The other day my son and I went to go check out the newest transit line in Toronto.
During its interminable construction, the provincial agency Metrolinx called it the Eglinton Crosstown. The Crosstown, a 25-station line, runs above ground at the West end and East end, and goes underground for about 10 kilometres under Eglinton avenue through the heart of the city. The project cost $13 billion and took 15 years to complete (six years longer than projected). The numbers are actually toe-curling; apparently there were 260 construction deficiencies.
The Crosstown had become a bit of a joke in our family because we drive up to Eglinton to get on the Allen Expressway, a route to Highway 401 East when we are heading out of town to our farm. At the corner of Oakwood and Eglinton, over the past decade-plus we have spent a cumulative several weeks stuck in traffic that crawled through the interminable snarl at the construction site where the Eglinton West subway station (now rechristened Cedarvale) meets the Crosstown.
Frits, our son, came up with a joke: “My father worked his whole life building the Crosstown. I am proud to say that I too have a good job. We are building the Crosstown. God willing, someday my son and daughter can get jobs building the Crosstown.”
Later, he wrote a term paper in his undergrad, for a poli sci course at Queen’s University, about the Gordian knot of bureaucratic and governance excrescence that was the Crosstown project: a joint venture of the Toronto Transit Commission, Government of Ontario, City of Toronto, Metrolinx, Crosslinx (private consortium hired to build the thing) and hundreds of lawyers. One problem I think it that the Crosstown is neither fish nor fowl. Is it a subway? It it a streetcar? It’s something in between. Anyway, the thing, whatever it might be, finally opened with minimal fanfare in early February.
With the paroxysms of progress behind us, kind of, we caught the Dufferin bus and entered a new gleaming white-tiled station called Fairbank, in which we rode escalators down to the underground train platform.
First impression: the Crosstown is grossly overbuilt. Fairbank Station is like a cathedral: a sort of Taj Mahal, temple-scale transit stop. On a Sunday, it was pretty empty. It cried out for a coffee shop, a newsstand or even maybe a minstrel playing guitar?
That said, once we arrived track level the train, now known simply as Line 5 Eglinton (actually two light rail trains hitched to one another) smoothed in quite soon and whisked us eastward. The trains were nearly empty, but then again it was Sunday morning. We glided east without incident. At Laird we rose out from underground and could admire the scenery as we traveled into Scarborough.
What strikes you as you glide through stations such as Aga Khan Park & Museum, Sloane and Hakimi Lebovic is that this part of Toronto was conceived and built for the automobile. Just east of Pharmacy and Eglinton lies the Cineplex Odeon Eglinton Town Centre Cinemas. From the Pharmacy Line 5 station one can see the movie cinema rising, far away in the southern distance; it looks like it’s about a ten-minute walk across an inhospitable, bleak and vast parking lot to get from Eglinton to the movies. Perhaps in the next quarter-century, now that there is higher-order transit in this part of town, the foot traffic will inspire commerces closer to the tracks, and some of that god-awful parking space will get converted to shops and, even more exciting, greenspace…?
When we arrived at the terminus, Kennedy, we wanted lunch. We spotted a Little Caesar’s pizzeria in a nearby shopping plaza. To get there from the train station required either a half-kilometre walk to get to a traffic light, or some illegal crossing of the street. We j-walked. We came back with the pizza and ate it on a bench by the plaza that leads to the Line 5 entrance, amid a kind of byzantine, endless-looking construction project by the Kennedy station. The Crosstown may be open but the work continues, I believe on a new subway extension east from Kennedy, further into Scarborough: “God willing, my son and his son after him will work on public transit projects on Eglinton Avenue…”