Article · Transit · 6 min read
Every major Metrolinx transit line is opening years behind schedule
Measured against the opening date first committed for each project, every major transit line in the Greater Toronto Area is landing three to five years late. Two have finally opened. Three are still under construction, and their targets keep moving.
The Eglinton Crosstown opened on 8 February 2026. Finch West opened on 7 December 2025. After years of moving targets, two of the Greater Toronto Area's signature transit lines are finally carrying passengers. The ribbon-cuttings drew the headlines; less noticed was how late the lines ran against the date they first promised.
Answering it consistently requires a fixed baseline. The cleanest is the opening date committed when each project's main construction contract was signed — the moment a builder was on the hook and a date was put in writing. That baseline post-dates the cancelled Transit City plans of the 2000s and the scope changes that came with them, so it measures the current project against its own commitment, not against a proposal that no longer exists.
On that basis, not one of them is on time. Every one of the five largest Metrolinx-led rail projects in the region is opening, or is now scheduled to open, between three and five years after the date it was contracted to.
The two that have opened
The Eglinton Crosstown (Line 5) is the longest-running of the group. Crosslinx Transit Solutions reached financial close in July 2015 with a contractual delivery date of 2021. The line opened in February 2026 — nearly five years past that date, and roughly fifteen years after construction first began in 2011. Ontario's Auditor General had earlier found that Metrolinx held limited contractual remedies to hold the consortium responsible for the delays, a recurring theme across these contracts.
The Finch West LRT (Line 6) is the shorter delay of the two completed lines, but the longer-running story. Mosaic Transit Group reached financial close in May 2018 on a roughly 2.5-billion-dollar design-build-finance-maintain contract, with a target opening of 2023. It opened in December 2025, close to three years late. Metrolinx has attributed the slippage to the pandemic, vehicle-delivery problems and litigation.
The three still under construction
The Hazel McCallion Line (Hurontario LRT) was contracted to Mobilinx in 2019 with completion in the fourth quarter of 2024. Metrolinx now points to construction completion in early 2028, with revenue service to follow after testing. That is more than three years beyond the contracted date, and no firm public opening date has been set.
The Ontario Line was announced in April 2019 with a 2027 target. Its current published opening estimate is 2031, four years later, and the project is still in tunnelling and station construction. Independent observers have questioned whether even 2031 holds.
The Scarborough Subway Extension of Line 2 was announced in its current three-stop form in 2019, with an opening around 2030. Internal TTC planning documents released through a freedom-of-information request show staff working to a 2033 date, three years on, even as the public-facing target has not formally moved. It is the one date here that comes from an internal record rather than an official announcement.
The cost picture is messier
Schedule is the cleaner story, because the cost figures are not measured the same way from project to project. Some contracts bundle thirty years of operations and maintenance into the headline number; others quote construction alone. Comparing them directly would overstate or understate the overrun depending on which projects are set side by side. With that caution, the published figures still point one direction.
| Project | Cost at contract / announcement | Most recent figure | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Eglinton Crosstown | ~4.6 billion (Transit City estimate) | ~12.8 billion | Scope shifted from the original surface plan to a heavily tunnelled line |
| Finch West | 2.5 billion (2018 contract) | ~3.6 billion (2025) | Design-build-finance-maintain, comparable basis |
| Hazel McCallion / Hurontario | 5.6 billion (2019 contract, incl. 30-yr O&M) | not publicly updated | Metrolinx has not released a revised total |
| Ontario Line | 10.9 billion (2019 estimate) | ~27.2 billion | Recent figure includes operations and financing; not a like-for-like construction cost |
| Scarborough Subway Extension | 5.5 billion (2019) | ~10.2 billion (2025) | Closest to a like-for-like comparison; nearly doubled |
Where the comparison is cleanest, Scarborough and Finch West, costs rose by roughly 85 percent and 40 percent. Where the baselines differ, the numbers are larger but harder to interpret. The schedule slip is what holds up uniformly across all five.
This piece is about delivery delay, projects arriving years after they were promised. For the other kind of transit delay, the day-to-day disruptions on lines already in service, see our look at what's actually delaying the TTC subway.