Prepare to embrace Ontario Line construction until the 2030s
The province broke ground on the elevated portion of the 15.6-kilometre line today. Here we go again!
The Eglinton Crosstown LRT has been functional for about ten days. If, in that short time, you’ve come to miss having a major ongoing transit project hovering in the background of our lives as the years pile up, we have good news.
The provincial government has officially started construction on the above-ground portion of the Ontario Line, according to a media release published today.
Related: A timeline of every single Eglinton Crosstown disaster, from 2010 until today
When completed, the line will make it so 230,000 more people are within walking distance to public transit. Today’s announcement marks the beginning of construction on the line’s three-kilometre elevated guideway and four of its stations.
With an end-to-end travel time of 30 minutes or less, the 15.6-kilometre transit route will consist of 15 stations, which are planned to run from Exhibition Place through the downtown core, and will connect to Line 5 at Don Mills Road, according to the release.
“Our government’s historic $70-billion investment in public transit across the province is helping protect workers in the face of tariffs and economic uncertainty and fight gridlock by getting transit users where they need to go faster,” Premier Doug Ford said in the statement. “The Ontario Line will be a game-changer for GTA residents, cutting travel times across Toronto and offering more than 40 convenient connections to other transit services across the region.”
Per a Global News report, when the line was first announced in 2019, it was projected to open by 2027. Metrolinx CEO Michael Lindsay said today that it was likelier to launch during the early 2030s, but that, like the Eglinton Crosstown, testing could delay that projection further.
Related: The cause of this month’s GO train derailment? Missing screws
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.
