Subway-building costs are higher today than they ever have been—and promise to rise even further if radical changes are not made.

That is the key finding from a report released by the Residential and Civil Construction Alliance of Ontario (RCCAO) on April 22.

The report, Station to Station: Why Subway-building Costs Have Soared in the Toronto Region, looks at several subway-construction projects across Canada and around the world. It compares the costs and cost drivers of each, and recommends approaches the Government of Ontario can adopt to help cut down the per-kilometre costs of new lines in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA).

One of the watershed moments considered in the report is the removal of the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) as the purchasing authority for the Toronto-York-Spadina Subway Extension (TYSSE) in 2015—two and a half years before the line opened. At that time, major cost overruns (the project cost nearly twice as much as any previous build in the GTA) and delays forced TTC out as project authority. Station designs were considered to be excessively grandiose, tunnels were dug deeper and at a greater cost than previous lines, and the value-for-money proposition offered by the public-sector purchaser was deemed inefficient.

Stepping in to replace TTC on the TYSSE project were Metrolinx and Infrastructure Ontario. Yet the RCCAO report, authored by transit researcher Stephen Wickens, suggests little has changed since the takeover. Indeed, the report says that while subway-building costs in Toronto rose almost in lockstep with the inflation rate throughout the second half of the 20th century, they increased at about twice that rate in the 21st.

“Subways cost far more now in real dollars than they did decades ago, even though the latest projects have had fewer stations per kilometre and traverse simpler, less-dense contexts,” says the report. “The new lines are projected to cost more despite being delivered during an extended period of record-low borrowing costs. Further, these projects will be delivered using the province’s public-private-partnership (P3) program, which is supposed to offer better value for the money.”

The report goes on to identify some of the biggest cost-increase factors on current subway-building projects, including the Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Among them are tunneling choices. Some of the stations along the TYSSE line are as deep as seven storeys underground. Past subway stations, meanwhile, were located above grade, and tunneling construction generally relied on the cut-and-cover method.

Plans for the Scarborough Subway Extension, says the report, call for stations that will be deeper and even more expensive. Per-kilometre estimates provided by the Ministry of Transportation for planned extensions deeper into Scarborough and under Yonge Street to Richmond Hill are nearly twice as much as the final tab for the TYSSE.

With these costs in mind, the report offers recommendations for stripping down subway costs. These include bringing in non-traditional experts to evaluate project-cost suitability, minimizing the use of tunnels and keeping tunnels as shallow as possible, planning for and protecting transit corridors, rethinking station aesthetics, and increasing project openness and accountability.

RCCAO executive director Andy Manahan hopes the research report will generate much-needed debate about how to improve the delivery of future transit-infrastructure projects.

“The Ontario government deserves praise for prioritizing the Ontario Line and for considering innovative at-grade and above-grade designs,” he said. “But this project must be built with sufficient future capacity to move people properly into and out of the core. Even though physical distancing measures have impacted transit ridership, adding to the Toronto region’s subway system remains an important goal and will ultimately help to reboot Ontario’s economy.”