Don't destroy Scarborough's Line 3. We can rebuild it, we have the technology!
Why are Olivia Chow and Jamaal Myers ripping up an entire metro line for no good reason?
In 2025, the City of Toronto plans to rip apart Scarborough’s now-closed Line 3, and replace it with something that’s not quite a real BRT, and which will come at immense cost to the taxpayer.
Yet in all the public debate surrounding the Line 2 extension into Scarborough, the Scarborough Busway, or the perpetually unfunded Line 7 Eglinton East LRT, one option for the TTC has remained suspiciously absent.
Why does Line 3 have to close at all? Not only can we fix Line 3, and do it before the Busway or the Line 2 Extension would be done, we can even make Line 3 the nicest metro line in the entire amalgamated city. But from the way politicians would talk about it, you would have no idea that was even a possibility.
Line 3, from before it opened in 1985 until the moment it closed last year in 2023, was viciously attacked by NIMBY interests that opposed the aesthetics of elevated rail, despite the cost advantages over tunneling. While Vancouver embraced elevated rail for their SkyTrain and built dozens of kilometres of track, Toronto held itself back due to our obsession with vanity.
Both Scarborough’s Line 3, and Vancouver’s SkyTrain Expo Line, used the ICTS light metro system designed by the Ontario government through their crown corporation UTDC, originally intended for Premier Bill Davis’ cancelled GO ALRT project.
Due to intentional choices made by the TTC when building Line 3, the ICTS trains experienced significant problems that they never did in Vancouver or Detroit, where the first-generation system was deployed at the same time.
As such, misplaced public animosity increased towards not only the TTC, but also the ICTS trains and the Ontario government that made them. The ICTS, considered a legacy of the Davis era, ended up hastily privatized by the Peterson government. The ICTS was rebranded by Bombardier as the Innovia ART, and is now currently marketed by Alstom as the Innovia Metro.
As a result of this public animosity, Toronto has shuttered it’s sole Innovia Metro line, never having replaced the original first-generation ICTS trains, pretending that it is a dead technology with no hope for repair, let alone growth.
Meanwhile, Vancouver’s Expo and Millennium Lines have more than 50km of track length, using third-generation Innovia Metro 300 trains. As this article is being written, they are laying additional track to extend the Expo Line into Surrey and Langley, and Alstom’s next-generation Mark V train has already arrived in Vancouver for testing.
Clearly someone is not being honest here, and in my opinion it’s the people telling us that Toronto can’t get new trains, for the exact same Innovia Metro system, of the same age as ours, that Vancouver just bought and received new trains for. So, let’s dig a little deeper into why Line 3 died, and how it can be reborn.
The first problem you’ll notice with Line 3 is the turning loop at Kennedy Station which remained perpetually unused for decades. This is because the TTC originally intended for a tram service, using the same CLRV streetcars as the rest of the TTC’s 1980s system. Attempts by the ICTS trains to use this loop would frequently cause track derailment for the first three years of Line 3’s life.
Ultimately the inability of the ICTS trains to safely navigate the loop was a non-issue, as the Line 3 platform at Kennedy, being a terminal station, simply used Spanish solution boarding where passengers entered the train from the first platform and left the train onto the second platform.
More glaring was the repetitive derailments caused by icing during Toronto’s winters. Despite the original budget including one million dollars to keep the third rail heated, the TTC bewilderingly slashed this item entirely, solely for cost savings. They assumed that if the trains ran frequently enough, it would keep the third rail free of any snow.
This logic was egregiously bad, and in reality ended up causing many of the icing problems. Thin layers of snow would melt on the third rail as the ICTS train passed over…and then re-freeze, building up more and more ice until eventually causing a derailment.
Within three years of opening, the TTC had installed the same wooden covers over the third rail that Line 1 and Line 2 both use on their above-ground segments. A pre-known problem with a reasonably priced solution, that the TTC begrudgingly refused to address for years.
But the most cataclysmic decision the TTC made is the one that sets Line 3 apart from literally every other Innovia Metro system ever built. Every other Innovia Metro is fully automated to the GoA4 standard with absolutely no operators anywhere aboard the train. With Line 3, however, the TTC made the fateful choice to forcibly refit the trains to use manual controls.
Consider how much money the TTC spent in the 2010s to convert Line 1 from two-person operation to GoA2, which still requires a single human not only to drive but even to control the doors. The ICTS was fully GoA4 in 1985, and yet while Vancouver fully embraced this automated future, the TTC spent extra money to reject it.
Both Vancouver and Toronto faced public anxiety over the safety of automated trains, but Toronto’s decision stemmed mainly from protest by the TTC’s operator union, ATU Local 113. In order to refit the front car of the ICTS with an operator cabin, significant amounts of seating and standing room were taken away from passengers.
Meanwhile, not only were fears about the automated trains groundless, in Vancouver they ended up proving much more safe and reliable than a human being ever could be. Vancouver’s SkyTrain system arrives exactly on-schedule more than 95% of the time, the highest rate in all of North America, with trains every three minutes.
While Vancouver has never installed platform screen doors at any station, Kuala Lumpur and New York’s Innovia Metro systems both do, and because of that incredibly precise GoA4 full automation, Vancouver could install it at any time. It is likely that after Alstom’s Mark V enters service, they will design and build doors that fit SkyTrain’s entire mixed fleet.
Fully automated Innovia Metro systems now exist in Vancouver, Detroit, New York, Kuala Lumpur, Beijing, and Seoul’s Capital Area. Soon, Riyadh will open a brand-new Innovia Metro with their Orange Line. Detroit may still use the same ICTS Mark I trains that Toronto’s Line 3 did, but Detroit’s trains have much less wear and tear due to the efficiency of automated controls.
The excuse that Toronto made back in the early 2000s for not purchasing the Innovia ART 200 was that the trains were “too long”, which is frankly absurd considering Bombardier delivered that exact model of trainset in multiple length options. If Line 3 was able to switch from two-car operation to four-car operation with the ICTS Mark I, it strains credulity to claim train length could be any obstacle for us.
Closing Line 3 will be the biggest mistake that the TTC has ever made, but thankfully there is still time for Mayor Olivia Chow and TTC Chair Jamaal Myers to stop this mistake from happening. We can go beyond just fixing Line 3, we can make Line 3 one of the nicest metro lines on the entire continent.
We can not only repair the tracks and make them snow-resistant, we can add the automated signaling that every other Innovia Metro uses. We can use the same sleek, modern Innovia Metro 300 trains used in so many other cities, or go even newer with the Mark V Alstom just shipped to Vancouver.
We can add platform screen doors to all the stations, and with the future of Line 3 certain, we can actually expand Line 3 with new stations, branching south to make further connections, and out east to reach the UofT Scarborough campus.
And most importantly, beyond any dreams of expanding it, you could have Line 3 back open and functioning well before the Scarborough Busway would even carry a single passenger. There is no universe where it makes sense to rip up an entire metro line for a crummy bus route that doesn’t even reach the standards of a BRT.
Scarborough deserves better than losing the only metro line they’ve ever had. Mayor Chow and TTC Chair Myers can fix Line 3, make it a system as pristine and enviable as Vancouver’s SkyTrain, and be true heroes for the entirety of Scarborough.
But in order to do that, they will need the courage to turn away from John Tory’s lackluster busway scheme. They will need to demonstrate their willingness to not just build things for Scarborough, but actively maintain them in good condition.
So, if Mayor Chow wants to prove she’s willing to fight for the people of Scarborough, this is her chance to step in and do it. Because time is running out, and Line 3 deserves to survive.
