In Toronto, a simple mention of “Eglinton” is enough to induce a shudder or spark a rant. While the avenue — one of the city’s major east-west arteries — transverses an extraordinarily diverse array of communities and neighbourhoods, it has become a metonym for a single project; the Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Like housing prices and the weather, the beleaguered transit line is both a reliable conversation starter and a surprising locus of civic solidarity. Looking for common ground with your lawyer, restaurant server, nurse or Uber driver? Just say the word.

These are the silver linings. As for the dark clouds? After breaking ground in 2011, the light rail project was slated for completion in 2020. This month, it entered its 14th year of construction, extending a timeline that began when today’s 30-year-olds were still in high school and Adele’s “Someone Like You” topped the charts. And there’s a ways to go yet: public transit agency Metrolinx and the provincial government have promised to announce an opening day three months in advance, stretching the earliest possible date well into 2025. So much for the good news.

Yet, there’s something worth waiting for. As an exercise in construction management and public relations, the Eglinton Crosstown LRT has been a near fiasco. As a piece of civic infrastructure, the nearly 20-kilometre transit line is nonetheless set to provide a vital boost to transit access, connecting people to jobs and opportunities across the city while taking cars off the road and contributing to sustainable city-building. And as a public design project? It’s actually quite good. The stations are now functionally complete, and they offer an alluring preview of a sensitive and streamlined design that prioritizes an airy and energetic sense of openness and coaxes natural light deep underground.

Arcadis, the project’s system-wide technical lead, worked in close collaboration with acclaimed Montreal-based architects Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker, who led the project’s “Design Excellence” scope, which aims to knit together transit infrastructure into the civic realm. To some degree, it’s a goal inherently served by the Eglinton Crosstown’s indoor-outdoor configuration; the 25 stops comprising the project’s first phase features a mix of 15 underground stations and 10 above-ground stops, the latter of which are relatively pared-down shelters directly integrated into the at-grade transit corridor. Conversely, the underground stations pose a more complex design and engineering challenge.

To create a site-specific but coherent aesthetic language, the design team developed a simple and easily recognizable formal language for the Eglinton Crosstown’s entrance buildings. On larger lots, spare yet strikingly angular pavilion buildings immediately draw the eye, their forms accentuated by light, transparent façades and bold, highly legible supergraphics that stand out against Eglinton’s largely rectilinear brick streetscape.

Paired with landscaped plazas and outdoor public seating where space permits (including at Chaplin, Keelesdale and Fairbank), the entrances are complemented by corner lot buildings, as well as mid-block entrances embedded directly into the streetscape. Although much of the built footprint is given over to necessary mechanical and HVAC equipment — which is consolidated behind opaque but elegantly textured precast panels — a careful balance of solid and transparent surfaces ensures light-filled spaces. In a nod to the geometric language of marquee station entrances, the system’s streamlined and boxy buildings are accented by angled columns across the glass façades that cast kinetic shadows into the interiors.

The generous windows open up views into Toronto’s neighbourhoods fostering a sense of connection with the city.

Inside, the openness and daylight lends simple white spaces a sense of energy and texture, elevating the daily commute. All the way down to track level, the careful layering of clerestories and escalators retains a connection to the sky, a feeling amplified by the stations’ double-height spaces. Moreover, a thoughtful integration of lively public art continues one of the Toronto Transit Commission’s historic strengths and civic signatures, injecting colour and vibrancy into the subterranean realm. At street level and underground, lucid pops of orange mix intuitive wayfinding into the colour palette, making intelligent use of the hue that will denote the line on Toronto’s transit maps.

To the design team’s credit, a kit of parts has yielded vibrant, welcoming spaces, while weaving a sense of intuitive wayfinding across the 19-kilometre line. “As a city building project, [it] represents a unique opportunity to formalize an architectural signature, from civic scale to the finest detail, while respecting the genius loci of Toronto’s diverse and constantly evolving neighbourhoods,” says Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker founder Renée Daoust.

For an otherwise troubled transit project, the welcoming public design injects a bracing note of optimism. Passing Cedarvale Station, I inevitably find myself peering through the windows, which offer up a surprisingly deep view inside. These are exciting hints of a dynamic and surprisingly cosmopolitan space — not to mention a vital piece of infrastructure. Still, it’s awfully hard to feel good about it all.

Besides the perpetual delays, the lack of clear public communication about the project’s opening date has eroded public trust and dampened civic spirit. And there is plenty of blame (and litigation) to go around, from Metrolinx’s confusing — and occasionally condescending — lack of communication to the opacity of a controversial public-private partnership that has yielded at least $1 billion of cost overruns amidst a lack of clear accountability. In the meantime, equity-deserving neighbourhoods along the transit lane have suffered the consequences, with businesses in neighbourhoods like Little Jamaica and Keelesdale bearing the years of added delays and road closures.

It didn’t have to be this hard. While the Eglinton Crosstown LRT will deliver much-needed transit, the project has been a tribulation since its inception. Long before the current transit line was conceived, nearly cancelled and then revived, an earlier plan to build an Eglinton subway was abruptly halted in 1995, when tunnels were already under construction. The missed opportunities and stilted ambitions didn’t stop there: Given the scale of the housing crisis, the decision not to build new homes atop the LRT stations betrays a deeper lack of imagination — and political courage.

The signature canopy deployed at a large-scale welcomes passengers transferring from the city bus network.

Now that it has been built, and drivers and empty trains have tested the tracks throughout the spring and summer, no opening date has been announced. Meanwhile, more transit is on its way. Currently under construction, a western extension of the line will eventually stretch the LRT to 28 kilometres and 32 stops. In the east end, the corridor will hopefully connect to another proposed light rail line, reaching into Scarborough’s historically underserved communities. Long before all that, transit construction on Eglinton will be old enough to vote. You have to wonder what its politics would be. For now, at least, the first phase of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT is tantalizingly close. All that’s missing is the people.