The path to future-ready cities starts with transit today

Cities grow and change. We understand the challenges and successes of many large and medium cities. Bold, considered investment in the right kinds of transit and broader city-building can unlock success. Toronto’s remarkable expansion story has many lessons and shows why integrated planning and delivery isn’t just good policy—it’s a needed survival strategy.

Summary highlight points:

• Metro region population growth drives significant travel demand: Trip-kilometres or trip-miles are key to understanding infrastructure needs. Regional planning often focuses on trip counts, but total travel distance is more useful—it’s the trip kilometres that drive infrastructure consumption and reveal new insights for planning and infrastructure delivery.
• Transit-first metro and regional visioning unlocks new opportunities: Planning at the regional level enables solutions and outcomes not visible through incremental planning.
• Invest early in transit to avoid costly congestion: Cities that act before or during growth can catalyze better land use patterns and avoid the economic drag of sub-optimal development.
• High-quality transit shapes vibrant communities: Compact, walkable, low-car environments shaped by effective rapid transit foster intensification and maximize land value for developers and the public.
• Retrofitting is possible with strategic planning and collaboration: Existing infrastructure and land use patterns can be re-purposed and transformed for better outcomes.
• Regional economic resilience depends on a strong transit backbone: Sustainable, fast, and convenient systems support workforce access, business growth, and competitiveness.
• Environmental benefits are substantial: Public transit reduces emissions, accelerates climate goals, and delivers cascading positive impacts.
• Urgency is critical, delays increase costs and missed opportunities: Acting now is the second-best thing to acting yesterday. 

Around the world, cities are growing and changing. Urban areas are absorbing millions of new residents, and where and how economic productivity occurs is changing. Better planning and infrastructure delivery can generate better outcomes for people, the economy, and the planet. The challenge is universal: how do we move people efficiently, sustainably, and equitably in a world of urbanization, climate pressures, and economic change?

Mobility and integrated urban planning are at the heart of this question. Cities that fail to deliver connected, successful transit risk becoming congested and losing economic potential. Quality of life suffers and competitiveness declines. Cities that embrace integrated, transit-oriented growth unlock resilience, prosperity, and opportunity.

Case study: Greater Toronto

Toronto offers a compelling example of urgency and the opportunity. Consistently one of North America’s fastest-growing urban regions, the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) are projected to grow from over 8 million residents today to more than 11 million by 2051. The wider Greater Golden Horseshoe (GGH) will add five million people in the same timeframe, reaching 15 million.

This growth is putting immense pressure on a mobility system that, while transit-oriented in downtown Toronto, is dominated by cars elsewhere. Today, roughly four billion trips per year generate 30 billion kilometres of car travel. Cars account for about 70 percent of all travel while transit represents less than 20 percent; walking and cycling just over 10 percent. Highways are congested and unreliable. Transit could and should do more to accommodate longer trips.

Under a status quo trajectory that includes some major transit projects, car travel balloons to 37 billion kilometres, transit trip kilometres grow somewhat, and active transportation grows but not to the level it should for an urban region of 15 million people. The result is regional highway gridlock and a mobility system that fails to support economic growth and quality of life.

There is another path.

The economics of transit investment

A transit-oriented growth scenario would hold car travel kilometres flat while increasing transit kilometres by nearly 70 percent and doubling walking and cycling trip kilometres. Vehicle kilometres would hold at 30 billion, saving 7 billion car kilometres from the network. Three additional billion kilometres of transit travel would be added beyond the base growth. The Greater Golden Horseshoe’s growth would be sustainable.

Toronto’s transit delivery program is ambitious, but progress has been hampered by significant implementation challenges. Rail network upgrades have come online more slowly than planned and remain insufficient to support a truly transit-oriented future. To attract longer regional trips away from cars, a substantially expanded regional rail network is essential.

The economics are compelling. One way is to think about land value creation. Residential real estate in Greater Toronto is worth about four trillion dollars. Adding two million homes for another four million people represents approximately another two trillion dollars in future value. If transit improvements lift property values on new housing by just ten percent, that’s two hundred billion dollars of wealth creation, before factoring in gains to existing real estate.

Another way to think about economics is time savings: With five billion trips per year in the future, shaving eight minutes off each trip equates to two hundred billion dollars in economic benefit, before savings in operating costs. Transit planned and delivered well is not a cost, it is an investment that pays dividends in access, productivity, and quality of life.

Lessons from global leaders

Greater London improved its transit economics significantly over the last two or so decades, moving from less than 80 percent operating cost recovery to 100 percent through network expansion, fare optimization, and transit-oriented development. Paris is building the Grand Paris Express, 200 kilometres of new track and 68 stations, linking the suburbs of Paris to Paris. Grand Express will serve two million passengers daily and connect to a million suburban jobs. This kind of progress delivers ongoing improvements that drive equity, productivity, and selective densification.

Delivery challenges and opportunities

Greater Toronto has begun to take steps in the right direction. Major projects such as the Ontario Line, Yonge Subway Extension, the Hazel McCallion LRT, and most of all GO Expansion represent significant, city-region planning progress but delivery has been slower than expected.

These projects, among others, are a large investment. But they are not enough to achieve the sustainable travel scenario outlined above. Instead, more regional rail that connects the region and key nodes is needed, and development must be clustered to an even greater degree on the existing and future network.

The concept of “GO 2.0 additional regional rail” has been discussed for some time, but it now needs to move beyond speculation and be advanced, connecting to other existing and future lines including potentially Alto, Canada’s planned high speed rail linking Toronto to other major cities. London’s Elizabeth Line, despite delays and cost overruns, is proving to be a spectacularly transformative and positive project because of the strength of its early planning and extensive connectivity to other rail services, planning Hatch helped shape. The remarkable success of London’s Overground, bringing significantly new and improved services to many neighbourhoods and suburbs provides an excellent model for other major cities to replicate. New York’s IBX, with real ambition, could be like Overground.

The challenge of scaling up delivery means deploying the best approaches customized for each project. Projects collectively will realize a future network. Delivery models focused on announcement milestones like planning completion or construction completion have failed to deliver the needed outcomes: Performance outcomes like trains running full with happy riders and development sprouting all around needs to be the focus all parties align around, not merely planning input.

In some cases, best practices already being deployed such as alliance and collaborative models—these need to be accelerated and scaled. In other cases, new approaches should be advanced to achieve the needed scaling of planning, design, and delivery; current western world industry models are generally not producing the scale of progressive planning and delivery of new and improved urban integrated rail systems that are needed this century. More private participation that enable the stretched public sector to focus on areas where it is making progress could be a significant part of the solution. Montreal’s regional light rail REM, another project Hatch was instrumental in realizing, is a model experts are looking to – innovative planning and regional impact, combined with rapid delivery by combining historic with new infrastructure is a very worthwhile case study. Brightline in California-Nevada and Florida is also worth looking at.

There are lessons from around the world that can be adapted and deployed to suit local conditions – the bottom line is that while much is being done, we need to find ways to do so much more. Often, the answers are right in front of us – thoughtful up-front approaches can yield huge economic returns and the ability to deliver faster with greater reliability.