[Mister F]

Originally Posted by hipster duck

It's interesting that you've been following Toronto transit developments from a continent away - this is usually quite rare!

I think the simplest explanation for why Toronto has pursued projects like light rail ahead of regional rail, let alone HSR, is that the timeframe for the development of transit projects in Canada is usually about 20 years from conception to ribbon cutting, so a somewhat parochial project like the Eglinton LRT was conceived in the mid-2000s when Toronto's transit needs were vastly different.

Around 2006 when the plan was hatched for Eglinton and a suite of other light rail lines, most of Toronto's job growth was suburban, the region lacked a regional transit authority with any real teeth and overall transit use was about 20% lower than it is today (pre-Covid, of course). Building a web of medium-capacity LRT lines across the inner suburbs that conspicuously avoided heading into the centre of the city made some sense at the time, but seems very shortsighted today. For the first time, Toronto needs something more London-esque: high capacity, higher-speed rail corridors to whisk people into the central city.

As MisterF mentioned, they have quietly been making incremental improvements to the GO train system to eventually turn it into something more akin to European regional rail, but it'll be a long, slow project. I think it's difficult to appreciate from a British/European perspective but, until recently, Toronto's commuter train system ran on a very primitive network of rail lines: single, often jointed, track built over a century ago for freight, often running in industrial corridors far from where there was any desire for residential development, almost no grade separations from other conflicting rail lines or roads, usually single platform stations with few amenities and, of course, no electrification. Imagine branch lines running through rural Wales running through a city of millions, and you basically have the kind of system GO inherited and has to turn into something like Parisian RER.

True, and that's partly what I was talking about when I said that we're basically building a brand new rail system from scratch. GO expansion is so massive, a $17 billion project, precisely because the starting point was so primitive. To your point, part of the reason that there's so little heavy rail expansion is that we're finally making use of the existing rail corridors that converge downtown. It only makes sense to expand what's already there. Further subway expansion is still needed of course, but we could end up with a system where the regional trains are just as important as the subways.