NEWS

Crosstown to be completed a year later

Tunnel boring machines
BORING IN LEASIDE: Ontario transportation minister Steven Del Duca and Scarborough Guildwood MPP Mitzie Hunter held a press conference near Brentcliffe Road, to mark the beginning of tunnelling westward for the Crosstown LRT, seen here as the tunnel boring machines prepare to head under Eglinton.

People living near the Eglinton corridor can expect one more year of that short-term pain before the long-term gain that is the Crosstown LRT will be completed.

Metrolinx pushed the opening date back a year, now saying the new transit line running along Eglinton Avenue from Weston Road to Kennedy subway station will open in September 2021.

The project is expected to have 25 stops with 10 km of its 19 km buried underground. The midtown area will have seven stops stretching from Bathurst Street in the west to Laird Drive in the east.

The Crosstown is a $5.3 billion project funded by Metrolinx, the province of Ontario’s transit body, and is the biggest transit expansion project in Toronto’s history.

When completed, the project will see passengers carried on light rail trains that run in dedicated lanes along the centre of Eglinton Avenue like the streetcars on St. Clair Avenue.

Metrolinx predicts the trains will run much faster than buses and slightly faster than the subway in the downtown core, with the total time along the entire route being almost half of what it would take on a bus today.

One thought on “Crosstown to be completed a year later

  • Jan Svenson P.Eng.

    The original ECLRT Project schedule was a preliminary schedule based on limited and estimated information. The current schedule is still a forecast schedule but with greater certainty as it now includes the activities scheduled by the construction contractor, Crosslinx Transit Solutions, including schedule input from their sub-trades. To predict in 2015, the completion of 6 years of activities including a number of uncertainties, is at best an educated guess. Most often, political pressure, makes this guess too optimistic. At the prior stage(prior to contract award) of the project, no party can be held responsible for the accuracy of the project schedule. It would perhaps be more revealing if the original schedule was published as 2020 plus or minus x years to show the level of accuracy of the information.

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