It was announced on Wednesday August 6th, 2025, that the contract had been awarded for the tunnelling works on the Yonge North Subway extension, which will take Line 1, 8 kilometres north. The line will end close to Richmond Hill Centre terminal, currently a fairly substantial hub for VIVA, York Region Transit, and GO buses, located in a big box store parking lot just off of Yonge Street and just north of Highway 407.

Yonge North Subway Extension map, image by Metrolinx

The awarding of this contract means that we are basically past the point of no return with this project, given that it's inconceivable its tunnels would be completed without the stations also being built, and perhaps strategically this is the strongest of the three subway extension projects pushed forward by the Ford government since their election in 2018. The two others, also about 8 kilometres long each, are the Danforth Line 2 Scarborough subway extension, which is currently being tunnelled, and the Eglinton Line 5 Crosstown west extension, for which most tunnels are already complete. That means that substantial progress has been made for all four of the major subway projects the government pushed forward — three extensions plus Ontario Line 3 — and right now about 40 kilometres of new subways are being built simultaneously in Toronto, by far the most of any city in North America. It does also seem likely that Ontario Line 3 will open before the Yonge North subway extension, a sort of unofficial condition of extending the crowded Yonge Line 1 subway further north and pushing even more riders onto it.

 

The project's strength lies in the fact that Yonge Street in North York and southern York Region is a very heavily used bus corridor, with TTC buses from Steeles East and West as well as several other routes funnelling down into Finch station, plus various York Region Transit routes including VIVA Blue also running along the Yonge corridor. This means that the segment of Yonge from Finch to Richmond Hill Centre — and especially to Steeles — actually sees a lot of bus traffic, with very substantial passenger numbers. With a subway, the great majority of this traffic will go underground, journeys will get faster, emissions will be reduced, and additional development and density, which is planned along the route, will be supported.

Rendering of future transit terminal in the transit-oriented community at High-Tech Station. Image, Infrastructure Ontario

As far as the actual tunnelling goes, it seems the project will see twin bored tunnels like most contemporary subway projects in Toronto, unlike the Scarborough subway extension which has faced problems with its single larger tunnel. Uniquely for a modern subway extension in Toronto, the northernmost stretch of the line will pop above ground and run next to the Richmond Hill regional train line, which it will connect with, enabling GO commutes to locations like North York Centre and York Mills. Potentially, it will also have a small maintenance yard to store additional trains along the line, which would enable two northern stations in close proximity, with a giant new bus exchange being built at “Bridge” to replace Richmond Hill centre terminal, while also serving huge new area redevelopments. Given that as Line 1 is equipped with CBTC signalling, it would be great to see platform screen doors (which I’ve talked about before on UrbanToronto) at all the extension's new stations, going beyond just the active protection for them that is being done on other recent extensions. This could potentially drive screen door deployment across the legacy subway system.

 

What’s interesting is the larger network implications of the project, and how they might change the public transport situation in this part of the region. For one, York Region Transit and its VIVA BRT service are infamous for their poor service, but with the subway replacing the many routes which run along this section of Yonge Street — including a chunk of the only reasonably frequent VIVA route, VIVA Blue — at the very least a decent number of YRT service hours should be able to be redeployed to improve service elsewhere. One would hope though that York Region would actually increase transit service, particularly on the Highway 7 VIVA routes which will now feed directly into the subway from the east and west. Providing an experience for the many people living in transit oriented (but transit starved) developments along Highway 7 and Yonge Street with a level of service that is at least close to as good as what Toronto residents on Finch, or Steeles would expect — buses every 10 minutes or better from the early morning to the late evening — and ideally also overnight despite a reduced frequency. At the end of the day, hopefully all of this can coincide with a redoubling of efforts to expand both infrastructure and service in York Region.

A mid-street YRT VIVA stop in York Region, image by Reece Martin

It’s also the case that when we step back, it will be quite impressive how long Line 1 has grown, with nearly 45 kilometres of route and 43 stations by itself, of which 20 kilometres and 22 stations will run up and down Yonge Street. Yonge is perhaps Canada's strongest corridor of transit oriented development, with major nodes of density at Richmond Hill Centre, North York Centre, Eglinton, St Clair, and through Downtown Toronto. It’s interesting then that a large portion of the traffic on the line has long been projected to not be heading downtown, but instead to the various other subcentres along the line, all of which have office space and substantial mixed-use development, and several of which have connecting east-west rail services.

Looking southwest to the High Tech Transit Oriented Community, Richmond Hill, image courtesy of the Province of Ontario

Looking at the broader network, this subway extension means that in the next decade or so, there will be five different frequent radial rail lines which extend beyond Highway 407, that are set to get frequent all day service as part of the “GO Expansion” program. On three of them — the Kitchener, Barrie, and Stouffville regional train lines — the frequent service will terminate at 407 adjacent stations, Bramalea and Unionville on the Kitchener and Stouffville lines, plus a planned Concord station on the Barrie line, where that line crosses Highway 407. The two legs of Line 1, both of which will now terminate near Highway 407, interlace with those three GO lines, providing an array of north-south travel options from the northern and northwestern extents of the region into Downtown Toronto.

 

Suffice it to say, the Yonge North Subway extension is set to be a highly impactful project, not only for extending the subway network, but also for expanding and empowering the regional, and municipal bus systems it connects with. It’s been a long time coming, but the Yonge subway is going to head even further north!

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Reece Martin is a well-known advocate for good transit, worldwide. He is based in Toronto and blogs at nextmetro.substack.

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UrbanToronto will continue to follow progress on this development, but in the meantime, you can learn more about it from our Database file, linked below. If you'd like, you can join in on the conversation in the associated Line 5 and Line 6 Forum threads, or leave a comment in the space provided on this page.

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UrbanToronto has a research service,UTPro, that provides comprehensive data on development projects in the Greater Golden Horseshoe — from proposal through to completion. We also offer Instant Reports, downloadable snapshots based on location, and a daily subscription newsletter, New Development Insider, that tracks projects from initial application.​​​

Related Companies:  Arcadis, LRI Engineering Inc.