As the Eglinton Crosstown LRT was finally about to arrive at Mount Dennis Station on Sunday, Joseph Virgilio was eager to jump on board.

“This was being built when I was born,” said Mr. Virgilio, 15, who lives near Keele and Eglinton.

“It’s like a late Christmas present, and it’s been a long time coming.”

After a decade-and-a-half, the 19-kilometre, 25-stop LRT line that Mr. Virgilio stepped onto is both an achievement and a warning. It adds a second east-west spine to Toronto’s transit network and gives users a rare level of refinement.

But it is six years late, massively over budget, and a reminder that Toronto has struggled not just to build transit, but to deliver the evolving city that should come with it.

Joseph Virgilio at Mount Dennis station.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail

On Sunday, the line was operating at roughly seven-minute intervals with some minor service interruptions. Trains were packed with buoyant transit fans. After December’s disastrous launch of the Finch Line 6, this passed for success.

But the opening had been bumped back repeatedly since 2021 by construction defects and signal problems. Metrolinx, the provincial agency that has run the project, has been highly secretive about the details.

The line begins at Mount Dennis in the city’s northwest. Here it connects with buses, the Union-Pearson Express train and GO Transit commuter rail. The line soon dips underground for 10 kilometres across the congested city centre, then re-emerges to proceed about nine kilometres to its terminus at Kennedy station in Scarborough.

In a design sense, the line is a restrained triumph. Its stations and stops share a coherent language: large windows and skylights, white-painted steel, expanses of white tile, and tangerine accents. The above-ground station buildings feature crisply detailed canopies, integrated public art and clear wayfinding.

This design language was created by Montreal architects Daoust Lestage Lizette Stecker and Toronto architects gh3*; Arcadis, DIALOG and NORR executed the station design.

People celebrate as they rush to ride the first train at Kennedy Station.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail

“The theme of the line was simple, light-filled boxes,” said Beth Kapusta, a consultant and the former head of design excellence at Metrolinx, who was touring the system.

“It was meant to be a strong, coherent system of clarity and simplicity.”

Toronto transit users deserve this kind of care; the TTC’s recent building projects are scattershot messes. And while Crosstown’s expanses of white will require rigorous maintenance – let’s see how they look in a year – the atmosphere on the trains and in the stations was crisp, orderly and comfortably lit.

Maintenance for 30 years will be the job of Crosslinx, a private consortium that also built the line, including Aecon, ACS-Dragados, EllisDon, and AtkinsRéalis.

TTC staff drive the trains, and TTC engineers were involved in the planning process. For years, these parties have been feuding privately and in public.

People wait to ride the first train of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT at Kennedy Station.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail

On Sunday, the leader of the TTC’s main union demanded more specifics about the operational and design problems.

“We’re operating with our eyes closed,” said Marvin Allred, president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113. “The public deserves transparency about what’s happened here and how these issues are being resolved.”

The final budget for the project will be nearly $13-billion, more than 40 per cent above the original estimate. The complex public-private partnership with Crosslinx was supposed to pin down risks and costs. Instead it produced years of internal strife and buck-passing. Some of Bay Street’s finest litigation minds have been billing a thousand dollars an hour to sort it all out.

At the opening, Ontario Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria said the province has made “significant progress learning from the Crosstown and the difficulties with it, from procurement to how we integrate systems.”

This is crucial. Marco Chitti, a Montreal-based architect and planner who has studied the costs of building transit in Canada, said the construction cost of the Crosstown is nearly double the standard in continental Europe.

Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow speaks to media at Kennedy Station.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail

“That is a big problem,” said Dr. Chitti, a fellow at New York University’s Marron Institute of Urban Management. “We still have [in Toronto] a very underbuilt transit system, and if politicians think it is too expensive to build, we will lose momentum.”

Crosstown is really two conjoined systems: a subway-like stretch that moves people long distances across the city, and a surface line that stops frequently and serves local trips.

That tension reflects its origins in Transit City, the mid-2000s plan championed by Toronto’s former progressive mayor David Miller, which aimed both to extend rapid transit to underserved zones and remake postwar arterial roads into something more urbane. Transit and land use are inseparable; here they would be linked by a coherent vision.

Eglinton would be an “Avenue,” with a capital A: a tree-lined boulevard framed by four- to six-storey buildings, informed by European precedents and advice from French urbanist Antoine Grumbach.

People riding the Eglinton Crosstown LRT on its opening day.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail

Yet Toronto’s postwar geography bears no resemblance to the dense banlieus, or suburbs, of Paris. Eglinton in its outer stretches is extremely wide, shaped by engineers as a high-speed arterial road. On Sunday morning near Victoria Park station, a woman trudged with shopping bags toward a nearby strip mall. There were no boulangeries in sight.

Nor are there likely to be. Recent research from the University of Toronto’s School of Cities found that building along the line, in the past decade, has been very tightly concentrated at the central corner of Yonge and Eglinton.

One transit line can’t solve all of Toronto’s problems. But the spirit among riders was generous and enthusiastic about the city’s future.

Mr. Virgilio, at Mount Dennis station, mused: “I think it could help unify the community and connect people to different parts of the city.”

That was the promise of Transit City, two decades ago. As hard as it was to build this line, building a city to match it is the harder task still.

Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail

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Alex Bozikovic has been the Architecture Critic for The Globe and Mail since 2013. He covers architecture, planning, landscape architecture and related subjects ranging from the details of the physical city to housing policy. He also writes occasionally on Toronto and Ontario politics.

His book 305 Lost Buildings of Canada (written with Raymond Biesinger, 2022) was a national bestseller that unpacks the social and architectural history of cities across the country.

House Divided (2019), for which he was an editor, catalyzed a conversation in Toronto and across Canada about the state of city planning.

His first book, Toronto Architecture: A City Guide (2017) was a new edition of the definitive guide to buildings in Toronto, first written by the late Patricia McHugh. Alex brings a deep understanding of Toronto's past and of architectural history.

A leading national voice on architecture and city planning, he has been a keynote speaker, design juror or visiting critic for organizations across the country including the Ontario Association of Architects, the Architectural Institute of British Columbia, and the cities of Calgary, Hamilton and Toronto. Alex has been a consistent advocate for intensification within cities, for social, economic and environmental reasons.

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