I was in Canada’s national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, on Sunday with a piece about the urgency of bus priority. An unpaywalled version is here.
Canada’s major cities and transit authorities will continue to propose street design changes that nudge everyone toward sharing the scarce space of the city street more fairly. These proposals will always be compromises between the needs of different users of the street. The goal is always to make everyone’s lives better, and maximize the access to opportunity that is the whole purpose of cities. But if the result is a bit inconvenient for you, it’s probably also still a little inconvenient for everyone else, and that may mean it’s the right compromise for everyone. Urban life is all about making compromises so that we share limited space fairly, with no user allowed to veto the needs of others. In a city, if everyone is compromising, everyone is winning.
Don’t forget to link to Christopher Yuen’s blog post about the King street priority project, an equally important discussion on how these compromises are made for transit priority.
https://humantransit.org/2017/12/toronto-a-new-king-street-for-transit.html
I think that in Toronto in particular there is a visceral sense that the TTC is not doing enough to earn its share of the street— while I’ve long since moved away, close friends and family still live on the proposed red lane corridors on Dufferin and Bathurst streets and they all share a vague awareness that transit is slightly worse than it used to be. The 7 Bathurst bus runs every 10 minutes when it used to run every 6. The Bathurst streetcar runs every 8 minutes when it used to run every 3. The Dufferin bus that ran every 2-4 minutes even on weekends now runs alternating local and express every 8-10.
Even in existing transit priority corridors like Spadina avenue, streetcars that ran every 90 seconds now run every 4-5 minutes.
Granted these sound like petulant complaints when transit still runs frequently by any reasonable standard. But I think there is a public that remembers what it was like when you didn’t have to wait- not ten minutes, not at all- and sees that while proposing meaningful improvements like red lanes, the TTC is foreclosing that era and not planning to bring it back. When the bus runs so often you can almost always see the next one coming, it truly does feel like an integral part of the street.
It’s worth observing that previous implementations of bus and streetcar lanes came with planned and advertised services increases- the King Street corridor saw the implementation of 5 minute service 20 hours a day. The Eglinton East lanes added frequent all day express service without cutting the 5 minute all day local service. The York University busway expanded the existent express service to all day every day frequent service, increased peak frequency to every 1-2 minutes and cut travel times by 30% or more.
These latest corridors do not promise any new service, and I think that’s worth pushing back on.
Steve Munro is one of the main voices the spurred that point of view, although what he says is a little different than what’s become the more public sentiment. He was bemoaning that transit priority wasn’t the main problem that needed fixing to improve service on Bathurst (or other low to mid-frequency corridors), not that transit priority wasn’t still a deserving use of the space.