Two stations on new York subway extension among the least used on the TTC network

Thestar.com
December 17, 2018
Ben Spurr

One year after the six-stop Spadina subway extension opened, some of its stations are bustling, but two are among the least used on the entire TTC network.

The $3.2-billion extension of the TTC’s Line 1 went into service on Dec. 17, 2017. The extension, which has two stops in Vaughan in York Region, took the subway outside Toronto’s borders for the first time.

The Highway 407 station on the TTC’s Line 1 is one of the least-used subway stations on the network. The average daily usage of the TTC’s 75 stations is just over 34,000.

Numbers collected by the TTC between October and November show the best performing station on the extension is York University, which has about 34,100 combined boardings and disembarkings every day.

That’s followed by Finch West, with 17,700, and Pioneer Village, which also serves the York campus, with 17,300. Vaughan Metropolitan Centre station at the end of the line has a daily usage of 14,800.

But two of the extension’s new stops have performed much worse. Highway 407 station is used by just 3,400 people a day, and Downsview Park by just 2,500.

The average daily usage of the TTC’s 75 stations is a little more than 34,000, which means aside from the York University stop, all stations on the extension are performing below average.

Highway 407 and Downsview Park are both near the very bottom of the list, and are less-well used than most stops on the lower-capacity Scarborough RT.

TTC spokesperson Susan Sperling said that the agency is “pleased” with extension’s numbers however, because they already represent 94 per cent of the stations’ projected “mature state” ridership.

“Based on past experience with Line 4 (Sheppard), we expected that we would achieve 75 per cent of our projection in the first year, with projections fully realized approximately two to three years after opening,” she said.

Transit blogger Steve Munro said it’s no surprise York University is a major transit destination and the two stations that serve the campus are well trafficked. There are fewer obvious trip generators around the less busy stops, however.

Highway 407 station, which sits in a field to the southeast of an intersection between two provincial highways, “is only ever going to be an interchange station for bus service,” Munro predicted.

The stop is currently served by connections to GO Transit and York Region Transit bus routes. But in a decision that has angered students, next month GO will stop running buses directly to York campus, and will reroute them to Highway 407 station instead. That’s expected to boost the use of the TTC stop.

The immediate area around Downsview Park station is a federally owned urban park and is relatively underdeveloped, although there have long been plans to bring more employment and residential uses to the area.

Toronto’s secondary plan for Downsview suggests that there could eventually be 42,000 more residents and jobs near the stop, but they’ve yet to materialize.

According to Munro, it might have been wise to omit Downsview Park station from the extension, at least initially. The TTC could have left space for the stop and built it later once sufficient development occurred around the site.

The transit agency took that approach with North York Centre station, an “infill” stop that was completed in 1987, 13 years after the Yonge subway extension was built.

“The advantage basically being, you don’t have to actually build the station until there’s something there to serve,” Munro said.

Although Downsview Park and Highway 407 stations see few riders, those who do use the stops are grateful they were built.

Toronto's subway system just grew. Check out this timeline of the TTC's growth since 1954.

Standing on the near empty southbound platform at Highway 407 Friday afternoon, Sherry Marksman, 45, said the extension has dramatically reduced the time it takes her to commute between her packing job at a warehouse north of Highway 401 and her home in the St. Clair neighbourhood of Toronto.

Before it opened?

“Oh my goodness, chaos,” she said. She used to have to transfer between a bus and the subway at Sheppard West station, a trip that took 90 minutes. Now it takes about 25.

“Right now it’s 3:36 p.m. I guarantee you I’ll be home by about five to four, I’ll be in my house,” she said.

Downsview Park station and Highway 407 station are underused stations even on a Saturday afternoon, not long before Christmas.

The six cavernous stops each cost between $125 million and $404 million to build (subway tunnels are included in some of the costs). They’ve been praised for their architectural ambition, but also criticized for supposedly being overbuilt.

At a speech to the Toronto Region Board of Trade last month, Ontario Transportation Minister Jeff Yurek depicted the stations as an example of government waste, saying they looked like they had been built to resemble “Taj Mahals, as opposed to being functional as they were required.”

“To me, to our government, that’s a serious problem,” said Yurek, the Ontario PC MPP for Elgin-Middlesex-London. The extension was opened under the previous Liberal government.

The entire extension went well over budget. It was initially supposed to end near York University and cost only $1.5 billion, but delays and the decision to extend it to Vaughan centre dramatically increased the cost. The project was paid for by the City of Toronto, York Region, and the provincial and federal governments.

When the extension opened the TTC estimated it would cost the agency $25 million a year to operate. The TTC predicted the new stops would attract 1.2 million net new customers to the network each year, a fraction of the more than 530 million who used the transit agency in 2017.