Brampton needs new transit plan, fast

Councillor says city will leverage local Liberal support for funding

Thestar.com
Oct. 28, 2015
By San Grewal

On the day Brampton council said no to a fully funded $1.6 billion provincial LRT project, staff and councillors began thinking about what has to be done to get an alternate transit project rolling, as soon as possible.

“I would like us to start setting up meetings with the new federal elected representatives, I’d like to start talking to the feds immediately,” said Councillor Jeff Bowman, whose motion early Wednesday morning killed the provincially approved and fully funded Main St. LRT plan.

“I’d like to go back to the province and reopen these talks and negotiations and say, ‘Here’s what we really want.’”

Early Wednesday morning, at the end of a marathon special council meeting, councillors voted to kill the city’s involvement with the provincially approved and fully funded Hurontario-Main St. LRT project - mainly because of concerns that ridership projections were too low to support Brampton’s section of the route along Main.

The decision meant turning down somewhere between $300 million and $400 million in provincial funding, in hopes that the province can be persuaded to support a different configuration in Brampton.

The line to be built will now run up Mississauga’s Hurontario St. spine and end just north of the border between the cities at Steeles Ave., instead of continuing up Main St. into downtown Brampton.

But the motion that passed opens the door for an alternative Brampton route that councillors say will better serve the city. The problem is, that route hasn’t been decided on, and there’s no money for it.

Bowman said the first order of business for the ninth largest city in Canada, desperate for higher order transit to ease gridlock in the booming municipality, is to get its share of billions of dollars in infrastructure investment promised by the new Liberal government in Ottawa.

“We now have the opportunity to truly get Brampton its fair share of transit funding,” Bowman said.

Both federally and provincially, Brampton seemed like “Liberal party headquarters” in the past two elections, Bowman said, adding that it’s time to leverage the huge support Brampton has provided to both higher level governments. All five of Brampton’s federal ridings went Liberal in this month’s federal election, after Conservatives swept the city in 2011.

One of the main reasons Bowman refused to back the province’s Main St. LRT route was because it would have given Brampton only 5.6 kilometres of track, compared to the 17.6 kilometres that Mississauga will get. And Brampton’s provincial funding share of the overall line would have been far less than the $1.3 billion Mississauga will get.

But the Mississauga leg of the LRT project will also benefit from Wednesday’s decision by Brampton to drop out of the plan. Bruce McCuaig, CEO of provincial transit agency Metrolinx, which will oversee the Hurontario project, said it can now begin proposal calls for procurements because the project’s scope has been set.

Construction is set to begin in 2018, with completion at Steeles around 2022.

Bowman and other Brampton councillors said they hope to have an alternative route, beginning at Steeles, ready to go once construction gets there. As part of his motion, he mentioned one of the options city staff will now be asked to study further. He wants work to begin right away.

A route running along Steeles Ave., then north past the Sheridan College campus, up to Queen St., across the city’s downtown and possibly beyond, was one of a handful of alternatives Brampton city staff have already studied.

Joe Pitushka, Brampton’s acting chief of planning and infrastructure, said staff’s first order of business is figuring out “how to engineer an LRT line that now ends at Steeles, and might have to turn around, but doesn’t preclude a future extension into Brampton from that location in either direction.”

Asked about looking at other LRT alternatives now that the Main St. route is dead, he said: “That’s a multi-disciplinary endeavour, because it requires planning, it requires engineering, it requires Metrolinx. We’ve got to fit all these pieces together, keeping in mind there can be no option going north on Main St. This decision represents a huge proposition for us. This is a huge, huge proposition.”