Roelof-Jan Steenstra arrived in Toronto about three years ago to run the city’s port, and almost immediately he noticed something strange.
The traffic everywhere was terrible, then he’d look out at the lake and it was more or less empty. Virtually nobody was commuting by boat, aside from the ferries taking people back and forth from the islands. It didn’t make sense to him that Toronto is right on the water, but barely uses it.
“Where we are building new roads? There isn’t that much space,” Steenstra, CEO of Ports Toronto, said one afternoon last month in his office. “This is an untapped resource.”
From his window at the Ports Toronto headquarters on Queens Quay, he can look out at Lake Ontario and picture what it might look like in the future, if things go his way.
The port, he says, could become one of the biggest allies for every frustrated motorist in the city. He wants more shipping traffic coming into the port, to take more tractor trailers off the road. And he sees a kind of GO Transit of the lake, a GO Boat, or a system of water taxis, seabuses, ferries and hovercraft bringing people in and out of the downtown core from Etobicoke, Scarborough and the outer suburbs, like Mississauga, Oakville and Burlington as well as Oshawa in the east.
“What do you see in Vancouver? Transportation across the harbour. Not because you have people that want to just visit. You have people commuting,” he said. “It’s not rocket science, right? It really is just in front of us. We’ve just got to tap into it.”
This isn’t the first time someone has cooked up an idea to ship people along the waterfront. For generations, city leaders have dreamed of different kinds of water transit systems as a way to unclog roads and ease the burden on trains and subways. The TTC studied the concept about 15 years ago. Former Toronto mayor John Tory promised to look at it during his 2014 campaign.
Each time, it’s ultimately been dismissed as far-fetched and expensive. But more than a decade later, the city’s congestion crisis has only worsened — and is expected to face even more trouble as back-to-office mandates on Bay Street come into force this month, funnelling more and more people into the downtown core.
A group of city leaders, including Steenstra, have decided it’s time to try something far-fetched.
Giles Gherson, the head of the Toronto Region Board of Trade, said the city has no choice but to try something — anything — at this point.
“There’s literally no marine traffic. And the roads are jammed,” said Gherson, who was editor-in-chief of the Star in the mid-2000s.
“The far-fetched thing is that we haven’t done it. That’s what’s far-fetched. It’s far-fetched that we haven’t made use of this valuable water corridor that we have right at our front door.”
Waterfront Toronto launched a study in 2023 on the feasibility of running water taxis or larger seabuses across the harbour. The study is expected to be released late this year, but Waterfront Toronto and other marine-focused groups, including Ports Toronto, are already looking at starting a pilot project as early as next summer.
The pilot will start small. The goal is to slowly build momentum behind the idea of travelling around the city by water, rather than try to launch an entire system all at once.
The pilot, which is expected to be up and running by the time the FIFA World Cup starts in Toronto next June, will start as a seasonal service using water taxis moving people across the harbour, before graduating to seabuses, which can carry 50 to 100 passengers. As of now, water taxis and ferries only focus on moving people back and forth between the islands and downtown. But the pilot will try moving them laterally across the harbour.
The locations aren’t finalized, but the service would likely make stops around the base of Bathurst Street, as well as Harbourfront Centre in the downtown core, and in the east, at the new Biidaasige Park near Cherry Street in the Port Lands, said Chris Glaisek, chief planning and design officer at Waterfront Toronto.
“It’s not a certainty yet that we’re doing it, but that is what we are trying to work toward,” he said, adding that the service would start by targeting pleasure-seekers looking to get to attractions around the harbour, before slowly building a following with commuters living on the waterfront.
If successful, the pilot could eventually turn into a permanent seabus loop making stops all around the harbour, including the Toronto Islands. And if that works, Glasiek said, the next step would be adding service destinations beyond the harbour, including Etobicoke, the Beaches and Scarborough. But going beyond the relatively calm waters of the inner harbour would require sourcing hardier vessels, like larger seabuses or ferries.
That whole process of launching a permanent seabus loop could take more than a decade to get off the ground, Glasiek said.
“I don’t think that you can do all that in one leap.”
But at the same time, a private company is contemplating a regional hovercraft service that could ostensibly compliment a seabus route, like GO Transit and the TTC.
Hoverlink Ontario is currently planning a hovercraft route, geared to tourists, that will go between Toronto and the Niagara region in about half an hour. But Hoverlink president Erika Potrz said the company plans to expand beyond the Toronto-Niagara route, acting more as a commuter service ferrying passengers in and out of downtown Toronto to waterfront communities including Hamilton, Mississauga and Oshawa.
“I spent a lot of time on the QEW, frustrated, almost dying and missing things with my kids,” said Potrz, who has commuted around the GTA for most of her career. “So for me, it’s definitely a bit of a legacy piece.”
The Hoverlink commuter trips could run express between one community in downtown, like Burlington to Toronto, Potrz said. Or it could run more of a milk route across the waterfront, picking up and dropping off passengers at each “hoverport.” The hoverports can be on land or act as a floating dock on the water. The trips would be comparable to the time it takes GO trains to get around the region, Potrz said, estimating that a Mississauga to Toronto trip would take about 15 to 20 minutes, depending on headwinds. But they won’t move anywhere close to the tens of millions of people who rely on GO trains.
Hoverlink’s two hovercraft carry up to 180 people each and float above land, water or ice. They can run year-round, in all weather, without causing discomfort to passengers inside, Potrz said.
“You don’t feel like you’re on water. You feel like you’re on a train.”
At this point, Hoverlink has an agreement with Ports Toronto to operate out of Billy Bishop Airport on the Toronto Islands. Potrz said the Toronto-Niagara service is expected to be running in two to three years. The cost isn’t final, but Hoverlink has suggested it would be in $60 range for a round trip.
To be a competitive commuter service, however, Hoverlink would have to be much cheaper, and Potrz said Hoverlink would look for government funding to help offset the cost.
“It takes the right investors, it takes the right visionaries. And I think that we all know not everybody is a visionary,” she said. “Success breeds more success. So if (Toronto to Niagara) is uber successful, then we’re not going to have any issues funding future phases.”
In the past, money has been a major hurdle. In 2007, the TTC looked at running two separate commuter ferry routes — one from Etobicoke, at Humber Bay, running back and forth from downtown, the other from Scarborough, at Bluffer’s Park. But the TTC report found the service would be too expensive and unreliable, since weather would either cause delays or cancellations on the route.
“Fast ferry service appears to offer few, if any, travel time benefits when compared to surface transit travel,” the report found. Plus, it would cost a lot more. Estimates showed that the TTC would have to subsidize the service by up to $39 per ride to offer prices that were competitive with GO Transit.
The report projected startup costs of about $40 million, including the purchase of four ferries, and an additional $13 million per year in operating expenses.
When John Tory was elected mayor in 2014, he said he ran into similar problems with a possible water transportation service.
“We explored it enough to know that it wasn’t something that you could easily proceed with right away. This happens a lot in Toronto, I guess, with things,” Tory said in an interview in August.
Another concern, he said, was weather. Commuters are creatures of routine. It would only take a few cancelled rides, or a miserable experience on a cold morning, to break the habit.
“People probably weren’t going to use it to get to work, for example, if they thought there was a problem on, you know, a certain Wednesday with high winds and big waves,” Tory said, adding that packed subway cars aren’t comfortable either, but “probably rank ahead of sitting in some seat, being bounced around like a ping pong ball.”
But he acknowledged that the discussion this time around is different, smaller and more realistic, with a seabus route in the inner harbour starting off as a seasonal service for recreation, rather than commuting.
“I mean, you know, build it and will they come? You know, that’s the question. Will they come?” Tory said. “It’s worth trying.”
With files from Ben Spurr
