partnership (P3) model to build infrastructure.
“They should shift the cost overruns and the costs of delays to the private sector, which has not been confirmed with Eglinton Crosstown,” Peasey-Allen says.
Premier Ford’s Ontario line, whose construction was awarded to a private consortium on November 17, is expected to cost nearly $20 billion, representing a 70 percent increase in the unforeseen budget increase. Wickens says the P3 model results in the unanticipated costs of such lengthy projects being passed on to taxpayers and future elected governments.
“I would say that every subway ever built in the non-communist world has been a public-private partnership in some form, but what we now narrowly think of as P3s is failing, at least in Ontario,” Wickens says.
What’s more, Wickens says Ontario’s budgeting process is opaque and damages public trust in those responsible for building transit.
“When we let costs get out of hand and we don’t make the line-by-line accounting open, transparent and easy to understand … we undermine the competitiveness of our cities economically and in terms of livability,” says Wickens.
Owens says investing in better service within existing transit systems is necessary to increase public enthusiasm for more public transit.
He claims that while Winnipeg’s physical transit infrastructure, which currently only has buses, has improved in the past year, the quality of service has remained largely unchanged due to the number of buses remaining the same.
“Without building a network, building one part of the chain doesn’t connect anything, if I may use metaphors,” says Owens. “We felt this was a case of investing too much money in one line rather than investing in the network itself.”
Towers of apartments and condominiums continue to spring up in Canada’s largest cities as the population grows rapidly, but the construction of public transportation is not keeping pace. For a country where most levels of government are vocally committed to a more sustainable future, building public transportation seems like an obvious choice.
Yet instead of cheap and plentiful public transit, Canada’s major urban centers have gotten arguments over construction methods, rising costs and endless delays.
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