Toronto said it would fast-track bus-only corridors to speed commutes. So why are riders stuck in the slow lane?

Thestar.com
Feb. 6, 2024

August Puranauth has always had a love-hate relationship with the 35 Jane bus.

As a kid, Puranauth rode the bus to school, and later used it as a way to navigate the city and become independent.

But it has always been slow and crammed.

“It was a lifeline, but it was also very overcrowded,” said Puranauth, adding that it's only gotten busier and less reliable.

Bus riders like Puranauth may soon get some relief. City council on Tuesday will vote on whether to move ahead with adding bus-only lanes to key corridors across the city, including Jane Street, through a 2019 plan called RapidTO.

Roughly 70 per cent of all TTC journeys include a surface transit trip, but unlike subways, streetcars and buses can get stuck in traffic. Bus-only lanes can dramatically improve surface transit, say transit experts and riders.

Little progress has been made on the four-year-old plan until now, but Mayor Olivia Chow’s council seems poised to actually make RapidTO happen -- though the plans still require ambitious and concrete timelines.

Cities around the world have implemented dedicated bus lanes, which can move up to four times as many people as mixed traffic lanes, by some estimates. Bus-only lanes can also help transit systems save on operational costs, since they can ferry people more quickly using fewer buses.

With only about 35 km of bus-only lanes, Toronto is well behind its peers. Montreal has more than 300 km, while New York and London each have more than 200.

“Transit riders who use the bus, like myself, feel like we’re left behind,” said Puranauth. “We see light rail and subway projects being built out across the city, but we’re still stuck on really slow buses.”

The TTC first proposed creating dedicated bus lanes in 2019, and in the throes of the pandemic in June 2020, the transit agency’s board voted to fast track bus-only lanes on what it called “five critical suburban corridors,” with a targeted installation date of September 2020. The corridors were on Jane Street, Dufferin Street, Steeles Avenue West, Finch Avenue East and Eglinton Avenue East, including small portions of Kingston Road and Morningside Avenue.

It was argued that the dedicated bus lanes would increase the speed, reliability and capacity of the TTC, helping to attract riders to the then-faltering transit system and improve commutes for essential front-line workers, many of whom lived in communities close to the bus corridors.

In July 2020, then-mayor John Tory’s executive committee decided against fast-tracking all but one of the five lanes -- Eglinton Ave East -- stressing that staff needed time to perform consultations and design work. Under the new plan, bus-only lanes in the Eglinton East corridor were to be rolled out that fall, followed by the Jane Street lanes in June 2021, then Steeles West, Finch East and Dufferin by 2022 or after.

But while the Eglinton East corridor was painted red, the other dedicated bus lanes never arrived. Instead, city staff undertook years of consultations -- sparked in part by backlash to the hasty way the lanes on Eglinton were implemented -- leaving riders to slog it out on some of Toronto's slowest buses.

“Council thought that it was also important to make sure that we had more consultation about which routes were prioritized and which bus lanes were important to residents and the trade-offs involved,” said Jacquelyn Hayward, director of project design and management for the city’s transportation services. “These are not simple changes. It’s not just a matter of painting red on a street and saying ‘Now we have a bus lane.’”

The city has added other measures to speed up surface transit, such dedicated turning lanes which allow transit vehicles to avoid traffic queues, and signal priority, which limits the time transit vehicles spend waiting at lights, Hayward said.

Still, the Eglinton lanes paid off -- according to a city study in 2021, there was a 10 per cent increase in on-time reliability across all four bus routes that run through the RapidTO lanes, and rush hour commute times dropped by up to five minutes, compared to 2019.

City staff conducted two phases of consultation on the other RapidTO lanes through 2022 and 2023. One major feedback, according to a city report, was that residents were frustrated with the number of studies being done and wanted to see quicker timelines. In 2022, volunteers for transit advocacy group TTCriders painted guerrilla bus lanes on Dufferin Street to raise awareness of the slow pace of RapidTO.

At this week's executive committee meeting, transit riders said they supported consultations, but that they were taking far too long.

“We know (the city) can move faster,” said Shelagh Pizey-Allen, executive director of TTCriders,  pointing to the rapid creation of dedicated lanes on the Scarborough RT replacement bus routes.

“The politics of using street space for anything other than private car driving is intimidating to our elected officials at every level of government,” said Shoshanna Saxe, who is a University of Toronto engineering professor and Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Infrastructure.

In comparison to cities like Montreal and London, Toronto has been more hesitant to have conversations about redesigning streets to prioritize higher capacity modes of transport.

“A lot of it is about leadership and gumption,” said Saxe.

A new transit-friendly council under Chow, who campaigned on improving TTC service, would appear to offer new hope for bus riders.

The RapidTO plan in front of council next week includes four additional dedicated bus corridors to be added in the next few years, including ones on sections of Finch Avenue, Dufferin Street, Lawrence Avenue East and Steeles Avenue West.

If the plan is endorsed by council, and all goes smoothly, the Jane Street lanes could be in place by the end of the year, Hayward said, though the others will likely take longer.

Puranauth is happy to see the mayor and council making progress on RapidTO -- but it's too early to start celebrating.

“We want to make sure that there’s going to be some strong, ambitious timelines, because transit riders have been waiting a long time.”