Creating a sense of place

NRU
June 20, 2018
Rob Jowett

new master plan for the second busiest transit route in Mississauga will revitalize the 17-km corridor, adding development potential and reducing traffic congestion.
“Dundas Connects is the city’s vision for Dundas Street in the coming decades,” says project lead strategic leader Andrew Miller. “It makes recommendations for rapid transit, for land use, and for improved public realm that will transform Dundas Street from a suburban arterial into an urban place in its own right.”

The corridor stretches from the Toronto border to Ridgeway Drive.

Miller says Dundas has been left behind as the city has built up, but it has a huge potential for growth. A lot of the development along the street dates back to the 1960s and has outlasted its usefulness.

“Development happened away from Dundas, largely, [rather] than on Dundas,” he says. “It is low-value retail relative to what you’d expect on a major transportation corridor. So we think there’s an awful lot of room to grow, and space for it.”

Ward 3 councillor Chris Fonseca told NRU that city staff wants to create an area where people want to go, rather than just commute through.

“It’ll be a further opportunity for people to explore the city,” she says. “I think the corridor has a lot to offer, [but] right now we’re not maximizing that potential.”

BRT service is central to the plan for Dundas. The street would be redesigned to include dedicated bus lanes down its middle. The route would extend from Kipling station in the east to terminal stations at University of Toronto Mississauga and Ridgeway Drive. Seven focus areas at major intersections would be sites of intense development and nodes to connect to other city transit services.

“For Mississauga we think that we’ve proposed the best service plan that we can within our borders,” says Miller. He adds that the BRT could easily be replaced with LRT if the demand for transit increased sufficiently.

The streetscape is also planned to be redesigned to better accommodate pedestrians and cyclists. Bike lanes will be added down the length of the street, and trees and street furniture will be added to the public realm. Miller says that improving the public realm is an essential component of the master plan.

“We are calling for… everything necessary to make an environment where pedestrians and cyclists are comfortable and happy.”
Fonseca says one of the objectives of the plan is to bring people to experience the street and surrounding area, which will lead to new development.

“It will bring people, it will attract business, it will attract people that want to live and work in the city, and it will also attract people that want to visit and explore along that corridor,” she says.

Miller says the master plan is intended to spur residential development in particular, of which there is not a lot on Dundas.

“What we hope it’s going to be is a place that is green, that is well-served by transit, that has lots of infill development and towers. So a place that is, rather than merely a conduit to move traffic from one place to another, a place that’s a destination in its own right.
“It’s going to orient our growth so in the future much more of our growth happens along Dundas Street,” he adds. “Growth is going to be channelled to places where there is rapid transit to serve it so that over the coming decades our populations can continue to increase but our gridlock does not increase.”

The Dundas Connects Master Plan will be considered by Mississauga council at its meeting June 20.

SvN, Aecon and Swerhun were retained as consultants to assist staff in preparing the master plan.