Three years
ago, Toronto city council killed a proposal to widen the Don Valley
Parkway, instead looking for a better way to deal with traffic in
the congested corridor from Steeles Avenue to Lake Ontario, and
between Bayview and Victoria Park Avenues. Next Thursday, a special
public meeting will be held at Toronto City Hall to discuss a
complex but controversial plan for the area. Jane Pitfield, city
councillor for the Don Valley West ward, and chair of Toronto’s
works committee, says, “The study incorporates many things, from
signal improvements, to queue-jump lanes for buses on the Don Valley
Parkway, to HOV lanes, to ... carpooling.”
She reports
that GO Transit is proposing a new train station for the growing
area near Eglinton Avenue and Wynford Drive. The stop would be “down
in the valley”, she says. “You’d have to find a way to get people up
and down from it, but it would allow people from Richmond Hill and
get off the train and go midtown to Yonge and Eglinton by bus.”
The councillor
is “very interested” in a possible bus rapid transit route that
would partly run through her ward. She says the proposed busway
“begins at Steeles, goes down Don Mills Road, past Flemingdon Park
where I have 27,000 people living, turns right at Overlea where I
have 30,000 people in Thorncliffe Park, and makes a jog at Millwood
and then into Redway Road where there’s currently a Loblaws store,
and the proposal is to build a busway.”
Express buses
would travel from Redway down the Bayview extension to Castle Frank
subway station, or instead drop riders in the valley, where they
could be conveyed up to the station by escalator. Residents of the
Rosedale area have long opposed any new road from the northeast,
fearing it would eventually bring too much traffic onto their
streets. Says Pitfield, “I believe a busway could be built and
designed so that it can only take buses.”
Steve Munro, an
independent transit expert, believes the plan puts too much focus on
the bus route, and especially on the controversial Redway Road
extension. He says. “The whole purpose of this is to improve
capacity in the Don Valley corridor so that they get people out of
their cars and onto transit.” Yet only 20% the projected ridership
of the proposed bus lines would be new to transit, he says. “All
you’re doing is moving (riders) from one bus line to another bus
line.”
Munro says the
best solution is to simply run more GO trains, “which is what GO
transit is planning to do anyway.” He says, “If you put more trains
on the Stouffville line and more trains on Richmond Hill line,
between the two of them you will carry far more people -- and they
will be people who are genuinely diverted from auto to transit --
than you will ever be able to carry with this busway proposal.”
The choices are
many, but let’s hope the best proposal wins.
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