The Train that Changed Weston
This week was a topsy-turvy one for us Westononians. The provincial government began the week by announcing a significant reduction to UP train service. For 36 hours, the community coalesced over this issue resulting in 5,000 signatures on a petition, countless media interviews, municipal outrage, and many, many social media threads. Then, came the reversal announcement, just as unexpected as the initial one, but much more welcome.
I wrote this piece to help build momentum on the protest, but I’m publishing it now as a case study about (a) the importance of transit in underserved communities and (b) the power of community to come together and make a difference. Weston is a community challenged in a number of ways, some of which are discussed in this piece. We’ve proved we know how to fix stuff. Let’s harness that energy to solve some of our other issues..
Here’s the story, written Monday night.
The 2015 introduction of the express train between Union Station and Pearson was a game changer for people travelling in and out of Toronto. Commuting to and from downtown by cab, private car, or airport bus had always been difficult to predict time-wise although could be reliably counted on to take longer than expected. I remember Toronto City Council lamenting the lack of a rail link when I worked for the Clerk back in the 90s. And that was long before traffic actually got bad.
But in my community of Weston, an inner suburb in Toronto’s northwest, adding everyday, all day, and frequent UP Express service to downtown made a significant change to our sense of belonging to the larger city by shortening our off-peak or weekend commutes to the core from as much as 3 hours by car or transit to just 30 minutes. From the recent announcement, it’s clear to those of us who live here that someone in authority thinks these are benefits we don’t deserve.
Weston was not universally pro-UP when the idea of a train was first seriously discussed 20 years ago. While I did not live here at the time, I understand the original plan would have seen our community bisected by a busy track but without a stop here. Residents also joined ranks with environmentalists who railed at the fact the corridor wouldn’t be electrified, relying instead on diesel powered trains. With considerable lobbying efforts in the community, the resulting UP goes underground through the heart of Weston and gives us our own stop, including commuter parking. (Electrification will have to wait for another day)
The victory felt hollow following the UP opening however. After the initial free rides we enjoyed on the Family Day weekend in 2015, we took a collective Westonian gasp at the $15 fares we were expected to pay to board the pristine Bombardier cars with their poshly uniformed attendants,, complete with jaunty rail-engineer style caps. This was June 2015, in time for use during the PanAm games. With the GO train continuing its Weston weekday rush-hour stops, we could still commute for about $5/ride but if we were traveling outside commuter hours, we were digging deep for bills, or driving. It didn’t seem right at all: we’d experienced the upheaval of construction for years, this was public money, and - perhaps most maddening of all - the trains wizzed through our community nearly empty. It was well-known the cost of running the train was absurdly high in proportion to the ridership. On the rare occasion when I treated myself to a late-night train home after a work meeting, I felt like the Queen of Weston herself in a private railcar.
Unsurprisingly, after a few months of operation, UP fares plummeted to under $5 from Weston to Union, equal to the GO fares for the same distance. While the rates were quietly de-coupled from GO a few years later, UP fares have stayed consistently low in the last eight years.
The UP became an overnight success. I used it every weekday and often on the weekends too. Friends would travel from downtown to see me without complaint (not the case before) and out-of-towners got the hang of parking at or near my place to board the train and enjoy what Toronto had to offer without traffic hassles. By March 2020, UP cars were jammed at rush hour and moderately full at most other times. Many users had luggage, the marker of airport travel, but many were day-trippers boarding at Weston and the other intermediate stop, Bloor. On sports nights, trains were full again with fans saving time (and the planet) by not taking cars downtown.
The pandemic drove ridership down to next to no-one, I would think. I wasn’t paying much attention, living my own anxious private hell alone in my house. I gather, however, service was cut radically. Indeed, it’s only earlier this year that we got back to service after 11 pm. (I nearly discovered this cut the hard way not many weeks ago when I arrived at 10:55 at Union to hear the ‘last train boarding’ announcement. Yikes that would have been annoying!)
Just a few weeks ago, we in Weston felt a little singed when One Fare was announced, a program allowing TTC fares to be blended with those of neighbouring transit systems and with GO transit. It was not extended to the UP Express however. Riders who need to transfer from the UP to the TTC at Union station pay twice.
The real burn, however, happened this week. Sandwiched among announcements of a number of transit improvements to other areas of the GTA was the one-liner that the UP Express serve would continue to run every 15 minutes but would stop at Weston and Bloor only every other train.
Weston has long been identified as a priority community. Our housing supply is limited and our affordable housing supply, even more so. A number of our high-rises have been beset with rental increases that are out of line with the provincial guideline to the point that tenants are staging a months’-long rent strike. Our main street lacks many of the hallmarks of a thriving community, including a full grocery store. Instead, Weston Road has pay-day lenders and increasingly, fast food chains. The promises of Artscape’s Weston Common and cultural hub awarded us through the City’s planning process are uncertain in the wake of Artscape’s demise in 2023. It feels like we aren’t meant to get ahead.
And then this UP Express blow.
It doesn’t even make sense. If the idea is to ensure airport commuters have first dibs on the seats, well, they already do when they’re coming from the airport. They board first get seats and the rest of us stand for the 15 minute trip to Union. On the way home, with this new schedule one train will be easy for airport commuters to board. The next, however, will be jammed with commuters trying to get home, quite easily supplanting the airport people to another train, effectively reducing their service to every 30 minutes, just as ours is. Who’s benefiting? Interestingly, in the eight years of operation, I haven’t heard any UP Express airport commuter say that the 2 minutes spent stopping at Bloor and again at Weston have been unreasonable. Where did this bone-headed idea come from?
So, UP Express people, one improvement you could make where you’d see some immediate benefit is checking tickets again. I’m willing to bet the majority of users who board at Weston are riding for free because no-one monitors. You can save money on the snazzy uniform and cap. Just somebody with a badge and a method to check proof of payment will do the job. Once you’ve sorted that out, I bet you’re more keen on having a solid base of commuters on your trains.
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