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Because I am not at all confident this $12.6-billion new transit line, more than a decade in the making, will provide the level of service ɫɫ�� transit riders deserve.

By design, this is a hybrid line. It’s much more than a streetcar, but not quite a full-on subway — it’s a bit of both. About 10 kilometres of the 19-kilometre route will operate in a tunnel beneath Eglinton Avenue, like a subway, but on the east side, as the line approaches Scarborough, the trains will emerge into daylight and run, streetcar-like, in the middle of the street for the remaining nine kilometres until the end of the line at Kennedy Station.

It’s this part of the line — the on-street part — that drives my dread. On paper, it seems like it should work just fine. There’s plenty of room for transit vehicles to run on-street on this wide, suburban part of Eglinton Avenue East. A tunnel, coming at a massive major cost premium over a surface line, would be an unnecessary expense here.

But the TTC, responsible for running service on the Crosstown once Metrolinx finally hands over the proverbial keys, has given us years of reasons to think it’ll screw this up.

Consider, for example, the cautionary tale on St. Clair Avenue. In 2004, ɫɫ�� city hall and the TTC by putting the 512 streetcar route in a dedicated right-of-way, similar to what we’ll see on Eglinton East. The logical idea was that by giving streetcars their own section of road, separate from car traffic, transit would be much faster and more reliable.

For a while, it totally worked. Data reported soon after the new right-of-way opened in 2010 showed that the TTC’s scheduled run time for the streetcar to travel from Yonge Street to Keele in the morning weekday rush hour had dropped from to . Average speed improved from about 12 km/h to 15 km/h.

But it didn’t last. These days, at an average speed of about 12 km/h again — about the same as before the right-of-way was installed. The trip from Yonge to the St. Clair loop is scheduled to take 69 minutes during weekday morning rush hour, but the paltry one-minute improvement from before the right-of-way is more than erased by extra scheduled “terminal time” where streetcars wait at the end of the line before turning around.

Delays are a major factor too. A decade ago, in 2014, the TTC recorded 816 delays totalling 9,076 minutes of delay on the St. Clair line. Last year, both metrics were more than 40 per cent worse, with 1,143 delays and 12,856 delay minutes, according to .

This is part of a pattern. Even on other routes where streetcars have been given some dedicated road space, like King Street, Spadina Avenue and Queens Quay, service speed and reliability have generally been getting worse, not better.

There are plenty of reasons for this, but let’s focus on two of the big ones: bad route management and a near-total absence of transit signal priority at intersections.

Let’s start with the route management. According to the metrics reported monthly , TTC surface vehicles are considered “on-time” if they enter service anywhere between one minute early and five minutes late. As a result, GPS maps will often show streetcars and buses roving the city in packs as if there’s strength in numbers, but because the vehicles were technically on-time when they started, little is done to fix it.

Maybe that wouldn’t matter as much if transit vehicles were guaranteed a quick green light at intersections, so they could travel fast. But this kind of technology — dubbed transit signal priority — has long been promised but never really delivered at ɫɫ�� city hall, despite some big talk. These days, the city says there are about 440 transit signal priority locations across ɫɫ��, but in practice streetcars and buses still spend a lot of time waiting at red lights. The transportation department seems allergic to really giving transit vehicles priority over single occupant vehicles, so real priority has been very limited.

Together, these two failures — poor route management and bad or non-existent transit priority — could easily spell disaster for the Eglinton LRT once it starts service. I hope I’m wrong. Especially because better management and signal priority on the surface section of the Eglinton line would likely translate to better management of other surface routes.

But I’ll hold my judgment — and I recommend riders do the same. There will be plenty of celebration when Crosstown vehicles finally take their maiden voyage, but let’s keep the good champagne on ice until the TTC demonstrates the Crosstown can get people all the way across town — quickly and without delay.

Update - March 31, 2025 

This column was updated from a previous version to add the number of transit priority signal locations currently present in ɫɫ��.