Brampton mayor supports downtown LRT route

Brampton heritage advocates say an LRT on Main St. will interfere with the city’s small-town charm.

Thestar.com
March 1, 2015
By Tess Kalinowski

The new mayor of Brampton says she wants the Hurontario LRT to run into or through the city’s historic downtown, a route that some residents believe will interfere with its heritage character and charm.

“Downtown expects and needs that foot traffic associated with all kinds of transit. If you build the transit somewhere else, that’s where the jobs and the density will be built,” said Linda Jeffrey.

The LRT, which is still awaiting provincial funding, should connect seamlessly with Brampton’s downtown GO station and the city’s own transit buses, she said.

City staff, working with provincial agency Metrolinx, had recommended the Main St. route through the downtown. But council wanted to see other options so staff were sent back to the drawing board.

The alternatives now on the table include several that would see the transit run east or west of Main St. and another that would involve running the LRT underground in one section.

Any of those are more appealing than the original proposal, said Michael Avis of the Brampton Historical Society. He lives in one of the historic homes near the original Main St. route. Avis sees a modern LRT as a blight on the city’s historic atmosphere, one that would inevitably divert traffic onto nearby residential streets.

“We’re not opposed to the LRT, we’re just opposed to the route. We just don’t think a railway and the heritage district are compatible,” said Avis.

He thinks the modern light transit vehicles would look incongruent alongside the palatial homes and parks along Main St. and he’s not persuaded by pictures of sleek LRVs on the streets of historic European cities either.

Putting the LRT underground won’t work either, said Avis - the foundations of some of the two-storey buildings that date to the 1800s couldn’t withstand the tunnelling. It makes sense to route the LRT west of Main St. up McLaughlin Rd. to Sheridan College or east to the hospital, he said.

Jeffrey says the LRT would actually be an improvement for downtown.

“When the GO bus is going up Main St. it’s smelly, it’s noisy, it shakes and rattles all of the foundations of the existing infrastructure. But if you go past an LRT, it’s quite, it’s sleek, it’s attractive,” she said.

Jeffrey wants the LRT discussion back before council this year.

It can’t happen soon enough, said Kevin Montgomery, a Brampton transit advocate, who ran in the last civic election. He worries that delaying a decision could give the financially constrained province an excuse to delay or abbreviate the Brampton end of the LRT, which will run from the Port Credit GO station to Mississauga’s city centre and then continue north along Hurontario.

“One potential outcome that was rumoured, was that the LRT could terminate at Shopper’s World at Steeles and Hurontario. In doing that the project could move ahead, and until an alternate route is finalized, that’s just what we’re stuck with,” said Montgomery.

“With respect to diverting it, Brampton already has a transportation master plan that indicates Main St., Steeles and Queen St. as the rapid transit corridors. These are the corridors the planners indicated were going to have the highest transit demand and the city is building and planning around these expectations,” he said.

Meantime, Jeffrey says she is working in a coalition with the mayors of Kitchener and Guelph to persuade the province to provide all-day, two-way GO service to those communities ahead of Metrolinx’s 10-year regional express rail plan that would electrify the GO system.

“For me, it is the shortest achievable transit improvement we could get prior to an LRT,” she said. To do that, the province has to complete an environmental assessment of the rail corridor between Malton and Mount Pleasant stations and it needs to add passenger rail capacity to the line, which is a heavily used freight track.

Montgomery fears some councillors see all-day, two-way GO trains as a sufficient solution to the city’s transit needs. But GO expansion and the LRT aren’t mutually exclusive, he said.

“There are two distinct traffic patterns. The movement between Brampton and Mississauga is greater than Brampton to Toronto. Both are important,” said Montgomery.

The mayor agrees.

“I know there are people who live in Toronto who work in Brampton and people in Brampton need to get to Toronto,” she said. “But we also need to think of all the other places that our residents live and work in. I know there are employers here that could hire more staff if they could get them to work more easily.”