The air at Finch West Station carries the sharp, metallic scent of new infrastructure, but it is dampened by the heavy chill of a Toronto winter and the palpable frustration of a community that has been waiting for years. On December 7th, 2025, Line 6 finally entered service, stretching from Keele to Humber College. It was supposed to be a milestone for equity and mobility. Instead, the reality of the rollout has felt like a slow-motion collision between institutional ambition and the lived experience of everyday commuters.
As a community-first editorial team, we did not arrive at our position lightly. We sat in a room and processed the Liaison Strategies data as a record of collective disappointment. When 70% of Torontonians label the project as “unsuccessful,” with the vast majority calling it “very unsuccessful,” we are witnessing the emotional exhaustion of people who were promised a “smooth” ride in glossy TTC advertisements, only to be met with a reality that has been “anything but.”
There is a profound power imbalance at play. Institutions like Metrolinx (held responsible by 54% of the public) possess the authority and the budgets, while the residents of Finch West possess only the uncertainty of their daily commute. We recognize the power these agencies hold, and we acknowledge the Mayor’s subsequent moves to implement improvements. However, acknowledging power is not the same as pardoning its failures. Our role is to maintain our position; a transit line that operates at a pace operators knew would be slower than public expectations is a breach of the community’s trust.
The sensory experience of this failure is quiet but devastating. It is the silence of a delayed train when you are already late for a shift; it is the friction of technical disruptions that have dominated 44% of the media coverage. We must be careful not to project our own anger onto the subject, yet we must remain rigorously objective about the data: negative coverage of service problems has officially overtaken the initial celebration of the opening.
This is a failure of empathy. We were told that the “hard lessons” from the Ottawa LRT would guide us, yet the Finch West launch suggests those lessons were either ignored or misunderstood. If we cannot stabilize this line, we are eroding the public’s receptivity to future progress. We must move beyond the “blame game” and demand a transit system that respects the dignity of the people it serves.
