A Toronto runner raced the new Finch LRT and won
It wasn’t close
If your algorithm tends to guide you in the direction of transit-rage content, you may be familiar with Mac Bauer, who goes by 514runner on Instagram. About a year ago, inspired by how long it took him to trek from the east end to Roncesvalles on public transit, the avid runner began timing himself racing against TTC vehicles.
Related: “We are fixing this”—Mayor Olivia Chow wants to speed up Toronto’s newest LRT
To commemorate the opening week of Toronto’s Finch West light-rail transit line, Bauer and two co-conspirators conducted an experiment, with Bauer running the 10.3-kilometre line, one friend travelling it by car and a third taking transit. In the end, Bauer beat the newly opened transit line by 18 minutes, though the car beat both of them.
“This is a generally underserved part of Toronto,” Bauer told the CBC after his winter run proved to be faster than a much-anticipated $2.6-billion transit line. “That’s a pretty big disservice to this group of people that really thought something good was going to happen.” Bauer added that the route currently does not have signal priority over vehicles and has many stops within a short range, contributing to its slower pace.
In a statement to the CBC, TTC spokesperson Stuart Green said, “The TTC, Metrolinx and the City are all committed, and working together, to speed up trip times through various initiatives like transit signal priority, as well as capitalizing on the experience and lessons learned during this soft opening phase.”
It’s only a matter of time before the sports-betting community gets in on this.
Related: Metrolinx and the TTC promise to make commuting less terrible
Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
