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At a board meeting this week, the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) heard presentations on improving the speeds of the new lines through tweaks to traffic signals. The timing is not coincidental; the debut of the Finch line in December led to a flood of public outrage over trains travelling slower than the previous bus service, with riders waiting for turning cars at red lights, and this Sunday, all fingers are crossed heading into the launch of the much-delayed Eglinton LRT Line 5.
Transit experts and advocates say that transit signal priority could help the new lines run faster service, something only recently recognized by officials – City council passed a motion in December asking staff to implement “more aggressive, active transit signal priority,” following a similar motion passed by the TTC board the week prior.
What is signal priority?
The answer isn’t straightforward for Narayan Donaldson, a transit consultant who recently gave a presentation on the topic to the TTC board.
“According to traffic engineers, it’s pretty much anything that a signal does that in any way benefits transit,” the planner at the Dutch firm Mobycon said, regardless of how much it helps transit.
For longtime Toronto transit advocate Steve Munro, transit signal priority “gives transit an equal, if not better, shake than cars at intersections.”
This priority has existed in Toronto in some form for decades, confirmed by city staff at the TTC board meeting in December.
“At over 400 locations across the city since the mid ‘90s, we’ve had a policy where if the bus shows up, unconditionally, at the signal, it will either extend the green light or shorten the red,” said Roger Browne, the director of Toronto’s congestion and network management department.
The newer, aggressive priority that includes transit moving ahead of left-turning vehicles represents “a marked change,” TTC staff said in response to questions on Tuesday.
“Finch [Line 6] really drove home the issue,” Munro said. “The attitude has always been the priority we have is good enough, and nobody was publicly challenging city transportation services.”
The presentation to the board from Donaldson, and a second on revitalizing Toronto’s surface transit by traffic consultant Jonathan English at Infrastory Insights, highlighted that implementation could result in “significant” reductions in streetcar travel times.
Speeding up the new LRT lines?
Even though city council passed a motion made by Mayor Chow to speed up the new LRTs and regular streetcar network, the changes will take time, according to the chair of the TTC.
“There will be a phase rotation [of TSP] being implemented by Q2 across both lines,” CEO Mandeep Lali said at the Feb. 3 board meeting.
With the designs for the lines being over a decade old, the policy that staff followed, resulting in both opening without more active signal priority “is probably a decade plus plus old,” according to Lali.
As part of their contracts, the TTC as the operator of Lines 5 and 6 has to consult with owner Metrolinx and their respective maintainers Crosslinx Transit Solutions and Mosaic Transit Group to make changes to signal priority.
The TTC is currently updating intersection signals to prioritize transit on the 510 Spadina streetcar, expected to be completed in February according to Browne.
A spokesperson for the City of Toronto transportation services was not available for an interview.
The caveats
While implementing aggressive signal priority can help speed up surface transit, Munro said a cookie-cutter approach won’t work to markedly improve the intricate TTC system.
“There’s very different geometry and interaction between traffic and transit and the signals depending on whether it’s a streetcar or a bus, whether the streetcar has a reserved lane or not,” he said.
Donaldson also pointed to the shortcomings of the current system, particularly how many intersections already have the shortest possible green lights needed for pedestrians to safely cross.
“In the Netherlands, the way to get around this is dividing pedestrian crossings into multiple stages,” he said. While Toronto has some multiple-stage crossings, they often leave pedestrians stranded in the middle, rather than providing a wave of green lights like Donaldson observed in the Netherlands.
He and Munro also highlighted the problem of ‘nearside stops’, where transit stops are ahead of intersections rather than after them, minimizing the impact of changing signals.
Eglinton Line 5 will start a phased opening on Feb. 8, and TTC staff are preparing a report on implementation and cost of more aggressive signal priority across the streetcar network, set to be presented in the first quarter of 2026.
Gabriel is a reporter for OTR in Winter 2026.
Otter.ai was used to transcribe the main interview in this story.
