Toronto quietly exploring major changes to planned LRT after recent failures

Metrolinx's painful rollout of the Eglinton Crosstown and Finch West LRT projects has the City of Toronto rethinking its plans for another upcoming light rail line.

The City of Toronto has quietly moved to explore alternative options for the Eglinton East Rapid Transit project, a planned 18.6-kilometre route from Kennedy Station to Malvern Town Centre via the University of Toronto Scarborough Campus, with 27 stops including five interchange stations.

Planned to run entirely along a surface corridor on Eglinton Ave. E., the future TTC Line 7 will function as a disconnected extension (requiring a change of trains/platforms) of the newly-opened Line 5. 

However, after the disastrous Dec. 7 opening of the Line 6 Finch that included major delays on opening day and hundreds of outages in its first month, the City is second-guessing its plan to operate the Eglinton East line in mixed traffic.

In the wake of Line 6's challenges, and lesser but still notable slowdowns on the surface section of the February-opened Line 5 Eglinton, the City quietly snuck a direction in its 2026 budget, asking the City's Executive Director of Transit Expansion to explore new options of the Eglinton East line.

Eglinton East LRT re-design? Toronto's 2026 budget quietly includes a direction to explore grade separation and underground segments for this at-grade-only planned project. It seems like the Line 6 Finch West LRT experience is an influencing factor here. https://t.co/yLiPQrx82P pic.twitter.com/zlfYwqFYCy

— Alex Glista 🇨🇦 (@AlexanderGlista) February 19, 2026

The brief motion in the budget requests "a high-level analysis of grade separation, underground, or at-grade alternative options for the Eglinton East Rapid Transit project and report in 2026 on a high-level assessment of risks and considerations of an alternative alignment, including necessary changes to current approvals, and the timeline that an alternative approach would impose on the project."

In layman's terms, the City is acknowledging the problems of the current routing option and seems prepared to at least explore biting the bullet on the vastly increased project costs of building the line either underground or with some other form of separation from vehicle traffic.

The project cost was estimated to be around $4.65 billion as of late 2023, with a then-projected construction window of 2027 to 2034. However, the line is currently unfunded and awaiting final approvals.