Toronto's Path grew from private landowners' tunnels into a 30 km pedestrian metro

Works in Progress reported in 2025 on the Path, Toronto's underground pedestrian network. In the early twentieth century businesses began tunnelling from their offices to the metro to let employees avoid congested streets and winter cold. Shops were added, and after a few businesses acted, a network effect emerged: others added their own tunnels, benefiting from existing ones while making them more useful. Developers routinely tied new office blocks into it.

Today the Path stretches more than 30 kilometers and links nearly all central metro and railway stations with many major office buildings. It has about 35 separately owned and managed chunks, each still held by descendants of the business that contributed it, so branches often end in office lobbies that function as public metro entrances. The municipality plays only a limited regulatory role.

The article gives two reasons it worked: tunnels are so valuable to the first landowners that there was no first-mover problem, unlike a railway that is useless until finished; and pedestrians need little space, so extra branches rarely create jams in existing stretches.

A single tunnel immediately benefits its builder, so nobody has to wait for the whole network.

Later owners gain from connecting to existing tunnels, which also makes those tunnels more useful.

Walkers take little space, so extra branches seldom cause jams.

Tunnels also shave about five minutes from the station-to-office walk and free street space for others.

Infrastructure that pays off for the first builder alone needs no coordinator, and its network value then compounds as others connect.

The Path carries hundreds of thousands of commuters each weekday, though shopping use dropped in the pandemic and has not fully recovered. The article says the model is hard to copy for roads and railways, which need unified planning, but similar systems exist in Montreal and in part in Tokyo, Osaka, Seoul, Hong Kong, Singapore and Houston. It asks why other big cities lack pedestrian metros.