In a weekly series, the Star seeks simple, affordable solutions to the everyday problems faced by Torontonians and the city as a whole

The problem: Transit riders are too often stuck on buses and streetcars in heavy traffic consisting mostly of private vehicles.

Every day, rain or shine, in heat waves or snowstorms, tens of thousands of Toronto transit users spend a good portion of their time waiting for the bus. If they’re lucky, it arrives as scheduled, but if not they have to wait a little longer.

Once they get on board, on the city’s busiest routes they’re often condemned to crawl along, surrounded by a sea of private single-occupant vehicles.

“Most of the time it’s horrible,” said Anne-Marie Tahal on Monday morning as she stood on the southeast corner of Jane St. and Lawrence Ave. W. waiting for her bus.

A resident of the Jane and Finch neighbourhood, she doesn’t own a car and depends on the bus to get her to and from her job in office administration. She said service can be so unreliable she sometimes budgets an extra 30 minutes to get to work, but still ends up late.

“It feels terrible,” she said, about having to rely on a service that is so frequently unreliable.

City officials and transit advocates are hoping to fix Tahal’s commute, and that of thousands others like her.

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Spurred on in part by the success of the project to improve streetcar service on King St. downtown, they’re eyeing significant changes that would give transit vehicles priority over other road users on high-volume surface bus and streetcar routes across the city.

According to a recent TTC report outlining the agency’s five-year service plan, measures being considered range from relatively subtle interventions like increased use of turning restrictions or traffic signals that give priority to transit vehicles, to more robust interventions like removing lanes of car traffic to create dedicated transit lanes.

The philosophy behind the proposed changes is simple: buses and streetcars carry more people than private cars, and changing how roadways work to give transit vehicles precedence is the most efficient use of space.

“I think one of the things as a city we need to be focused on is … how do we move more people more efficiently and effectively through our rights of way?” said James Perttula, director of transit and transportation planning at the City of Toronto.

“And transit can be a much more effective way to move more people, so if we can free up things to allow that transit to move better, it’s got big benefits.”

While discussions about how to improve Toronto transit often focus on how to expand the subway system through big ticket projects like the Scarborough subway extension or Premier Doug Ford’s proposed Ontario Line, the bus and streetcar networks are at least as important.

Almost 50 per cent of the 533 million trips the TTC recorded in 2017 were on buses, and streetcars accounted for another 10 per cent.

According to the TTC, 18 of its surface corridors — sections of the network served by at least one bus or streetcar route — each carry at least 30,000 people on an average weekday, and 12 of those carry more than 40,000.

To put that in perspective, the transit agency says only three non-TTC corridors in the Greater Toronto Area can boast daily ridership of more than 30,000, and they’re GO Transit’s busy Lakeshore East, Lakeshore West, and Milton rail and bus lines.

The busy TTC surface routes include bus lines that serve suburban areas like the 39 Finch East, 35 Jane, and 52 Lawrence West, each of which carry roughly as many riders every day as the Line 4 (Sheppard) subway.

Given the heavy ridership of lines like these, small interventions could deliver better transit service to thousands of TTC users, while being significantly less expensive and quicker to implement than building multi-billion-dollar new lines.

The King streetcar project, which saw the city improve transit reliability on a 2.6-kilometre stretch of street using simple measures like introducing turning restrictions and removing on-street parking, had an initial budget of just $1.5 million. That’s a fraction of the money required to build new subways, which can cost more than $300 million per kilometre including stations, or even above-ground light rail lines, which can run more than $100 million per kilometre.

“As we have these longer drawn out debates in the city about what to do with rapid transit, we could be making some interventions that are quick and low cost and could really improve the lives of tens of thousands of travellers per day,” said Matti Siemiatycki, an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s geography and planning department.

He said changes like dedicated bus lanes could be made “fairly cheaply, and fairly quickly, and on an experimental basis to see what works.”

“The city and the TTC should pick the busiest routes, and then essentially just get out there with a can of paint or some flexible barriers and implement some bus lanes, and see what happens,” he said.

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The city and TTC have already introduced a handful of transit priority measures. Transit signal priority, first pioneered in the 1990s, has since been installed at more than 400 intersections.

Some intersections also have queue jump lanes, which allow buses to bypass other vehicles at traffic lights and can reduce delays by as much as four minutes during busy periods, according to the TTC.

The city has tried to implement high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) or bus-only lanes on routes like Don Mills and Eglinton, but they’re not physically separated from traffic and the TTC says car drivers often ignore the rules.

The 510 Spadina, 509 Harbourfront, and 512 St. Clair streetcar lines run on dedicated rights-of-way, but similar infrastructure for TTC buses remains rare. One exception is the York University Busway, which opened in 2009 and includes a 1.8-kilometre transit-only roadway that runs in a hydro corridor between Finch West station and Dufferin St.

Other municipalities in the GTA have taken a more aggressive approach. In 2014 Mississauga opened the first phase of its Transitway, an 18-kilometre, 12-stop bus rapid transit (BRT) system that for sections runs on dedicated roadways separated from other traffic. The project cost a reported $528 million.

Perttula said that for the moment the City of Toronto isn’t considering such a large-scale project, and instead will focus on improving service on existing TTC routes. He said that while officials have yet to identify specific routes for new transit-priority measures, potential top candidates are streets like Dufferin St., where rapid densification threatens to overwhelm existing Route 29 bus service, or Sheppard Ave. E., where plans to build a subway extension or LRT to meet demand have been repeatedly delayed.

Perttula said city and TTC staff hope to make firm recommendations about surface transit improvements by early next year.

If history is any guide, any attempt to remove traffic lanes for cars and reallocate the space to transit would be strongly opposed by some residents and their councillors at city hall.

Perhaps contradictorily it’s in the suburbs — where wide streets and the lack of rapid transit options would seem to create fertile ground for measures like dedicated bus lanes — where the idea might meet the most resistance.

The built form of suburban communities has made much of the local population reliant on their cars, and many believe the private automobile should be upheld as the primary way to get around.

One of the TTC’s busiest routes, the 52 Lawrence West, runs along the northern border of Councillor Stephen Holyday’s Etobicoke Centre ward. He said he appreciates “there is concern over the reliability of service,” and he supports measures like transit priority signals and queue jump lanes.

But he predicted setting up dedicated bus lanes would find little support among his constituents.

“I think people would find it absurd to close down an already congested traffic lane to make matters worse for everybody. And I’m not sure it would be successful in its intended outcome,” he said.

In the past, in order to overcome skepticism about taking road space away from cars the city has moved cautiously and implemented new projects like the Bloor St. bike lanes or King streetcar corridor on a pilot basis, only proposing they be made permanent after months of intensive study and documentation.

But Cherise Burda, executive director of Ryerson University’s City Building Institute, said the city can’t afford to take baby steps. According to provincial government projections, Toronto’s population is expected to grow by about a third to 3.9 million by 2041, and Burda argued transit needs to improve fast because the road network can’t accommodate more private cars.

“Our city is kind of on the cusp of being in a lot of trouble,” she said.

“We don’t need little pilots. We need to get really serious about upping our game on surface transit.”

Burda, who later this month will moderate a panel on “hacking surface transit,” argued that suburban communities like those Holyday represents have the most to gain from transit priority measures. She favours major interventions like creating BRT routes running in dedicated lanes down the middle of suburban arterials such as Jane St.

“A lot of low-income neighbourhoods in the northeast and the northwest that aren’t served by any rapid transit — these are people who are taking two-hour buses to get to work. So serving those neighbourhoods I think is really important.”

Perttula acknowledged that measures like dedicated bus lanes are bound to face pushback, but he hoped initiatives like the Mississauga Transitway and the King streetcar project have convinced more people that putting transit first works.

He said he would love to think public opinion has shifted enough that the city could “jump right in and make some of these kinds of changes.” But he conceded, “I don’t know whether or not we’ve reached that yet,” and launching projects on a pilot basis may still be necessary.

He agreed that as Toronto’s population grows the city can’t afford to stay idle for long.

“We’re not going to be able to move everyone in single-occupant vehicles. We need to think about moving more people around effectively if we don’t want things to grind to a halt.”