While Toronto’s downtown core will be home to at least one station on the proposed high-speed passenger rail line, it’s unclear whether that will end up being Union Station.
Martin Imbleau, CEO of Alto, the crown corporation in charge of the multibillion-dollar megaproject said he is still “considering different options” for the terminal point of the rail line expected to run from Quebec City.
Toronto’s historic Union Station may be the most obvious choice, but it’s already taxed with Via, GO, the UP Express passenger service, as well as the area’s freight traffic. In addition, Metrolinx is planning its own expansion projects at Union: “It’s a challenge. It’s a constraint,” Imbleau said in an interview with the Star.
Toronto to Montreal in three hours, Ottawa in two with speeds of up to 300 km/h — and a commitment to accessible fare options — are some of the benefits promised by the planned rail line, which is expected to be up and running by the 2040s.
As with any infrastructure project expected to cost as much as $90 billion and require so many years of planning and consultation, many of the details are still up in air.
Here are some of the biggest unanswered questions for Torontonians:
Where will it all end?
Union Station may seem like the clear-cut choice to be Toronto’s high-speed rail stop, but there are drawbacks.
“I don’t think it’s a slam dunk,” said Eric Miller, a civil engineering professor at U of T who specializes in integrated land use and transport modelling.
Miller pointed out how crowded that century-old terminal already is. “Despite the refurbishing that’s been going on for a long time down there, there is a finite capacity of trains you could put through there.”
Miller suggested the East Harbour Transit Hub, part of a huge mixed-use development under construction near the Don River and Lake Shore Boulevard, could be another potential option. That station on the eastern edge of downtown would be a much-needed alternative to Union and would allow for transfers to the Ontario Line and the GO network, he added.
There might also end up being more than one stop for the line in Toronto — just like Montreal, where Alto has planned for a stop in the city proper and another across the Prairies River in Laval.
During his interview, Imbleau himself floated the idea of a station that could be built outside of the downtown core, as Alto works on the more complex task of building the rail line into the centre of Toronto.
“Maybe it’s worthwhile to have a secondary station well-connected north, east, west of downtown,” said Imbleau. “It could serve as the initial station while we’re building something more difficult or it takes more time to get to downtown.”
How will it get into Toronto?
There are three ways to build a high-speed rail line directly into the heart of downtown Toronto, Imbleau said, each with its benefits and drawbacks.
The most obvious one is to use existing tracks, like GO or freight rails that already run through Union Station, to navigate into the city. Among the drawbacks for this option is the need to massively upgrade the current system to allow for high-speed train signalling. It would also require the new service to share the tracks with other trains, a setup that has hampered passenger service on Via Rail.
According to Imbleau, another option is to build an elevated line into the downtown core, to a station at Union or another transit hub. But in the already-crowded core of Toronto, he recognizes that “the elevated solution is probably not the easiest one.”
Finally, Alto could also run underground, something Imbleau said Alto is “definitely considering” for Montreal.
“You have certainty with tunnels,” said Imbleau. “You control your destiny. You know when it starts, you know when it ends.”
But, he added, it is “more costly” than the other options, a fact that’s been proven by some Toronto’s transit projects. The dig for the Eglinton Crosstown LRT was particularly difficult as Metrolinx had to navigate around a complex network of utilities, and around existing TTC stations, a similar situation for the Ontario Line.
How disruptive will it be?
Imbleau acknowledged that there will be disruption in order to bring this once-in-a-generation infrastructure project to life.
“It’s a $60- to 90-billion project. We’ll build it in 15 years,” said Imbleau. “We will have tension, we’ll have hurdles, we will have issues, we’ll have surprises and we’ll be wrong.
But he added, “Let’s remain humble — we’ll make mistakes, we will learn.”
The major disruption, especially for homeowners in downtown Toronto, will likely be expropriations — the process through which the government will take over land to use for the line. Farmers in Eastern Ontario worried about losing land, livelihoods and the cohesion of their communities have turned out to a series of information sessions to register their opposition.
“Both in dollar value terms and the number of properties, I think this project will be the largest number and the largest value of expropriations in modern Canadian history,” said Ajay Gajaria, an expropriation lawyer and partner at Toronto law firm Aird & Berlis.
Alongside the threat of expropriations, the Senate is considering changes to Bill C-15 that would allow the federal government to take properties more quickly, getting rid of hearings that would determine if the property is truly necessary for the project, Gajaria said.
“It would be very difficult for an owner to be able to make an argument as to why the shape of the line should be changed,” he said, cautioning there’s little homeowners could do once their land has been slated for expropriation with fair compensation.
Imbleau said the ideal approach is often to follow existing infrastructure, such as highways, to minimize expropriations, and even Ontario Premier Doug Ford has suggested the line could run along the Highway 401 corridor.
But Imbleau also told the Star the route along the 401 is not straight enough to support high-speed travel. Instead, planners are aiming to follow property lines where possible to limit disruptions.
“At the end of the day compensation has to be reasonable based on best practices,” Imbleau said. “It’s significant compensation, let’s put it that way.”
Imbleau said it is too early to determine the exact route — and who might be expropriated — but he expects there will be more clarity by the fall after Alto wraps up its extended community consultations.
Construction will begin on the section between Montreal and Ottawa, Imbleau said, because “Toronto is not the place where you start. It’s a place where you deploy what you have learned elsewhere.”
How will it be built?
Imbleau said that Alto is taking cues for high-speed rail construction from countries like Spain and Italy. Italy has a long north-south high-speed rail line that’s relatively straight, similar to what Alto is attempting to build here, he said.
But he actually wants to emulate the Spanish way of building, which saw 3,000 kilometres constructed in less than 30 years.
“They went city pair to city pair … (adding) incremental service,” Imbleau said, which why Alto plans to build the line between Montreal and Ottawa first.
However, transit expert Reece Martin is skeptical about how collaborative Alto can be with local transit agencies like Metrolinx, which controls the GO network across Ontario. Interagency tension plagued the construction of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT.
“You’ve got this federal government agency, Alto and Metrolinx and they don’t interface,” said Martin. “In other countries, it would be a national agency, there would be regulatory frameworks … that just doesn’t exist in Canada.”
For his part, Imbleau said he has a good relationship with Metrolinx, and that he and CEO Michael Lindsay are working towards the same goal and meet regularly.
The decisions to come — determining station locations and how the Alto line will connect into Toronto — will have billions of dollars worth of ramifications, defining the lives and livelihoods of everyone who faces expropriation or construction disruption.
All of those will have to be made while also thinking about what the city will be like decades from now.
“This is a long-term play, multiple decades to build this thing,” said U of T’s Miller. “We have to be very much thinking about the Toronto we want to have 20 or 30 years from now … not the Toronto that we have today.”
