Ontario Premier Doug Ford holds a media availability at the TTC Davisville subway yard in Toronto on Wednesday.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
The province will not commit to an opening date for the new subway line currently under construction in Toronto and warns a major expressway could be shut down to build bridges, Metrolinx CEO Michael Lindsay said Wednesday.
He said the plan is to open the Ontario Line by the early 2030s, potentially later than the 2031 target.
“Based on where civil infrastructure is at this point, we think we’re still trending towards the early 2030s to be done with civil infrastructure,” Lindsay said.
Then the testing phase would begin, he said.
The Ontario Line was initially supposed to open in 2027, Metrolinx said when it announced the project in 2019.
Lindsay said the provincial transit agency and the Toronto Transit Commission, which operates the subways, streetcars and buses in the city, have learned lessons from two other projects.
The Eglinton Crosstown LRT opened earlier this month, six years after it was originally scheduled to open and 15 years after construction began.
Another much-delayed transit line, the Finch West LRT, opened late last year and saw major problems early on, much of it related to trains performing poorly in wintry conditions.
“Consistent with the lessons learned on the Eglinton Crosstown that we’d been discussing over the last couple of weeks, we’re trying right now to think about how we front load systems integration considerations to reduce that testing and conditioning time,” Lindsay said.
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Lindsay and Ontario Premier Doug Ford said the province has broken ground on the elevated portion of the new subway line that will cut through downtown Toronto from Exhibition Place in the west to the old Science Centre near midtown. Construction on four new stations is also beginning.
The line will run more than 15 kilometres, include 15 new stations and accommodate nearly 400,000 trips a day.
Lindsay said the route will require three bridges over the Don River, which runs next to the Don Valley Parkway, a major expressway that connects Highway 401 in the north to the Gardiner Expressway that runs along the water.
When asked if any of the bridge work would require the shutdown of the Don Valley Parkway, Lindsay said “potentially.”
“These are formidable works,” Lindsay said. “If you think about it, we are building the Bloor viaduct again three times for this project, but these are massive works. We will work with all partners to minimize disruptions to people (and) vehicles on the DVP.”