The Decibel - What’s stopping Canada from building better public transit

Episode Date: February 5, 2025

There’s a fairly long list of public transit projects that have gone off the rails all across Canada. These projects often end up over budget and face multiple delays. Is this problem unique to Canada?Oliver Moore is a journalist with The Globe who has covered transit issues for years. He explains why this phenomenon keeps happening and what public transit agencies can do about it.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

So, Oliver, you've got the paper over there. What are you looking at? It's an article that I did with my colleague, Jeff Gray, at Queen's Park. It's an article looking at why it's so difficult to build transit projects in Canada, why there are so many delays, why the price keeps going up. Oliver Moore is a journalist with The Globe and Mail who's covered transit issues for many years. You've got in Ottawa, the Confederation Line, which is such a scandal that it actually prompted

a judicial inquiry. You've got Toronto, you've got the Eglinton Crosstown LRT, the price is going up. We have no idea when it's going to open. The Finch LRT in Toronto, same sort of thing. In Peel region, west of Toronto, they have a project, its scope is shrunk, its price has gone up. Calgary, you've got the Green Line, also an LRT, it's been on and off of life support. And then in BC, the Surrey Langley Skytrain has been delayed and its price has well gone up. Oliver is on the show today to explain why Canada just can't seem to build big public transit in a quick, cost-effective way and who loses out when we don't.

I'm Maenaka Ramen-Wilms and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Oliver, welcome back to the show. Thanks. It's great to be here. So off the top, you listed some of those projects in Canada that remain kind of in transit purgatory, right? Like started but not finished. Could we pick one of those that you listed and actually dig into that example and look at the problems it's faced? Well, the one that's really the poster child here is the Eglinton Crosstown. Your listeners in Toronto will be,

unfortunately, quite familiar with it. Yes. For those who are not, it's a light rail plan running across midtown Toronto. It's partly buried in the center of the city. It's above ground at each end. There's actually been transit plans for Eglinton going back to the early 90s, late 80s even.

It was gonna be a subway, it was canceled, it was rejuvenated, and eventually it started in 2011. It was supposed to be done in 2020. It's now 2025, we don't know when it's going to open. The last we've heard from Metrolinx, the transit agency that the province operates, is they will give us a three month sort of warning that this project is going to open.

We heard that in September of 2023, it's about what, 15 months later, we have not yet got that three month window, so we really have no idea when it's going to open. To be fair, there's been a lot of things happen over that time. There was a pandemic that made it a lot harder for people to work in close proximity. That just generally created supply chain issues. There are some legitimate things there that no one can discount. There have also been a long list of construction problems, quality control issues, engineering problems. There's been court battles where the consortium of construction companies that's building the project have gone to court with Metrolinx,

the transit agency. There's really just been delay, delay, delay, delay. So as you say, a bit of a mess. We're like 13 years into this project and the cost has really ballooned too, right? It's $13 billion now, which is in transit terms, a lot of money, but not that much money. There are more expensive projects out there, but the average person hearing that, this is a gargantuan amount of money. So you hear $13 billion and you say, what do we get for that? Well, so far you don't get anything except huge impacts at the surface level. It's been very disruptive to the city and I think it's really caused a lot of people to question the cost benefit analysis of building transit.

That maybe the result is great, but the pain now is very, very hard to deal with for some people. So this is quite an egregious example in Toronto. When we look across Canada, Oliver, are we also seeing this problem? How common is this that these projects are delayed and over budget? It's very common. I mean, that one is, across town is probably the worst example I can think of, but it is very common across Canada.

We've got these projects in places as diverse as Ottawa and Toronto and Peel region. We've got Calgary, we've got BC, we've got different trans agencies, different governments of different political stripes. And we have these problems again and again. Again, it's not every project in every city, but it's a lot of them. So I wonder, is this a Canadian problem like with Canadian public transit then that we're having an issue here or is this something that other countries also deal with? It's broader than Canada. I mean, it's in a way it's too bad because if it was just Canada, we'd say hire a consultant from the UK, bring in that company and you solve the problem. Unfortunately, it's more broad than that, but it's not interestingly everywhere.

Researchers who look into this say there's a really strong link between the fact that these countries speak English and their transit projects go off the rails. And obviously no one's saying that the speaking of English is the problem, but there's a cultural issue at play in some of these countries. The cultural issue, according to people I've talked to, the best anyone can think of is a few things. One of which is that there's been a loss of institutional knowledge in these countries. They haven't built transit enough for a long time. The people who should be overseeing these projects, the government and bureaucracies should be overseeing them, have lost some of the knowledge of how to oversee a project. They've

lost the knowledge of what should even be happening and how to ride herd, as it were, on the construction companies. There's also a certain amount of political meddling. In some cases, locals may not want a rail line on the street, so it gets buried as a result. It becomes much more expensive. There is an element in North America, certainly, of building things more cautiously than in some other countries.

You have a double subway train. The train one direction, trains going the other direction, and between them in Canada, there'll be a firewall. In some other jurisdictions, they won't have that. That doesn't mean those places are unsafe. Many of our listeners will have gone to those cities, ridden their subway trains and they're just fine. It's just a different way of doing it. The problem is that as soon as you add in something like a firewall, your tunnel becomes considerably bigger and that is such an enormous part of the cost is the size of the tunnel. One last thing is that in Canada, there's less risk tolerance. You've got situations where they'll run a tunnel farther below ground to keep it away from private homes so there's not vibrations that could lead to damage. In Toronto,

they're expropriating a bunch of homes on Pape Avenue out of the chance that there could be damage. This is for the Ontario land. This is for the Ontario land, exactly. And these are not, with all due respect to the homeowners, these are not historic homes, not particularly distinguished homes. It doesn't seem likely that there's a reason why these homes are at high risk of danger. The agency itself is so erring from a place of caution. Whereas in Europe, they regularly tunnel underneath 800-year-old churches. I mean, Rome, as we speak, is currently building a subway tunnel under the Coliseum.

Wow. Okay, yeah. It's a different world. Different, yeah, different things to consider there. The last point though on the Anglosphere thing is that to some extent people say to me, they benchmark against each other. And so if you're in Canada and you look at your project

and you say, boy, this project's extremely expensive. Why is that? Is that acceptable? And you look at New York and say, well, actually it's not so bad. New York's project is more expensive. But if you look at, say, Barcelona, you might be like, well, actually, our project is really expensive, and maybe we need to rein in the size of the stations, rein in the glamour of the stations, that sort of thing. Okay. This is really interesting. So we're going to get into how

this actually breaks down and the reasons behind this here. But first, Oliver, can we just establish who loses out when these projects don't get built? Who loses out here? There's multiple layers of downside in this situation. I mean, politically, no politician wants to be behind a project that's causing tons of problems. Even to the extent you can blame it on your predecessor, you still don't want to wear it. The public purse loses out as these projects go on and on, they get more expensive. But really, when it comes to actually everybody loses. because if you're a potential transit rider, you lose

because the infrastructure is not there. If you're a driver, you lose because there's things happening that are tearing up the roads and also that there was more traffic as a result of the fact that transit is not built. I mean, we know there's about a century of research now that says that making roads bigger, expanding the number of roads does not actually help traffic. Those roads just fill up with cars. One of the only things that helps traffic is, other than putting a price on it, congestion charge in New York is building transit. Giving people a good robust reliable option will actually divert some of that traffic. So even if you don't ride transit, even if you think transit's a crazy socialist scheme, you will benefit from transit

being built. To the extent that jurisdictions struggle to build it and they risk losing the public confidence that it's a worthwhile thing, everybody loses. One of the big issues too when it comes to public confidence is the cost, right? Because these projects are very expensive. Just in general here then, why do we see some transit projects where the cost just balloons so much over time? Well, the Ontario line is a new project that started under the Doug Ford government and it was supposed to run from Ontario Place to the Ontario Science Centre under downtown Toronto and then looping north on the east side of the city.

This is a subway. Subway line, yeah. I mean, partly underground, partly surface level, partly raised. But yeah, it'll look and feel like a subway though shorter. And that's an important point we need to get to later. In 2019, the Ontario line was construction was pegged at $11 billion. So three years later, 2022 and the cost of it, which is now construction, but also including the trains, the signaling of 30 years of service. So the Apple's comparisons are difficult. Has suddenly $19 billion. And that's 2022 But then 2024, so only two years later, and this is according to Global News,

it was up to $27 billion. So it went from 19 billion to 27 billion in two years. And that is, setting aside the number of zeros in the word billion, which is an extraordinarily long number, percentage-wise, that's just a huge increase for it to go up 50% in two years. So how does that happen?

I mean, I don't wanna get into the nitty gritty of the Ontario line, but in general years. So how does that happen? I mean, I don't want to get into the nitty gritty of the Ontario line, but in general, Oliver, how does that happen? Projects sometimes have scope creep. There are certainly situations where, you know, a city might be doing a light rail line on the surface, which should be a very cheap thing to build. But then maybe they say, well,

we're ripping up the road to do that. Maybe this is a great time to replace, you know, the utilities. And, you know, once we're digging into the road, maybe we should replace the time to replace utilities. Once we're digging into the road, maybe we should replace the sewer mains as well. You get a lot of other things that are legitimate useful things for the city to build, they get lumped in with the transit project, even if they're not necessarily part of the transit project. Other things are simply that it gets more expensive. As time goes on, you've got a lot of consultants who are making six-figure

salaries. You've got equipment that's being leased. The longer it goes on, the price is going to go up for sure. Yeah. It's interesting. There's an actual part where the price is increasing potentially, but then there's this other consideration that these other things get lumped into the cost. That actually might be part of the reason why that cost goes up. It certainly could be.

There's also the fact that early estimates are politically advantageous estimates. And so there's always the risk that these projects are lowballed in their initial cost and then reality catches up with them and then the price rises as a result. It's not necessarily that something went wrong with the project in that case, it's that the project was not legitimately priced in the first place. Okay. I guess I'm wondering Oliver, like wouldn't we get better at this over time? Why does this keep happening that we get stuck in these situations with building public transit? Like are there underlying factors here that are behind things like these high prices? Well, one of them is that there's a great reliance on soft costs. Like I talk to people inside transit building and they say in many cases, there's great layers of bureaucracy. It takes

forever for decisions to happen because the transit agency has huge teams of people. The construction company has huge teams of people. Politicians may also be demanding changes that can be very expensive. I spoke with someone and he said that you've got problems with politicians who are sticking their nose in and making requests for design changes and they might be reacting to the concerns of their constituents, but they don't know the knock on effects of those decisions. Some of them might be obvious. They say, we don't want this train line on the road. We're going to bear it. Huge cost increase. But then you've got homeowners to say, well, we don't want an exhaust event near our house. So there's a sort of series of design changes

have to happen to move the exhaust that away from their house. And that must take time and money I'd imagine. Yeah. And then you've got sort of the cost of running the train really low, so there's a lot of vibrations for the houses above. And some of them are simply design choices. And if you ride the subway in Toronto, it's a long train. One of the big differences on two of the successful projects recently in Canada is they are much smaller trains. They're automated and smaller. They can run twice as often and you have the same capacity. Sounds like whatever, six of one, half a dozen of the other, except that because they're shorter

trains, you have much smaller stations. You have much smaller stations, they're much cheaper. I think almost everyone who works in the transit sphere would say there's an institutional reluctance to change at many transit agencies. We'll be right back. All right, so let's dig into this a little bit, Oliver, because we were talking about how governments have kind of lost this institutional knowledge or don't share this institutional knowledge as much when it comes to building transit. Why is that?

Well, I think one of the things that there's a lack of interest and willingness in many trends that you just kind of learn from each other. We are going to reinvent our own wheel. In some of the big cities, this is really deep in the marrow of the trans agencies. And I think on a provincial level, they hold the purse strings, they make the decisions. I think there's less interest necessarily in looking at what other cities have done because they think, well, we can do it better. And sometimes there are things that could definitely be improved. You look at the last project and you say, we don't want to do it that way because the subway expansion up to Vaughan, pretty palatial stations. In the end, it wasn't an enormous part of the cost,

but that cost could have been lower as a result. This is part of the Toronto subway. Exactly. And so what was learned by that? Well, if you look at the Eglinton Crosstown, which is currently under construction, look at the stations. They're not particularly palatial. They're standalone, one story glass boxes mostly. Many real estate people would say, why do you put a tower on top of that station? Why do you learn something from what other cities have done and build development there,

density there? You know, in places like Tokyo and in Hong Kong, you would never build a transit station without building housing associated with it. So that inability or unwillingness to learn from each other is actually making the project one, more expensive in many cases and two, leaving money on the table that you could have earned to defray the cost of the project. Okay. And I think it's interesting too to understand who's responsible for these projects. So we've talked a lot about government involvement,

but it's not just government usually that's involved in building these projects, right, Oliver? So how does this work? The P3 model and I'll try to make this brief to your listeners on all two notes. Okay. P3 stands for public-private partnership and it's the way a lot of things get built now in the West. Before P3s, a transit agency would design a project, they would hire a construction firm to build the project, and then the transit agency would run the project. Partly to rein in costs, the perception that it would rein in costs, the P3 model was introduced and that involves a contractor not just building the line,

but designing it, borrowing the money upfront to build it, and often even operating it and maintaining it for decades. So this is a private contractor that the government has hired then basically. Yeah, it's usually a consortium of huge construction companies, and they their names that from the AECON, Ellis Dawn, they maybe do these projects in many cities of the world. And the idea of the P3 was that it would transfer risk to the private consortiums, to the private companies, which is a great theory. Government can say,

we have set a price and that's the price. And often the criticism was the price was higher upfront because you were transferring the risk, the companies are paying for that risk and they should, they're going to charge as a result. The argument was it was worth paying the higher price because at least we knew the price. In practice, it hasn't always worked out that way. Often what's happened instead is that when there is a dispute over a price increase, it just ends up in court. A number of jurisdictions have really soured on the P3 model in part for that reason. In fact, so had the construction companies. They don't want to bid on these enormous 10 billion and $15 billion projects when they don't have a really good sense of what the ultimate price is going to be. So the Ontario line across downtown Toronto, it's a sort of a

version of this. It's been broken up. It's not one giant contract. It's a series of more manageable pieces. And so for parts of it, the governments and the contractors will collaborate on the early design phase and they'll iron out problems, they'll anticipate cost overruns and then a final price side gets set. And this avoids one of the real problems with P3s is that it forced construction companies to lock in a price before they knew all the details. And of course, as I said, it was never really locked in, locked in because you can always go to court. Yeah. And which sometimes ends up happening as we've seen.

Indeed. Okay. So it's interesting to see how this kind of breaks down between the private and the public sector. How much say, I guess, do provincial governments generally have on a design of a public transit system? Quite a bit. You've definitely got situations where they will say, we want this to be underground,

or we want this kind of train. And then they'll leave up to the private sector to choose the train, but often the procurement is so specific that there's not a lot of choices they could have. There's certainly cases where since the provinces hold the purse strings, they can force changes on the cities, which might have done the plan in the first place. If you look at the green line in Calgary, its scope has changed repeatedly and in part because the provinces said, we're not gonna give you the money unless you change the project.

The green line in Calgary was actually killed in late 2024, because the province said to the city, Calgary's new plan wasn't worth the money, and we're not gonna support it, which effectively kills it. It's back on the table with changes that the province and the city could both live with. So there's a lot of room for the province, which generally holds either full purse strings in Toronto or partial purse strings in a

number of other cities to make their requests known, shall we say. Yeah. I'm wondering about how transit got built before because we're talking about this now, but cities like Toronto and Montreal did build extensive subway systems in decades previous, right? So how was that able to happen relatively more quickly then? I mean, it's interesting the difference. And I'm only a student of history. Obviously, I wasn't there. But it feels that there was greater willingness

on the part of the transit builders to throw their weight around a little bit. And I'm sure that was very unpopular at times. If you look at Toronto's Bloor Danforth subway line, that's the one that runs across the central city, the downtown, a lot of it is actually built a little bit north of the Danforth because there was a commercial street on the Danforth with businesses and they didn't want to interrupt that. So they just effectively bulldozed a strip of houses just

north of the Danforth, built the subway line there and then put generally parks and parking lots on top of it. It would be very hard to imagine a provincial government doing that now, though they have the power. I mean, you could force change and there were certainly people who would say pragmatically, the province should be willing to break a few more eggs making its omelet. They might make a cheaper omelet. They might make a cheaper omelet, but as you say, there could be more opposition to it. So there's all these considerations these days they have to take into account.

Absolutely, and people always were, I think there were, something said there were always these considerations, but maybe the government was just more willing to say, no, this is for the greater good. You know, when we talk about how transit used to be built, and I think it's easy to romanticize a little bit, you know, we used to really get things done.

I mean, those people who had their homes bulldozed off, just off the Danforth, I'm sure we're pretty unhappy about it, even if they off the Danforth, I'm sure were pretty unhappy about it even if they got some sort of compensation, but that doesn't necessarily make you feel great about losing your home. It's hard to build transit in dense cities. Tokyo's great advantage, which is a horrible thing to say, but they were bombed pretty much flat in the war and were rebuilding. They built a lot of their transit early days and a lot of it's above ground, much, much cheaper to build. In New York, there was a famous builder in the middle of the 20th century named Robert Moses, pretty much a reviled figure now because he really threw the weight of

the government around. He was talking about building through some dense neighborhood, I think in Brooklyn, and he said, you've got to go in with a meat ax. So the downside of throwing your weight around is you get up with a lot of very unhappy people. I can see why governments don't want to do that. I can see why governments think that's unwise to do it quite apart from whether they're unhappy. It's just, is it good to anger constituents? Is that a reasonable thing to do? But the calculus and when it's right to do that and how much you're willing to anger them to get the project done, that seems to have changed. So Oliver, just to end here, we've been talking about troubled projects, but what about the transit projects in Canada that have gone well?

What have they done right? Yeah, we can point to some successes and the two, three really that really come to mind is the ION LRT in Waterloo, but that's a fairly small project. But the two big ones are the Canada line in Vancouver and the REM, which is a light rail line in Vancouver and the REM, which is a light rail line in Montreal. The Canada line is 15 years old, so perspective, but it's not that long ago and it had the motivation or the sort of political pressure of,

they had to finish it by the Olympics. And the REM in Montreal had its own political pressure, which is that it was a favorite project of the premier. There was a lot of desire for it to finish. And both cases, I'm told that helps because it smooths the waters. You know, when things start to get delayed and start to get backed up, it's much easier to have that institutional push to solve problems. Also the pragmatism in Vancouver, they did a section of the tunneled bit with what they call cut and cover,

which is they simply dug down the road, basically dig a huge trench, put a subway inside it and fill it back up again. That was very unpopular with the local businesses, but it's also a lot faster and a lot cheaper than boring a tunnel, which is the general way it's done. In the case of Montreal, they did a lot of it elevated, which is vastly cheaper than burying it. They reused a particular historic tunnel, which saved them a lot of money, even though I'm told they accidentally detonated a cache of explosives that no one knew was there, which caused some delays and some cost increases, but it still was cheaper. So hard decisions have to get made and they're not popular decisions and I would never want to

give carte blanche for a government to run roughshod over the concerns of the constituents because this is a democracy. But it's also true that if you can build transit more cheaply, you can build a lot more transit for the same dollar. Oliver, thank you so much for taking the time to be here and walk us through this today. Always a pleasure. I wish I had more cheerful thing to talk about. That's it for today. I'm Maynika Ramon-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Michal Stein, and Allie Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Fraynor is our managing editor. You can subscribe to The Globe and Mail at globeandmail.com

slash subscribe. Thanks so much for listening.