On February 3, I made my final journey to Eglinton Station to catch the 32 Bus. After 15 minutes of waiting, the ETA inching further away by the minute, I begrudgingly resolved to walk and catch up with the bus along the route. But that bus never came. Cursing under my breath, I trudged uphill through the snow and slush to my destination. Just a few days later, that nearly 40-minute walk was reduced to a 10-minute commute on the newly minted Line 5 — a 19-kilometre light rail transit (LRT) route that weaves both under and above the ground, connecting the city east-to-west with 25 stations between Kennedy and Mount Dennis.

In many ways, it felt miraculous. This time, instead of accessing the bus platform through the tired, overcrowded lobby of Canada Square, I entered through the new glazed pavilion, its crisp white interior still spotless. Down the escalators, I headed to the platform, winding my way through the surprisingly expansive station — and stopping to admire a prismatic piece of public art by Louise Witthöft and Rodney LaTourelle. I waited less than two minutes for the train, easily found a seat, and arrived at my destination in minutes. The experience was everything a transit journey should be: convenient, efficient, safe.

Behind that seamless journey is a deliberate design system. Given the wide range of urban conditions across the line, the architects — a team including NORR, DIALOG and Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker and led by Arcadis, which also managed the interiors and urban planning, plus engineering and construction support as part of a larger consortium, with engineering led by AtkinsRéalis — developed four station typologies: corner, embedded, pavilion and at-grade. “The idea was that each one would be integrated into the neighbourhood. That we would listen to what the people had to say, watch the way people moved, and respect the local surrounding identity,” explains Trevor McIntyre, global director of placemaking at Arcadis. “We tried to create a system that had one overall design language that could be recognized across the city, but it was almost like a different uniform that responded to the character of the community.”

The four typologies are united by a few key traits: a glass box with a ribbed, white metal frame, an orange entrance canopy (matching the line’s assigned colour on the transit map) and, where space permits, a landscaped entrance plaza intended to serve as a local landmark and gathering place. These shared elements reflect a broader Design Excellence scope led by Daoust Lestage, which informed the line’s architectural and public realm expression across the corridor. “It’s important to keep in mind that we’re city-building,” McIntyre says. “Aside from the transit function, the city is always asking for something more. What else can we get out of the project — whether it’s the streetscape, the landscape, or dedicated bikeways?”

Mount Dennis Station is the westernmost stop on the 19-kilometre line, which runs along Eglinton Avenue. PHOTO: A-Frame

The underground stations were heavily influenced by the late transit architect Richard Stevens of IBI Group (now Arcadis). “Richard was always preoccupied with opening up the station and bringing the life of the street down to the platform,” explains Lisa D’Abbondanza, practice group manager at Arcadis. To that end, the stations are an exercise in volumetric play: Entrance pavilions with soaring ceilings foster a sense of civic grandeur while also ushering natural light deep into what could otherwise be cavernous spaces. The resulting interiors are bright, with clear sightlines, emphasizing safety while also making for intuitive wayfinding (which relies on spatial sequencing, lighting, colour and texture to guide passengers, rather than just overt signage). “When you’re building something like this, which is here for the long term, it has to be timeless,” says McIntyre.

While the white textured walls deliberately discourage graffiti, there is plenty of art to be found across the line. An open call helped introduce art to the public realm at street level. At track level, meanwhile, unique wall murals for each station help create a sense of place, allowing riders to orient themselves underground; they also double as acoustic panels that dampen noise. (Crosslinx Transit Solutions and Curio Art Consultancy collaborated with Metrolinx on the art program.)

Oakwood Station features a double-height mural at street level, and an orange canopy that signals the line’s assigned colour on the transit map. PHOTO: Arcadis and AtkinsRéalis

Besides aesthetic considerations, there were also complex logistical challenges to contend with — for instance, how to make unsightly mechanical infrastructure essentially invisible to the end user. “We don’t always have the ability to say, ‘No, I don’t want that there.’ And so we need to work to make those systems into a civic element that still serves the station functionally,” D’Abbondanza says. Accessibility was also top of mind: All stations foreground generous, wheelchair-accessible circulation, benches where people can stop and sit, and dedicated bikeways (and parking) that make it easier to journey to and from the station.

Translating that ambition into built form proved far more complicated. It’s no secret that building a project of this scale has been something of a Sisyphean task, its nearly 15-year construction process mired with delays and controversy. For residents and businesses along Eglinton, the years of lane closures, fencing and shifting construction zones became part of the daily cacophony of the corridor. It’s not entirely surprising, given that it (along with the recently opened Line 6 Finch West) is the city’s first major transit expansion since the Line 1 extension to Vaughan Metropolitan Centre opened to the public in 2017, and over two decades since the construction of Line 4 Sheppard, the last net-new transit line. That’s not to mention the challenges of navigating ever-evolving regulations along the way. “Because these projects are so long, by the time you finish them, codes and standards have changed,” D’Abbondanza explains. “So a lot of questions will come up that ask, ‘Why did you do it that way?’ As designers, you have to kind of look back and look forward.”

An illuminated double-height pavilion forms the entrance to most of Line 5’s stations, including Keelesdale. Digital signage provides the kind of up-to-date information that is rarely seen in Toronto’s public infrastructure. PHOTO: A-Frame

The complexity of these projects makes them rife with setbacks; even small discrepancies can lead to massive delays. In a project delivered through a layered public–private partnership — involving multiple contractors, designers, engineers and public agencies — coordination challenges can compound over time. In 2021, for instance, a portion of track laid just a few millimetres off spec (which, if not rectified, could have caused derailments) necessitated a two-month shift in timeline — an unfortunate yet avoidable mistake. Many delays, however, could not have been foreseen. At Eglinton Station, engineers discovered deteriorated concrete, which halted excavation for months. “There’s a lot of stuff down there that’s just not on the records, and nobody knows — so when you discover that, it’s like, ‘Okay, we’ve got a problem. How do we deal with that?’” explains McIntyre.

The impact of these delays has been unevenly felt. Gilgorm Avenue, for instance, a one-way street that runs adjacent to Chaplin Station, was closed to Eglinton for the better part of a decade, causing untold disruption. Small businesses, impacted by reduced foot traffic due to lengthy construction, shuttered their doors disproportionately in vulnerable neighbourhoods like Keelesdale and Little Jamaica. And in the meantime, transit riders bore the brunt of the city’s much broader disinvestment in infrastructure as they were forced to contend with chronic signal issues on the subway and a woefully inadequate bus network, whose service is patchy at best and completely unreliable at worst. No wonder public patience was wearing thin. The average person may not understand why delays happen, and designers, sometimes unfairly, shoulder the burden of public opinion. “It’s an interesting role — being responsible for good design, for public money, for what you leave as a legacy to the city,” D’Abbondanza says. “The intent was always to prioritize quality, and that was only possible through collaboration with the client, the construction team, the design team and the maintenance team.”

With their cohesive architectural language — a glass box with a ribbed white metal frame — the stations of Line 5 stand out. Chaplin Station exemplifies the vibrant access to the light-rail network. PHOTO: Arcadis and AtkinsRéalis

Both she and McIntyre hope the project will be remembered for its final form, rather than the process it took to get there. For one thing, the buildings look remarkably like the renderings, with very little value-engineering (a near miracle for a public project of this scale). But on a deeper level, the human impact means the most — at Fairbank station, the design team brought back the fountain where seniors used to meet. “We tried to put the end user, who’s using this transit for the next 100 years, first. If we’re asking them to do something that doesn’t make sense, if it means they’re not going to use transit, then we’ve failed,” says McIntyre.

Still, feedback has been mixed. The speed of service has been criticized as too slow for a cross-city transit artery. And while LRTs do run slower than subway trains, they are also simpler and cheaper to build (which may be hard to believe, given the project’s one-billion-dollar cost overrun and six-year delay). Had the transit line been built back when it was first proposed in the 1990s, it could have been realized at a lower cost and with less disruption to the city, which is now bursting at the seams.

Riders were eager to explore the Line when it first opened. PHOTO: Kurtis Chen

For every person who extols the generous station designs, another will argue that they eat up valuable real estate that could be better utilized — for instance, for integration with housing development. According to Arcadis, the stations have been designed to support the future development of transit-oriented communities, either on top of or adjacent to them. One condo is under construction at Forest Hill station, and other stations are prepped for that eventuality, but few of these opportunities have been realized across the line. It is a fair criticism, but you cannot solely blame a transit project for chronic disinvestment in housing and other infrastructure. A transit line can be many things, but it should not have to be everything.

As a long-time Eglinton resident, I held on, perhaps naively, to the hope that the end of construction would mean less traffic and a more pedestrian-oriented public realm. But the neighbourhood is still riddled with gridlock, even without buses running along Eglinton. For a while, the thinking has been that if you build it, they will come. And though the community was out in full force to celebrate the opening on February 8, when I first rode Line 5 on that cold evening, just after rush hour, the station was a ghost town. The same policies that have prevented densification in the Yellow Belt, leading to sprawling single-family neighbourhoods, have made us reliant on cars and resistant to change. In order for transit to make an impact, people need to be willing to use it. When the dust has settled, I hope they will. With any luck, Line 5 will not be a once-in-a-lifetime project, but rather a catalyst for further development that connects our city in meaningful ways.

Two pedestrianization projects reinvent roads to make space for walking, cycling and play

By introducing chicanes (narrowed segments) to via Amadei, STUDIOSPAZIO and Openfabric have traffic-calmed this artery in Mantua, Italy, and planted it with lush greenery.

For many years, via Amadei in Mantua, Italy, had been taken over by speeding cars. But now — thanks to the combined efforts of the architects at STUDIOSPAZIO and landscape firm Openfabric — the 850-metre-long, 14-metre-wide throughway has been “depaved” and landscaped to resemble the residential gardens adjacent the road. “By narrowing the carriageway and depaving the surface corresponding to one traffic lane, space is freed for greenery and new public uses,” the designers explain. “The result is an unexpected form of public space that redefines the perception of the entire area.” A sequence of chicanes introduces curves to the road and separates the sidewalk from the bike path. This breaks the street down into small segments that redefine it more as a public space contoured by lush greenery than as a high-octane thoroughfare. “Amadei Garden Street,” as it’s now called, “demonstrates how targeted interventions — measured in scale yet ambitious in intent — can trigger lasting processes of urban regeneration.”

A future vision for Paseo Park in Queens, New York, builds on the work the local community has already done in making 34th Avenue a public space animated by a range of activities.

One of America’s hardest-hit neighbourhoods during the first wave of COVID-19 — Jackson Heights, Queens — swiftly became a case study in accessible outdoor public space. At the height of the pandemic, the community rallied to pedestrianize the 26 blocks that make up 34th Avenue, installing barricades from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day to block car traffic in favour of programming the corridor with markets, Zumba classes and even immigration services. Then the city’s horticultural society and department of transportation became involved; plants and street furniture were added to the mix and entire blocks were designated either “plaza” or “shared.” These were the seeds of a linear landscape in the making: Paseo Park, a shared space for the community, including schools in need of more playground area. Today, the Alliance for Paseo Park and the 34th Avenue Open Street Coalition are visioning the site’s future with architecture and urbanism firm WXY, building on concepts like the super median and the super sidewalk — the ultimate people’s promenade — that would permanently move some parking spaces and divert multi-modal transportation (including buses and mopeds) to a nearby thoroughfare. “It’s great to see communities leading with innovation, versus designers leading community,” says Claire Weisz, co-founder of WXY. “In the end, the design is actually able to expand on locals’ vision.”