The Decibel - Behind schedule and over budget: Why do we keep building LRTs?

Episode Date: March 17, 2026

Building cities for the future means building a lot more public transit – and lately, Canadian cities have been planning LRTs, or light rail transit. While these projects are introduced with great promise of moving people around more efficiently, in practice, these projects have a history of disappointment. There’s Ottawa’s LRT project, which opened to great frustration from riders. Then, Toronto’s Finch West line, upon opening, couldn’t quite keep pace with a local runner. Most recently, there was Toronto’s Eglinton Crosstown, which opened this past February, six years later than initially planned, and a billion dollars over budget. Oliver Moore writes for the Globe’s Editorial Board. Previously, he was an urban affairs reporter. He’s here to talk about why we keep building LRTs and how we should think about transit that will take us into the future. Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Oh, is this one coming or is this... It's very exciting. Decibel producer, Mikhail Stein, is waiting for the train. And the reason she's excited is because she, along with most of the city of Toronto, has been waiting for this train for 15 years. The Eglinton Cross Town LRT. This light rail transit line, or LRT, has been making headlines for a long time. It went more than a billion dollars over budget.

it, and it was supposed to open all the way back in 2020. That was revised to 2021, then 2022, 2023. You get the point. So when it finally opened to passengers on February 8, 26, Mikal had to see it for herself and talked to other people riding the train that day. Can I ask you what brings you to the LRT today? We just want to try line 5. He is very excited about this.

He's begging me for a long time. We know today's the first day, so he's like, oh, let's go, let's go, we have to go, mom. Yeah. Can I ask you, what are you so excited about? Yeah, I came all away from St. Catherine's like on Saturday night, and I spent a whole night in Toronto just to wait for the opening day. Arraniath, Cedar Man, Cedarville Station. Transfer for line 5, Baglington.

Doors will open on the right. Well, I remember when they started construction in 2010 or so, so yeah, I've been waiting a while for it to open. There was literally a marching band or something, like, probably a group of friends, but they had, like, drums and a kazoo or something. And, like, every time we arrived at a major station, they would start drumming and playing some music. So, yeah. Despite the excitement, a big question remains. What went wrong for so long? And Eglinton isn't the only LRT project, mired in drama.

A lot of cities have some sort of complication. There's Ottawa's O-Train, plagued by malfunctions, delays, and derailments. Talk of an LRT in Hamilton has been ongoing for years. Construction there hasn't begun. And Calgary already has an LRT, but a planned extension could take a decade to finish. So what is it about these LRT projects that make them go, well, off the rails. Oh my gosh.

I feel like I need to narrate what just happened, which was that the LRT just broke really fast and I almost went flying across the car. Oliver Moore writes for the Globe and Mail's editorial board. Before that, he spent years covering urban issues for the globe. He's here to talk about why we keep building LRTs and how we should be thinking about transit that will take us into the future.

I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is the Decival from The Globe and Mail. Hi, Oliver. Thanks so much for coming on the show. It's a pleasure to be here. So we just heard from our producer, Michal, riding the LRT, and we heard from people who were very excited to ride it. So just to start off, let's lay the groundwork, lay the tracks, if you will. What exactly is an LRT? Yeah, and a lot of Canadians will never have run across them.

They don't exist in most cities in Canada. But they are in a bunch of cities. They're in Vancouver, in Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Montreal. Think of it as somewhere between a streetcar and a subway. It runs on rails. Often you pay before you get on the vehicle, which allows you to board much more quickly. They don't carry as many people as a subway, but in many ways they kind of look like a slightly scaled down subway.

And it's faster than the streetcar if done properly because it's separated from traffic. So they typically run on the road, or at ground level at least. Some of them, including one in Toronto, are partly underground. But the concept traditionally is that it's on the road, but separated from traffic so it's much faster as a result, which is one of the great advantages of it over, say, a bus or a street car. Faster and bigger than a street car, slower and smaller than a subway. Okay. When did we start seeing LRT?

Like, when did they come onto the scene? It's been about half a century now. I think Edmonton was the first to bring LRT. And as I say, they're now in a number of cities. They're not a new technology by any means. Okay. So we've had Subway since the late 1800s. And then LRTs came onto the scene, I think, around the 70s, right?

What's the cell for light rail transit? Like, why did cities, not just Canada, but places all over the world, why did cities want LRTs? One big difference is the cost. I mean, you know, once you start tunneling, things become ferociously more expensive, I mean, you know, this isn't necessarily what you want from an urban planning point of view or what neighbors want, but from a purely cost point of view, if you build a ground level, you build at ground level. The next option is you elevate it. You put it on stilts of some sort. The third option is you go underground just because underground is so expensive. So all other things be equal, you don't want to put transit underground.

And so if you don't have the capacity requirements for a full. subway, LRT can be a cheaper option that gives you something closer to the functionality of subway than, say, a bus does, without the high cost of a subway. Okay. So it seems like in Canada, LRT projects are exploding. There are the two LRT lines that just opened in Toronto, but there's also plans for one in Peel region, Hamilton, an extension in Calgary, Surrey, British Columbia. So it sounds like the pull is to have something that's kind of like a subway, but it takes

less people. So they're taking like density into account here. Is there a possibility that we're not thinking about the future when we're building LRTs? Because I mean, populations grow quite a bit, right? So it makes sense in the moment. But are we not thinking about the future when it comes to building LRTs? It's a fair point. And there may be situations where in 100 years, people like us, when journalism of course still exists, we'll be sitting around and making these having these discussions and they'll be thinking, why did those fools back in 2025 not build a subway? But a couple of things I would say one is that there are projections and there are there are sort of mathematical attempts to figure out how much need there is. There are certainly places where there's no realistic prospect

of ever being enough people that they're going to need a subway. So they shouldn't build one there. There's other places where I guess maybe there's a gray zone, but I would say two main points. One of which is this subways underground transit is just so much more expensive. So if you go with only subways today, you build way less transit because you just can't afford to build a lot. And so then this scenario is you're building for a great tomorrow, but you're today is constrained. And so you have less transit today, which makes it harder to get around a city, which leads to more traffic, which makes a city less appealing, which could then actually hamper the growth potential that could in theory lead to a subway. So it's not a bad idea, of course,

to plan for the future. You should. But I think it would be a flawed concept to say, build subways only now because you might need them in 150 years. Let's even take a step away, step back. We don't know what's going to happen in 150 years. There may be much more growth than we think, there may be less. I mean, things happen. Um, you know, on an extreme level, Ireland has fewer people now living in it than it did before the famine. It has never caught up to its pre-fabmin population. You know, London took 75 years to catch up to its pre-war population. Now, those are cataclysmic events. That's, that's probably not going to happen. But, you know, we read a lot in the media about the demographic crisis facing Canada. Fertility rights are going down. We don't know that Toronto's

could be, whatever, three times the size of 100 years from now. It might be a lot bigger. It might be a similar in size, it might even be smaller. We just don't know. So it would be a very expensive bet now to spend a lot of money building for a much more populist future that we're not sure is going to arrive. That has a real cost today to making that bet. And then something that we do know right now is that we do need more public transit, right?

Yes, we do. And yeah, that's the thing. If you're only building the most expensive version, you don't get very much of it. Okay. So part of the appeal of LRTs is that they are supposed to cost less money to build than a subway, right? But let's actually look at this. Can we compare what it costs to build the Egglinton LRT versus the cost to build the subway in the city? Yeah, absolutely. And here I'm a little bit indebted to our colleague Jeff Gray, who's done some very good reporting on transit and particularly the cross town.

And it's a little bit hard to winkle out because the contracts for these LRT projects often are the construction and 30 years of maintenance and operation. You have to kind of figure out how much was the cost to build the thing versus the bigger number. That said, Jeff has done some number crunching. And if you look at the crosstown construction, as of last year, it was about a half a billion dollars per kilometer in 2025. So to make the dollars consistent with sticking with 2025, I mean, you think of Toronto has two main subway lines.

It's more or less one that runs north-south on a U and then one that runs east-west. The east-west one was built more recently. It was finished in 1966. and it cost in current dollars, about $120 million a kilometer. That's very cheap compared to what we do now. I mean, a lot has changed since that. I mean, labor laws have changed, environmental laws have changed, and we could talk about the way the construction is done.

That's also different. But a more recent construction, subway construction, much smaller, but it's an extension of the line up into Vaughn. So it's only about 8.6 kilometers, not that big, but it's a proper recent subway construction project. It was done finished in 2017. and it cost $460 million per kilometer. It's roughly the same as the cross-town.

Now, you could say, well, we got a subway for that. Yeah. You got an LRT for this. So therefore, the cross-town's bad value or it's too expensive. But over those eight years, things have continued to change. And there's a broader, there's a macro problem here is that transit construction costs in North America are absolutely exploding. Why is that? There's a bunch of reasons that academics and transit watchers point to,

including a loss of institutional knowledge, which leads to an over-reliance and consultants, which makes also hard to know whether you're getting good value for money. Construction is often done far too maybe lavishly, as the word, huge station boxes, huge underground excavation. And the underground stuff, as I said,

or the underground stuff is the very expensive stuff. There's a project in New York, which eight years ago, a New York Times reporter did a huge analysis of it, and it was described as the most, expensive subway mile on earth. And it worked out in Canadian dollars to about $3 billion per kilometer. Oh my goodness. So what's that? Six times what we were just talking about with the cross town. And that's eight years ago. And current subway construction proposals in New York are more

expensive again. It's a little bit like that line. I think it's from the Simpsons where Bar is saying, this is the worst day of my life. And Homer says, no, no, it's the worst day of your life so far. And so when it comes to transit construction costs, it's worthwhile to point backwards and say, where have we gone wrong? Because something has clearly changed. But it's not necessarily realistic to say we should be able to build for the price we built it for in the 60s

because it's just, we're not in that world anymore. These have changed so much, right? Yeah, okay. So it sounds like prices have ballooned for transit. Absolutely, it exploded. Yes. And when it comes to subways and LRTs here.

So what about buses then? Because we are hearing more about dedicated bus lanes and this is a way to get people around the city. So why not have more dedicated bus lanes That doesn't cost as much of the subway or an LRT. It's a lot less for sure. And if done well, BRT, bus rapid transit, you can do BRT. That's pretty good.

Some listeners will have been to Mexico City. I've ridden the BRT there. It's pretty fantastic. I mean, it's not great as a rider experience because it's absolutely rammed with people. So as a writer, it's not super fantastic to ride it, but it's very effective. You're not paying on the bus. Everyone just floods on and off. But the key difference there between, say, the rents,

painted bus lanes in some parts of Toronto, is that they're actually separate lanes in Mexico City. Drivers do get into them sometimes, but basically it's the bus's lane alone, so it can go very quickly. To some people that's still not as good as an LRT, because the argument is the LRT has a permanence because of its track. Once you lay track, this is not an absolute, but once you lay track, you're less likely to pull it up. And therefore, you created something that can encourage development, which is a whole separate thing from moving people, but there's an argument that made, that if you're going to spend a lot of money on transit, you also want to make the city grow as a result of the transit you've built. So one argument for LRT over bus rapid transit is that its permanence

encourages development, whether that's the goal or not as a separate question. And the other argument is that it's a more pleasant ride. And so, you know, the BRT is way cheaper. And I think the biggest question to raise on the BRT versus LRT questions, are people willing to give it, it's truly its own space? Because so much of the LRT debate is around getting in the way of traffic. What do you do with the traffic lights? Do you give the LRT vehicle priority over the drivers? Or do you not? What does that do for speed?

And so if you're not willing to give space with a bus or LRT, the concept kind of falls apart. If you are willing to give space, you can't have a debate about which one is better. Yeah. I take your point. That makes a lot of sense to say that, you know, it does give a permanence, right? If you were having these tracks being put down, that you have this sense that it's going to be there for a lot longer. Absolutely. And, you know, it's no guarantee. And there are places in Toronto where you can see

kind of poke it up through the road, the sort of vestigial streetcar tracks of, you know, 50 or 100 years ago, whatever it was. But generally speaking, once you've laid track, it is a more permanent thing than not. We'll be right back. So, Oliver, when we look at the LRT transit lines that have opened over the last few years, like Ottawa's O-Train, Toronto's Finch and Eggleton LRT lines, we tend to hear about how wrong things have gone, right? What's going on with these projects? I mean, there's no simple answer. Unfortunately, we could do multiple podcasts about just the Ottawa one.

I had an inquiry of the multi-hundred-page report about that. So a bunch of different things have happened. I think without getting into the individual projects too much, perhaps one result of that is there's become this narrative that LRTs are a bad form of transit or a bad, a thing that doesn't work, shall we say. And I think that would be very unfortunate if that's what listeners or that's what the country draws from this because, you know, different types of transit serve different needs. You know, the bus is, you know, is for a certain level of density, a certain level of ridership demand.

An LRT is for a different level. A subway is for a different level again. They're not really comparable. They do different things. And so it would be very unfortunate if one form of transit, you know, the LRT kind of got this, you know, black mark on it and was seen as this thing that we shouldn't build anymore. We have to draw a very clear distinction between the problems of the construction and the problems of the project. And what I mean by that is that if a project takes longer than it should be to build, that's a bad thing. If it takes much more money than we expected to build it, that's obviously a bad thing.

Those are failures of execution. But they don't necessarily make the project a bad project. You judge that once it's open, once it's being used, is it doing what it was supposed to do? So I think when it comes to LRT projects that have happened in Canada, and there's, you're right, there's been some controversy. and there's a lot of bad press about them. But I think we'll be very interested if we go back in a couple of years or five years and look at how well they're working because that's the real test. Obviously, we have an execution problem if it takes us way longer and cost them when you build them.

That shouldn't be happening. But the real test is, are they doing what they're supposed to do? And I think that, you know, that will have to see. And the only last thing I would say on this is that it feels like we hear a lot about LRT projects that are going wrong. And we do. But that's in part because we're building a lot of LRT projects. We are doing a lot of them. If we were building tons of subgroup projects, we'd probably have tons of news about how these subway projects aren't going well.

And they're all over budget. They're all taking too long. And there's weird construction problems. And they're ending up in court all the time. I don't think there'd be a great difference in how they're being reported. Well, I guess we'll see with the Ontario line, which is happening right now. I guess we will. And that's an interesting point because, you know, we moan a lot about LRT projects that take forever and go so far over budget.

And that's not acceptable. The Ontario line was supposed to open in 2027. You know, that's next year. It's not opening in 2027. Spoiler. They moved that, I think, to 2030. And then they said 2031. And now they're saying early 2030s.

Oh, my goodness. We'll see. And I don't even necessarily know if we can hold that against them. I think, to something like I said, these are big complicated projects. I mean, I would be nice if political promises were made with some sort of rigor. I mean, we've seen that again and again where transit promises are made on the election trail. And then turns out that the promise was quite unrealistic. And it turns out it's going to take longer than we thought.

So that shouldn't happen. But there are sometimes delays. I just think it would be very nice if they had the confidence in their new schedule to tell us, we think it's going to open in 2032 or whatever the year is, not like sometime in the early 2030s, which is a huge gray zone. Yeah. And just to say the Ontario line is the new subway extension that will go through downtown Toronto. Yeah, it'll run from sort of the southwest of the downtown, through the downtown, and then north.

Right. Okay. Eventually. You mentioned earlier about the construction of these projects and how that is causing issues. Can you tell me more about that? Yeah, absolutely. You know, the crosstown, which is the LROT across Midtown, Toronto that just opened this year, it was set up as a public-private partnership, and it was over-s, the construction was overseen by Metro Links, the transit agency.

Now, there's a couple of things, and again, I'm indebted to our colleague Jeff Gray for some of the reporting on this, is that this was the first really major transit project that Metro Links had overseen. And so is it wise in retrospect to give a... a relatively new or relatively inexperienced agency oversight of a very large, very complicated, very expensive project, history would suggest maybe that was not the best idea. It was structured as a say as a P3,

public-private partnership. So by putting it together as a public-private partnership, in theory, the company is building it take on the risk. Well, that doesn't actually work because when things go wrong, they end up in court. And unfortunately, the names are very similar. So Metro links the transit agency and cross-links, the consortium of companies that was building the thing,

building the cross town, end up in court, I think at least twice, maybe three times, twice for sure, and Metchlings paid hundreds of millions of dollars each time in settlements. So it's not as simple as saying that a P3 is risk-free for government. It doesn't say a P3 model is necessarily a bad model, but it has its own inherent issues. And in this case, it became very adversarial. They butted heads a lot. They went to court repeatedly. And it seems that there was a real breakdown in the relationship there and less of a willingness to work together to make it work and more of an inclination, at least on the part of MetroLink, to say, no, we sign this contract, we're not giving you more money, make it happen.

And maybe they thought that's why we have this contract. But in the real world, project which was supposed to open in 2020, opened in 2026, you could attribute some of that to the pandemic fair, but it took a lot longer than it should have. And I think it's pretty obvious that the way it was done was not a. ideal. Does our climate have anything to do with these projects not working as well as they could? When I mean these projects, I mean LRTs. I don't think there's any evidence of that. I mean, LRTs work in very, very cold climates in Scandinavia. They work in very hot climates. That shouldn't be an issue. I mean, I would say that as a rider of transit, it would be very nice if the people

built transit were to say, acknowledge that we live in a cold climate and were to enclose the platforms. There's nothing wrong with cold and LRTs together as a technology. It would be nice if the people who built it thought a little bit about the cold and the passenger experience. Yeah. Where in the world do LRTs work really well? Lots of places. I mean, listeners who think LRT are garbage should travel more. I mean, Paris has LRTs. Barcelona has LRT. Smaller cities, you can ride them in Bordeaux. In a Canadian context, you can, Waterloo has LRTs that work quite well, even in the cold. Montreal has built, relatively recently opened the REM, and I've not written it yet, but I've

I hear good things about it. It's a very large LRT project and seems to be working great. So there's nothing wrong with the technology or the concept. Maybe some of the execution hasn't been so great. Okay, so on that point, how can future LRT projects in Canada learn from past LRT mistakes? Like, is there a way to avoid these huge price tags and long delays? I wish I could say yes, there is. I wish I could say there was a simple answer.

I mean, I'm going to make another Simpsons reference. I love your Simpsons reference, by the way. Okay, good. You know, it's lovely to think that there's this silver bullet. There's this thing we can do X and we'll fix it. And, you know, it kind of brings you back to the monorail of The Simpsons. Like, here's this new idea. You never thought of it before.

It's going to solve your problems. I'll give you the Springfield Monorail. I've sold Monterelles to Rockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook. And by gum, it put them on the map. Unfortunately, while the Monorrell episode ended in, I think, a bit of a shambles, as I recall correctly. Yes, it did. And so, you know, there's not a simple,

answer, but there's a number of things that can be done that are, some cases are being done. I mean, one of the problems with the cross-town contract was it was an enormous contract. It was all bundled here. It was one contract that was so big that only two consortia were big enough to bid on it. So that's still two, but it's not exactly a robust competitive bidding process if you have only two. For the Ontario line, the subway line we talked about earlier, MetroLink has broken it up. So it's a bunch of contracts, which should, in theory, make it work better, or at least

might raise its odds of working better. Let's just say that. But one thing that Metrolinks has not done, and MetroLink is a provincial agency, the chair of Metrolinks used to say that they had one shareholder and that was the Premier of Ontario. They have not, and the province of Ontario has not held a public inquiry on what went wrong with the crosstown. And I'm not entirely sure why that is. I mean, one obvious cynical answer is they don't want to do it because they don't want things to get public. But I think the public has a legitimate interest in what went wrong here because these are very large sums of money. Billions of dollars.

Billions and billions of dollars. And when things go wrong, it can sour the well for transit building. It's harder to justify a project when people say, yeah, but the last time you did one, it was a total gong show, and it cost $15 billion. And so I think transparency can go a long way. And MetroLink's has got a well-deserved reputation for opacity, the opposite of transparency. And I think a little, letting a little sunlight in there would help give the public more confidence in the process, which would help maintain a constituency for building transit.

So whether a public inquiry is necessary or not, I think is not for me to say, but definitely having a better understanding of what or wrong. And so far, we don't know. I mean, Premier Doug Ford says, and he kind of, he was at some press comments kind of gestured to the engineers in their room. And they've learned all the lessons. And we don't want to, like, help them waste their time by doing a public inquiry. And they want to get on building transit.

And I kind of get it sort of. But I'm like, but maybe if they wasted a bit of time on a public inquiry, they could build transit faster and better next time. If we come back to the Eglinton LRT, took over a decade to build, it's been open for over a month now, what should be looking for to judge if it's a success or not?

Yeah, it's an interesting thing because transit to some extent disappears into the fabric of a city. Most transit riders are absolutely creatures of habit. They do the same route every day. They go down the same staircase at the same station. They get on the same door of the same vehicle, and they're absolutely, you know,

that's why wayfinding science. and things are almost entirely for tourists because locals do the same thing all the time. They know it entirely. So at its best, transit kind of disappears. You don't think about it. It just works. And you know, you might compare it to, you know, it's an artery of the city. It's like an artery in your body.

You don't think, I mean, I guess unless you're sick, you don't think about your arteries. You don't think about your veins. They just do what they're supposed to do. And so the real sign of success for the crosstown, I think will be, we're not writing stories about it. We're not doing podcasts about it. It's just this workhorse doing its thing carrying tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people across the center of the city. Oliver, this has been great.

Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for giving me a chance to talk about transit. It's been a while. That was Oliver Moore, a member of the Globe's editorial board. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Our producers are Madeline White, Rachel Evene McLaughlin and Mahal Stein. Bianca Thompson helped edit this episode.

Our editor is David Crosby. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening.