Governments face critical decisions on how to spend taxpayers’ money and must weigh priorities and come to these decisions in a transparent and defensible way. A prioritization tool can play a critical role in informing spending decisions, ensuring that decisions are made in the interest of the public good, and bolstering public confidence in elected officials and the democratic process. Ideally, a prioritization tool not only evaluates potential projects against a desired set of policy objectives but also prioritizes potential projects into an implementation plan through the integration of pragmatic considerations. Metrolinx, an Ontario, Canada, provincial agency tasked with transportation planning for the greater Toronto and Hamilton area, developed a prioritization framework to make recommendations on capital investment in sustainable transportation. This paper summarizes the current prioritization framework, outlines its limitations, and goes on to explore potential remedies to those limitations as well as inherent challenges. Specifically, the paper discusses incorporating broader considerations, including multimodal integration and active transportation, congestion, network effects, and project interdependencies, and bridging the gap between project evaluation and real-world prioritization. The paper presents best-practice research for each broader consideration and posits that these broader considerations can be used to transform evaluation outputs into prioritized implementation plans.

The Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area's regional GO Rail network is undergoing a substantive upgrade to provide a twoway, all-day, electrified, 15-min service. These investments have led to discussions about the nature of the service and calls to add new stations, particularly within the City of Toronto. This paper explores the methodology used to evaluate specific new station locations in the City of Toronto and beyond, along with a concurrent analysis of the impacts of a package of new stations on the network performance and hierarchy. Both assessments used a multi-faceted business case framework. Traveltime impacts, land use, costs, feasibility, and other factors influenced the recommendation of sites intended to optimize the substantial investment in network infrastructure, and address city-building objectives like encouraging development and providing access to underserved communities. Network analysis points to new stations within the city shifting the traditional three-tier network hierarchy comprised of regional rail, urban rapid transit, and local transit to a hybrid network in which regional rail serves some intermediate functions.