Line 6 Finch West in Toronto is commencing service on December 7, 2025 – about 10 days from the time of writing. The land it traverses through was built-up during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s – an era of land-use planning that was predominantly focused on the car as the primary mode of transportation. There’s no shortage of low-density strip malls and bungalows in the area, but in Toronto fashion, it is also peppered with mid-century tower-in-the-park apartment blocks, many of which are home to lower-income households and recent immigrants who rely on public transit for daily travel. The new Line 6 will hopefully provide improved public transit connections to these neighbourhoods as well as key destinations along the corridor (e.g. Humber North campus).
I thought it would be interesting to quickly map the route alignment relative to surrounding land-use patterns, much of which haven’t changed much in 50 years. Each of these maps is presented in the same scale and stacked on top of each other, hopefully to aid comparison between them. Click to view at a slightly higher resolution.
Below is a second graphic that takes a deeper dive into the population metric to examine how population has grown and declined along the route over the 25 year period from 1996 to 2021. (This is based on census data, which is conducted every 5 years, the last census being in 2021). Overall there has been slight population growth along this corridor, some of it along the western sections through Rexdale. But there has been some population decline around Jane and Finch. From looking at historical aerial imagery, this area hasn’t experienced much change in terms of it’s housing structures, so likely the population decline is a result of household sizes getting smaller over time, or maybe more vacant units.
For more graphics like this second one, check out our interactive charts that tracked 25 years of change along transit lines across the City of Toronto. The Canadian Urban Institute is also creating similar interactive charts looking at a range of data for transit lines across Canada.
Over the next few weeks and months, I’m interested a) in exploring and maybe mapping out changes in retail/businesses along the corridor (potentially as an indicator of commercial displacement) and b) once the line is operating, in seeing how the new LRT improves travel times and reliability compared to existing surface bus routes that are often slowed down by traffic. TBD on how this goes – it will depend on if we can get quality data.
