Matthew Williams sees Mississauga’s plan for a $1.2 billion light rail line (LRT) along Hurontario St. as being about more than just transit. He believes the LRT is an essential part of an ambitious strategy to make the city a better place to live.

“It’s really about creating a vision for change,” says Williams, a city transportation planner who led a study that identified the LRT as the best transit option for Mississauga’s primary thoroughfare.

The proposed LRT line would run along Hurontario St. — the city’s busiest corridor — connecting Port Credit to downtown Brampton with as many as 32 stations on the 20-kilometre route.

The LRT line would come off Hurontario and run through Mississauga city centre, where up to 120,000 new residents are expected within the next decade.

Mississauga’s City Centre Transit Terminal, located north of the Square One shopping centre, is the main hub of the Mississauga Transit system, providing connections to local bus and regional transportation services through GO Transit (there’s no GO rail station in the city centre; the nearest one is in Cooksville).

The LRT would link up with the city’s new bus rapid transit (BRT) corridor that’s currently under construction; the BRT will run east-west through the top end of Mississauga city centre.

The LRT plan resulted from a Hurontario/Main Street study — a joint effort by the cities of Mississauga and Brampton — that looked at ways to integrate urban design, land use and transportation along that bustling corridor.

The LRT project adheres to the goals of the province’s Places to Grow legislation, which seeks to promote higher density, pedestrian- and transit-friendly development in locations just like Mississauga’s main drag.

“This fully supports the growth plan,” Williams says. “We want to focus our growth along Hurontario.”

The corridor connects with three GO lines, two urban growth centres (downtown Brampton and downtown Mississauga) and five mobility hubs — Port Credit, Cooksville, Mississauga city centre, downtown Brampton (Main Street) and Bramalea — as identified by the province.

While the Hurontario/Main Street master plan was unanimously approved last summer by Mississauga council, currently there is no funding commitment from either the province or federal government for construction of the LRT line, only for preliminary design work. The province is also funding an environmental assessment.

Metrolinx, the provincial authority that manages GTA transportation planning, has backed the case for the LRT, having done an analysis that identified the Hurontario/Main Street corridor as one of its 15 “priority projects” for the GTA.

Small wonder. Hurontario St. carries the highest transit ridership of any Mississauga Transit route, with about 28,000 riders each day, according to the city.

And Brampton and Mississauga are expected to grow by nearly 400,000 people by 2031, with 100,000 people and 50,000 jobs located in the area surrounding the proposed LRT corridor, the study estimates.

So there will certainly be enough demand to support an LRT system, Williams says. “Basically every time we add a bus (along Hurontario) it’s full. We have great ridership along that corridor, it’s just really congested with cars.

“Even adding more buses is something we have to be cautious about because those are resources going into furthering congestion.”

The advantages of an LRT line?

For the majority of the route, trains will run on a dedicated track so they won’t conflict with automobile traffic or add to congestion. Plus, the system is electrically powered and not a direct source of greenhouse gas emissions. And compared to buses, the LRT system requires less maintenance and has lower operating costs.

Most important, if all goes according to plan, the LRT line will spur growth of all sorts along the Hurontario/Main Street corridor.

“It could catalyze denser development on that strip and start to build a transit-oriented cluster,” says Matti Siemiatycki, a professor of urban planning at the University of Toronto. “That would be a major improvement for Mississauga and for the region.”

Possible downsides?

The preliminary design of the LRT requires it to occupy two lanes of traffic along the six-lane portions of Hurontario and operate in shared lanes in smaller four-lane sections in downtown Brampton, for example.

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This will inevitably mean delays and headaches during construction.

But as Siemiatycki points out, “there will be some sort of disruption no matter what kind of transportation system you build.”

“And if we don’t do anything,” Williams adds, “we’ll reach capacity, congestion will keep on growing and there will be a big price to pay.”

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