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In ten years from now, the Toronto Subway will feel like a properly large urban rapid transit system; we will have gone from 2026's 82 subway stations to well over 100, service will have stretched all across the city and into the surrounding suburbs, and the core of the network will be significantly denser thanks to the addition of Ontario Line 3.
This is super exciting, and given ever-increasing congestion and this significant network growth — not to mention the totally transformed built form of the city — we can likely expect significantly higher ridership. Over the last ten years or so, the transit network has averaged a little over a million riders per day, but with growth driven by major new lines, extensions, congestion, and densification, it’s likely ridership will increase significantly in the future. This is obviously great for the transit system, but it will mean stations which are already immensely busy and sometimes even dangerously crowded will be pushed past their breaking point. At the same time, as the bulk of the subway network was built before 2000, many of the network’s older stations desperately need more than just a fresh coat of paint, but a whole rethink in how they function, decades into their service life.
The Program
I think, then, it makes sense for the TTC — in partnership with the City, Province, and Federal governments — to develop a program to overhaul a number of subway stations in succession. The projects to expand Union Station and Bloor-Yonge are instructive, but these projects have both been too costly and not substantial enough. While the Bloor-Yonge rebuild, which got underway recently, will cost north of a billion dollars (prices that used to pay for significant portions of whole subway projects) — the project will leave some critical flaws in the station, like a lack of platform screen doors. These two major station projects so far have both been one-offs, a flash in the pan every fifteen years, instead of systematically addressing a handful of deficient stations over the space of a decade or so.
What exactly should an enhancement program look like? Well, for one, it should be a coherent program, bringing a number of the subway’s busiest stations into a good state of repair, improving their accessibility, expanding their capacity, and completely modernizing them with amenities appropriate for the next 50 years, all while updating them to a common, modernized design language more in line with the overhauled Union Station, but also more in line with the new stations on Eglinton Line 5 and what's to come on Ontario Line 3 — while respecting their heritage.
In this first part, we will start with the aspects of Toronto's stations that should be looked at across the system. In our next part, we will dig into downtown stations that could do with some upgrades. In our last part, we will look at where particular improvements would benefit particular suburban hub stations.
System-wide Station Improvements
Fare gates
For one, with fares now exclusively collected electronically at fare gates, (Presto vending and recharge machines, and temporary fare card vending machines now provide fare booth functions at every station), the remaining fare booths should likely be removed. These are typically located adjacent to a primary fare gate line, and their removal should enable additional gates to be added to improve throughput. Fare gates themselves could be upgraded to the longer, newer units used on the Eglinton Crosstown. Real human help should still exist, but in the forms either of roving staff with lecterns at key points, or new information booths that are more akin to those seen at some newer stations like Mount Dennis; highly-visible, but out of the way of the main paths passengers take through the stations.
Entrances
On top of widened fare gate lines, new and enhanced entrances should be created. Modernizing signage and widening connections to the PATH network, and replacing escalators and elevators with newer ones — perhaps even looking into fire-and-smoke-safe doors that don’t need to mostly be manually opened. Enhancements to existing surface entrances are also welcome, including installing canopies over sidewalk stairs, widening and refreshing of existing sidewalk level entrances wherever possible, adding wayfinding screens about next trains, and improving lighting and visibility. Where possible, completely rethought entrances with large structures to both provide weather protection, and a place for friends or colleagues to meet in-transit — akin to the “light boxes” at Eglinton Crosstown stations — would be sensible. Of course, some stations also would benefit from new entrances, not only to add to capacity, but also to essentially expand the reach of stations.
Screen Doors on Platforms
An obvious addition that should exist city-wide are platform screen doors. These would most importantly improve safety — as numerous people lose their lives on the subway network every decade — but also improve resilience. In recent weeks, there have sometimes been multiple shutdowns per day due to suicides and trespassing on the tracks and in the tunnels. Even putting aside the obvious accessibility, capacity, and comfort benefits, the value of preventing hundreds of hours of delays — which can affect tens or hundreds of thousands of riders — is immense, as is the value of reducing or eliminating employee time-off because of traumatic incidents. Installing screen doors at some of the busiest stations first helps prevent proportionally more incidents, and also focuses safety, capacity, and comfort improvements where they are most needed — along narrow, crowded platforms. As Line 1 trains are now automatically controlled, and as Line 2 is getting new trains with communications-based train control built in, platform screen doors would be a fairly straightforward addition to both main subway lines.
Cost has long been a major stated excuse for not installing screen doors, but cities the world over have managed to install screen doors, sometimes in much older subway systems, at a fraction of the price. Learning from cities like Madrid, Vienna, Hong Kong, and Paris — instead of talking about how screen doors are just too expensive — would be a sensible approach, especially because these cities have already done the calculus showing massive disruption spanning decades is more expensive than retrofitting doors. Increasingly, thanks to the Ontario Line, there will be a local supply and maintenance base for screen doors, and this could very well help drive the cost down. Over the long term, the entire subway network ought to be retrofitted, in the same way that we don’t still have some elevators which do not have proper doors. Work on lines such as Line 5 should be simpler thanks to its all-concrete platforms without a cantilever.
Washrooms
Another major benefit for comfort and accessibility would be more washrooms behind the fare line. I can perhaps be sympathetic to the argument that putting washrooms at every station at the moment does not make sense. But, as the network increasingly has more riders, adding washrooms to busy stations that currently lack them, and expanding and rehabbing existing ones to make maintenance simpler, seems like a wise priority. Bonus points if some washrooms include serious accessibility and parent-friendly features, like extensive grab rails, places to empty ostomy bags, changing tables, and wall-mounted child seats as you will frequently see in Japan and sometimes see in GTA malls. These measures would be forward-looking in a city and country with a rapidly-aging population that wants to encourage everyone to take public transport.
Retail Units and Vending Machines
Another in-station amenity that makes a ton of sense are enhanced retail units. Toronto increasingly lacks for small, low-cost retail units that small businesses and upstarts can call home, and the subway could be the perfect place for these. Traditionally, a lot of subway retail units have sat empty, but that's seemingly because they were not well-fitted out, and were located in dark and dingy locations. The busiest stations on the network with a fresh coat of paint would likely not suffer from this problem, and this is a place that Toronto could learn from Vancouver, where Translink seems to have much more success leasing out its in-station retail units. Another bit of inspiration that could be taken from Translink is lots of in-station vending machines, a wide variety of which are available these days selling all kinds of stuff, not just Diet Pepsi, chips, and chocolate bars.
Wayfinding
Wayfinding could also take a big step forward. Obviously, the habit in Toronto of only updating the newest or other particular stations to the newest wayfinding is a problematic one, and something I would not encourage; wayfinding should be taken seriously, and when you update it, the improvements should be universal. However, it does make sense to take this opportunity to rip out every last old sign and replace everything in these stations, as well as include other wayfinding features that might be more expensive or maintenance intensive than what you might find in other locations. For example more digital screens showing system status and next trains - including ones that only show the time until the next several trains in large font like you can see in Vancouver, lines on the floor directing passengers around facilities, and extra maps and other useful elements. And obviously, the presence of platform screen doors would also open up surfaces for more wayfinding — perhaps for things like train loading indicators that get people to move along the platform to fill less busy cars of a train.
Flowmaxxing
Of course, a key thing in all of this would simply be expanding capacity. Escalators should be replaced and where possible expanded to larger standard sizes. Elevators should be made redundant to improve capacity and reliability (and where possible replaced with forward-motion units that let stroller and wheelchair users roll forward to get in and out). Passageways in stations should be expanded, and perhaps in some cases permanent metal barriers and swing gates could be installed as you see in London to help keep large flows of passengers heading from one part of the station to another from blocking smaller numbers of passengers going in another direction — a frequent problem in Toronto’s busiest stations today. Platforms of course should also grow, not only wider, but where possible longer as well, should we ever desire to run full 7-car trains — instead of the 6-and-a-half car trains the subway is currently built to handle. Where long underground walkways exist, moving sidewalks should be introduced to speed movement, like the tunnel between the Line 1 and Line 2 platforms at Spadina station, where such devices were ripped out.
Quality of Space
But we also shouldn’t only think of purely practical things. Many stations would also benefit from new public art — and it has been added in a few stations recently — ideally of the more positive and uplifting kind, that adopts mediums that were not always widely-used when stations were opened, from digital screens, to complex lighting and interactivity. The physical appearance of stations should also be modernized, with new, hardier stair steps, clean modern tile, intact ceiling slats, tidied conduits, and enhanced lighting, perhaps with a common design style for all impacted stations that takes inspiration from the Eglinton and Ontario Lines. Of course, this particular modernization work would not be simple and would need to thoughtfully balance the new with a respect for the historic look and feel of the given stations.
That completes an overview of the aspects of stations that we should be looking to improve across the system. When we return, we will start looking at what certain stations are crying out for in particular.
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Reece Martin is a well-known advocate for good transit, worldwide. He is based in Toronto and blogs at The Transit Brief.
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