The new Finch West LRT line opened this past weekend in Toronto. This is a 10.3-kilometer transit line that runs from Humber College to Finch West subway station, and replaces a bus route that was previously one of the busiest in the city.

It's also a line that dates back to 2007. I vividly remember reading about this proposal while I was in grad school in the US. Some of you might remember that it was part of Mayor David Miller's Transit City proposal. Since then, the project got cancelled and revived at least once, which is partially why it took some 18 years to complete.

Transit openings are typically exciting. A bunch of people lined up on Sunday morning in the cold to be first to ride it. I slept in instead of doing that, but I do fancy myself a transit nerd. Whenever I'm in a new city, I always try to take (or at least test out) their transit system.

And when the Eglinton LRT finally opens, I do have aspirations to ride from end to end while spinning house and techno music from the rear car. (I have yet to reach out to the TTC to see if they might be interested in accommodating such an activity.)

But it's not all excitement. Now that the Finch line is open, the customer reviews are in and the general consensus seems to be that it sucks:

A CBC Toronto reporter rode the entire 10.3-kilometre line from east to west Monday morning, finding it took roughly 55 minutes to complete. As a reference point, over 400 runners ran this year's Toronto Marathon 10-kilometre event in under 55 minutes.

CBC Toronto's eastbound return trip to Finch West Station was about eight minutes shorter, clocking in at roughly 47 minutes. Still, several riders Monday told CBC Radio's Metro Morning that the previous bus route on Finch Avenue W. was faster and had more stops along the way, making it easier to access.

So now Torontonians are rightly questioning why our various levels of government spent ~$3.75 billion and took 18 years to build a line that performs worse than what was already there. Hmm. Good question.

The problems — and I defer to experts like Reece Martin — seem to be a lack of transit signal priority, stop spacing that's too tight (~500 meters on average), and too many slow zones, among other things. This is highly problematic from a value-for-money standpoint and from an overall transit investment standpoint.

If we don't fix this, we haven't just wasted billions; we’ve probably killed the argument for light rail in this city for a generation. The good news is we know this can work, and that's because it's being done successfully all over the world. Let's go, Toronto. Make it happen.

Cover photo via Wikipedia

Sometimes I am an advocate for big, bold urban change. This is where I tend to be closely aligned with urbanists like Joe Berridge, co-founder of Urban Strategies. (We sat on a panel together this past October at the Council for Canadian Urbanism Forum, and I found myself agreeing with him on this point.)

For example, last week I tweeted that the edges of High Park would be better off looking like Central Park in New York. By this I meant that High Park is an urban park with a major subway line running on top of it — we should not be shy about embracing a more urban future.

This stretch of Bloor Street, at the north edge of the park, has got to be one of the dullest stretches of street along the entire line. It's hardly fitting for Toronto's most famous urban park.

Some of you didn't like this tweet. Serendipitously, it also happened to align with a heated community meeting for a major two-tower rental development in High Park North. But this project is one block from a subway station, and it should be approved. The unfortunate reality is that we have underdeveloped much of the land around our transit infrastructure.

At the very same time, I am a strong advocate for small-scale, incremental change. We've spoken a lot about this topic over the years, particularly in the context of Tokyo. Japan is renowned for its flexible approach to zoning and for the way that it allows small, ground-up interventions. The result is an approach to urbanism that is often referred to as emergent.

A good example of this approach is the work of Japanese developer Staple. Staple calls itself a "soft developer" and what that translates into is a bottom-up model that is focused on regenerating local economies. (This is arguably even more important in the context of Japan, where a shrinking population is creating urban decline in many communities.)

To achieve this, they rely on "soft infrastructure" such as local shops and grocers, hotels, housing, workspaces, restaurants, regenerative agriculture, lifelong learning centers, and more. In other words, they are focused on the nuts and bolts that make for thriving local communities and that can be easily missed if you're too focused on the bigger picture.

One recently completed project is Soil Nihonbashi in Tokyo's Nihonbashi-Kabutocho neighborhood. Designed by architect Kiyoaki Takeda, the project opened in September and includes a coffee shop, cocktail bar, dim sum spot (and other dining options), co-working space, parklet (bakery), rooftop agricultural garden, and 14-room hotel.

It's the kind of hotel that global brands tend to avoid like the plague. It's too small. Too many diseconomies of scale. But it's exactly the kind of hotel and mix of uses that is wonderful for local communities. Think of what the Drake Hotel here in Toronto did for West Queen West when it opened back in the day.

All of this brings me back to something I have said before. A good recipe for city building is to be stubborn on vision, but flexible on the details. Cities are at their best when you allow and empower bottom-up change. Get out of the way. There's no way that top-down planning will get it all right. So if you can combine bold vision with flexible implementation, well then, you've got the secret sauce.

Cover photo from architect Kiyoaki Takeda