Abstract Manager

Toronto has entered a Golden Age of rapid transit expansion; within the city limits alone, nearly 150 km of new or enhanced higher order transit will open within the next 10 years with another 40 km in the planning pipeline. The problem: most of the projects radiate outward from the core into the suburbs making the system vulnerable to disruption which will become increasingly frequent in a changing climate. As more people in the region rely on transit, the socioeconomic impact of disruptions will compound. Further, thanks to supercharged gentrification in and around Toronto’s job-dense urban core, disruptions will disproportionately impact equity-deserving communities reliant on longer transit trips to access economic opportunities. In a space crowded with transit projects competing for the next wave of funding, how do we ensure projects focused on creating network redundancy through the lens of climate change and equity rise to the top? This question was put to practice in the planning of the Eglinton East LRT (EELRT), a proposed 18 km rapid transit project serving Toronto’s eastern borough of Scarborough. This presentation will describe how the adoption of a nimble, outcome-focused, fit-for-purpose evaluation methodology rooted in the business case model led to the project’s revival and repositioning as one of the City’s two transit priority projects.

Following the discovery of a fatal flaw with the previously approved design coupled with unprecedented inflationary pressures on capital cost, the study made the case for a modified LRT  concept that significantly reduced the per-km cost while increasing the corridor length and thus project benefits. This “reset” will save the City nearly $2 billion in capital and lifecycle operation and maintenance costs, speed up construction by 3-4 years, enhance network redundancy by creating eight new interchanges, serve seven low-income “priority neighbourhoods,” reduce embodied greenhouse gas emissions, all while reducing community and environmental impacts. This study provides a template for practitioners aiming to effectively rethink costly, over-designed transit mega-projects stuck in the unfunded planning-design loop and build broad-based support for a renewed project based on equity and resilience objectives.