Will new streetcars, in the end, be motorists’ friend?
They’re a mile long, alright, but the big load they carry will free up space on city streets

thestar.com
Aug. 10, 2014
By Joseph Hall

As sightings of the TTC’s new - and very long - streetcars increase on city roadways this month, a question may well occur to gape-mouthed Toronto motorists:

“How am I going to get past that sucker?”

The short answer is - you’re probably not.

In the hopscotch game of streetcar passing that Toronto motorists uniquely learn - pull up behind the open door closest to the Red Rocket’s front and blast on by when it closes - the gig is almost surely up.

The new transit vehicles are seven metres longer than any in the system’s current streetcar fleet and boast four doors instead of a maximum three.

“Motorists are going to have to make some adjustments,” TTC spokesperson Brad Ross says coyly.

“But if you don’t want to pass a streetcar, then get on one,” Ross adds.

The new, 30-metre cars will begin to officially roll out on the 510 Spadina line - which has its own right of way - Aug. 31. And some 204 of them will completely replace the old rockets on all routes over the next five years.

But in such incremental and attritional ways, this city is being transformed, many experts say.

Because as far as Toronto’s transportation priorities go, the car is finally taking a back seat.

“Essentially you do reach a tipping point when you get to a certain scale,” says Jennifer Keesmaat, the city’s chief planner.

“We do not have capacity to be adding more roads so if you’re adding more people, those people have to be moving differently,” Keesmaat says.

Those different modes of commuting include, most importantly, walking, biking and transit.

And Keesmaat points to several planned and ongoing projects across the city where these automobile alternatives will be significantly enhanced - leaving motorists to fend with status quos or less.

The prime example is the Eglinton Crosstown LRT project now under construction.

Of the 19 kilometres the line will eventually traverse, more than half will tunnel underground.

But even along the 11-kilometre, western segment that runs beneath the surface, cars will be denied free run of the topping street.

Indeed, while four lanes will remain available to motorists, their vehicles will be far more cramped.

The street, Keesmaat says, will go green, figuratively and literally, with $150 million worth of protected bike lanes and wide, tree lined sidewalks being proposed.

Motorists won’t be losing ground along Eglinton, Keesmaat says. They just won’t be gaining any despite the disappearance of bus lanes along the thoroughfare.

“We’re not decreasing traffic capacity. We’re maintaining it,” she says.

“The objective moving forward (however)...is to balance our streets for all users meaning that we are no longer going to prioritize the car and historically we have prioritized the car.”

Keesmatt says that a continued car prioritization would require the city to cannibalize the infrastructure that new roads would presumably be built to service.

“The Catch 22 is that if you try to build more road capacity, you reach a point where you have to start taking out buildings and homes and houses,” she says.

“You start taking away more of the city.”

Keesmaat says the Eglinton reconfiguration will be accompanied by mid-rise commercial and residential densification alongside the roadway that will make it easier for residents to walk from their homes to work or shop - and provide ready customers for the new LRT line.

But downtown, where densification has already occurred, motorists are actually losing ground. New bike lanes opened last month on Richmond, Adelaide and Simcoe Sts. have claimed a quarter of the space cars once owned along the newly-painted segments of those arteries.

And the lanes - now pilot projects - are part of plans for an expansive bike network in the central Toronto that will connect with the lake and take cyclists from many segments of the city in and out of the business core.

“It’s not saying ‘oh no, we’re taking away space from commuters.’ No, no, those cyclists are commuters,” Keesmaat says.

“Why not add more space for cars? The answer is we’re not moving very many people in cars, we’re moving a lot more people on bikes, as pedestrians and on transit.”

Toronto has reached a belated awakening about its transportation needs, says Eric Miller, a University of Toronto transportation expert.

“Perhaps much to our surprise, we have become a big city and big cities have to operate differently than small cities,” Miller says.

“There just isn’t enough road space over and above everything else to accommodate all the cars that you would need to move people around in a big city.”

Toronto has been slower than many other major cities in coming to grips with its size and the different transportation modes that heft demands.

“The European cities are poster children for this, but even New York City, Chicago, San Francisco … we see this trend towards reemphasizing active transportation, walking biking and transit,” he says.

“We’ve been building the auto-oriented city here... for the last 100 years more or less and it just isn’t working anymore, particularly downtown and in mid-town areas.”

Keesmaat too sees mature models in other major urban areas that long ago underwent the type of growth, densification and accompanying congestion this city has more recently witnessed.

“Very few people will go to New York City or go to Paris or go to London and get in a car and drive around because it’s terrible to drive” in those cities, she says.

“And that’s because those cities got to a certain density where it became imperative to have exceptional public transit that needed to be a better option to get people from A to B than driving.”

Building transportation alternatives has been a task Toronto has spurned for decades, Keesmaat says.

The new projects however, may provide the critical mass needed to steer the city away from an engrained car culture - one that its current Mayor Rob Ford (Open Rob Ford’s policard) notably favours.

“Really we are talking about a very different approach to movement in the city,”

“Whereas over the past 30 years we’ve really focused on how we can move as many cars as possible, the objective moving forward is how can we move as many people as possible.”

Keesmaat says her road-sharing philosophy is not at all an anti-car scheme.

“It doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t move in their own cars because there are lots of trips for a whole variety of reasons that are by necessity going to have to happen by car,” she says.

“But it means that we need to be adding more choice so that people have the option of moving around in different ways and they need to be real options.”

And the push to provide such high-quality options has even drawn the support of the country’s largest automobile organization.

“Every piece is meant to work as a network across the region and to complement the other pieces,” says Caroline Grech, a government relations specialist with the Canadian Automobile Association.

“So better transit ultimately will take congestion off the roads, it’s about providing options for people,” Grech says.

Grech, a frequent transit user, says a recent survey of the CAA’s 1.9 million members found that 30 per cent of them cycled regularly and that her group sees a need to share the road equitably.

“There does need to be a balance, but I think with infrastructure projects such as improved public transit and providing a safe place for cyclists to ride... that will ultimately benefit drivers,” she says.

“With the higher density there does need to be more options for people, it can’t just be everybody driving everywhere. Diversification of options is always beneficial.”

Think of that next time you’re trying to pass a 30-metre streetcar.