Is King St. just the beginning?

While controversy is still swirling around the pilot project to give priority to streetcars on the busy downtown street, the TTC and city are in the early stages of exploring emulating the idea elsewhere.

According to the transit agency’s new corporate plan, which will be debated at a special meeting of its board on Thursday, the city and TTC plan to collaborate on “a comprehensive Surface Transit Priority Plan” that would “let buses and streetcars move more quickly on key corridors without getting stuck in traffic.”

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The document has yet to be endorsed by the board, but it states the plan would be executed over the next five years. It describes the King pilot as a “first step.”

The transit priority plan is still in its infancy, and the TTC stresses no modifications are planned for any specific streets at this time.

Agency spokesperson Stuart Green said transit priority measures have already been implemented at various places throughout the city, including specially-timed traffic signals, dedicated bus lanes at busy intersections, and high occupancy vehicle lanes on some major streets.

“Giving transit a priority in Toronto is not uncommon at the moment,” he said.

“And if there’s a way we can explore ways to continue making transit a priority to move 1.8 million people around the city more efficiently and more effectively, we will do that.”

According to the corporate plan, prioritizing transit service could help make transit more attractive, and the proposal has been included in the agency’s ridership growth strategy that aims to draw more customers after three years of stagnating growth.

Possible measures that could be used to prioritize TTC service include additional physically separated right-of-ways of the kind already in place for the 510 Spadina and 512 St. Clair streetcar routes.

The city could also add more “queue jump lanes” at intersections, which would allow buses to bypass private vehicles at traffic lights.

Toronto’s former chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat, who helped develop the King project, said that replicating the idea on a wider scale would be a way for the city to achieve some “quick wins” on the transit file.

“We have this astounding ridership that’s happening at grade on buses, on streetcars right now,” she said.

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“There are significant improvements that we can make simply by transforming the way we’re using existing infrastructure.”

While public debate around improving transit often focuses on building expensive new subway lines, close to 60 per cent of the roughly 535 million annual trips on the TTC are made on buses or streetcars.

A group of business owners who oppose a pilot project that limits vehicle traffic along King Street have launched a social media campaign calling for a stop to the pilot project by using the hashtag #ReverseKingCarBan.

Smaller, inexpensive changes improve service on those routes could have significant benefits, Keesmaat argued.

As examples she cited Bathurst St. or Finch Ave., which are wide enough in some sections to dedicate a traffic lane to buses. That could dramatically improve commutes for the tens of thousands of riders who use those routes every day.

If the King project is any indication, additional efforts to prioritize transit at the expense of private vehicles will be controversial.

Although the pilot has improved streetcar service in the two months since it was installed, a group of local business owners says restricting car traffic in the area has hurt sales. They’re waging a campaign to cancel the $1.5-million project, which is currently scheduled to last until December, after which council is expected to vote on whether to make it permanent.

Transit blogger Steve Munro cautioned there may also be logistical challenges to prioritizing surface transit.

He argued that King is unique because it has extremely high transit ridership and is located close to numerous parallel routes drivers can use as alternatives.

The situation is different for routes like the 29 Dufferin bus, which carries 40,000 people a day and is often cited as a line where service needs improving.

It would be difficult to add dedicated bus lanes on the street because it’s narrow and passes through residential neighbourhoods where curbside parking demands are high.

“There ain’t room to put a reserve lane on it and have anything left for anybody else,” Munro said.

“There may be specific locations where (a transit priority plan is) applicable, but it is not an across-the-board fix.”