200,000 daily commuters, almost none of them outside
The PATH
Toronto's underground pedestrian network connects 75+ buildings across 30 kilometres of climate-controlled tunnels — for decades the largest system of its kind on Earth, until Montreal's rival network recently edged it out.
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Our transit guide and weather guide both mention the PATH in passing — for genuinely brutal winters, it's less a shopping amenity than basic infrastructure. Here's the fuller picture.
Grown piecemeal since the early 20th century
The PATH wasn't built as a single project — it grew from disconnected basement-level connections between individual buildings starting in the early 1900s, gradually stitched together over decades. The City of Toronto formalized its role coordinating the network through a 1987 agreement with property owners, by which point it had already reached roughly 15 km. Colour-coded wayfinding — blue north, yellow east, red south, orange west — was introduced in the early 1990s to help people navigate what had become a genuinely confusing maze.
A real Guinness World Record — with an asterisk now
The PATH has long been certified by Guinness World Records as the largest underground shopping complex on Earth by retail floor space, at roughly 371,600 square metres. On total walkway length, though, Montreal's rival underground network, RÉSO, edged past it in 2023 at around 32 km to PATH's roughly 30 km — a friendly, ongoing rivalry between Canada's two largest underground pedestrian systems rather than a clean, settled record.
What it actually connects
Today the PATH links more than 75 buildings, six TTC subway stations, and the GO Transit and UP Express hubs at Union Station, with more than 1,200 retailers along the way — serving an estimated 200,000 commuters a day, most of whom never see the sky between their office and the subway.
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