In previous posts about the Metrolinx regional plan, I have written about the absence of local transit service other than something assumed to grow a lot, but not on Metrolinx’ dime. Another aspect of local planning that pops up at Metrolinx Board meetings is the road network.
To nobody’s surprise, there are many projects to expand road capacity in the 905 given that the vast majority of travel there today and in the foreseeable future will be by private car. Yes, there may be improvements through car pooling, park-and-ride and other schemes to lower the total passenger miles carried by autos, but there will still remain a huge demand for road space.
Recently, I received a note from a reader about the challenge of fighting Environmental Assessment battles in York Region.
Background
York Region has proposed a massive arterial road widening program. The base plan is to widen virtually all existing 4-5 lane arterial roads (2 lanes each way + left turn lane) to 6-7 lanes + wide median + bicycle lanes. The extra lane would be for HOV/bus during rush hour and general purpose the rest of the time. Different roads are at different stages in the EA process. Most are going through without citizen opposition.
However, in Markham, citizen concerns, lead by me, has resulted in the EA process being halted for 5 regional roads. The Region has agreed to model a broad range of alternatives and to form a citizens’ advisory committee. This work will commence this fall. They have also renamed the program “Transit Supportive Roads”, a very disingenuous name as you will see below.
Case Example – 16th Ave
Let me use 16th Ave in Markham, as I am most familiar with that regional road.
- runs through established low density residential/parkland neighbourhoods (95%) or commercial (5%)
- stable adjacent neighbourhoods unlikely to intensify in next 20 years
- one YRT bus route (Route 85) with peak service every 20 mins
- maximum current transit ridership say 50 people/hr/peak direction
- VIVA BRT on dedicated right of way coming soon on Highway 7 ( 2 km south)
- heavily congested by automobiles during peak hours
The idea that this road needs investment of scarce public dollars to build a “transit supportive road” is ludicrous. Until the built form of the area changes, this will remain as a low transit ridership route (< few hundred pphpd). The project is a road widening for cars with a fancy new name.
My Request of your Readers
However, let’s play along for a minute. Do your readers have any suggestions on what could be tried (or modelled) to improve transit within the existing footprint or with minor widening? At this point, the Region seems amenable to testing a broad range of ideas. Two ideas have surfaced so far:
- Build a single reversible bus-only lane in the centre of the road
- Use the “intermittent bus lane” concept cited in Metrolinx Green Paper on Transit (pg 11) and apparently giving 50% improvement in bus speeds in Lisbon with limited impact on general traffic movement
Has anyone seen #1 anywhere in North America? Has anyone been to Lisbon and observed #2? Does anyone have other ideas?
Peter Miasek
This raises at least two questions. First, are we facing unbridled widening of roads in the 905 regardless of whatever efforts are made to woo people onto transit? The current situation with VIVA is disheartening in that an entire network of BRT is shut down, but it carries only 35,000 people a day. Those people are feeling the impact, but they’re a drop in the bucket of transportation demand. How much political clout can transit plans muster?
Second, the Metrolinx Draft plan contains some fairly strong language about the need for local municipalities to bring their plans into line with the new regional plan. Will Metrolinx have anything to say about road projects, some of which, as Durham’s Roger Anderson pointed out, are on the verge of construction but don’t even appear on the Metrolinx maps? How can Metrolinx formulate a regional plan when it ignores the role and impact of local road and transit decisions?
Steve Munro 
Suburban roads are already too wide. The width of a road has a massive impact on how livable an area is; anything more than two lanes in each direction is entirely unattractive to have to cross on foot and is generally impossible to cross without the aid of a crosswalk or traffic signal. Massively wide roads also don’t seem to encourage the sort of mixed-use development you see on Toronto streets.
Its naive to believe that transportation problems can be solved by simply making roads wider; I’ll note that these suburban roads are appearantly “heavily congested” during rush hours, and yet Queen St., at least from say Spadina to Queensway has a tolerable level of congestion at any time of the day. Traffic gets a bit heavier during rush hours but it stays relatively constant, presumably due to the much greater share of transit/cycling.
(I’m basing this on personal observation, not vehicle counts. But traffic doesn’t seem to grind to a halt during rush hour like it can in the suburbs.)
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16th Ave has nothing facing it except for 4 or 5 commercial properties around Markham and Woodbine (combined, not each). This street has little actual value to transit as there is nothing to serve on the street itself. Other streets, like Carlton, hold more potential since people actually live on that very street.
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I never understood why Burnhamthorpe Road in Mississauga has such a wide right-of-way. Is it so that if an automobile has a rollover, it wouldn’t hit anyone? Are they planning for more traffic lanes? Is an LRT/BRT going on Burnhamthorpe? Why don’t they put apartments and stores on that right-of-way, if no traffic will be going on it?
I have found that the road planners design new roads that exceed the posted speed limit by at least 10 km/h. It must be so that the police can collect speeders and collect the fines. Why build roads that can handle higher speeds and then post signs below that?
Steve: Road designers tend to aim high on the basis that traffic will actually move at a higher speed than the posted limit. Also, in some cases, the posted speed is set due to political considerations such as neighbourhood concerns or environmental issues.
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In the past, you have dismissed the challenge of getting people out of their cars and into transit as foolish. Your stated objective with Transit City is to prevent people from feeling the need to own a second car to run errands and so forth. I’m sure I could find the right quotes if I scoured around.
In that case, it would seem that more road construction would still be needed to handle peak demand from commuters. Unless you’re proposing something that would relieve peak demand, “unbridled road construction” is consistent with both the expanding GTA population and the locally-optimized transit system that you want.
Steve: There is a big difference between the density at which the areas to be served by Transit City are now, or are planned to be built and the character of the already-built York Region. TC is intended to support growth of population in an existing area and to do so in a way that will minimize the need for additional cars/household.
My point here is that Metrolinx has completely ignored the question of whether the planned road expansions are consistent with the stated goals for the region and whether these can even be achieved. Most definitely, I do not agree that road expansion per se assists transit. York us lucky to have wide rights-of-way and does not face congestion on roads that cannot be expanded. Toronto is not in that position. Also, as pointed out in the letter that started all of this, wide roads are inherently anti-pedestrian.
People run errands with cars because those errands take them miles out of their way rather than just around the corner. The biggest challenge for single-car households is the need for a car for every meaningful trip — work, school, recreation. I certainly don’t dismiss the challenge of getting people out of their cars, but it will take a combination of factors — better neighbourhood design, higher operating costs and fewer incomes/household, demographic evolution of the 905 and, finally, better transit — to make a difference.
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I just wanted to comment on a few things here, as one of the riders of the 85 16th Ave bus.
1. The route has recently seen a sharp increase in ridership from previous figures. This is most likely due to the rise in gas prices. Even at 20 minute intervals, there are lineups for this bus. It’s no longer just a filler useless bus route; it actually takes people places.
2. The 85 route is actually a very long route that was recently chopped off in order to enable the 20 minute frequency. It used to go from Markham/Stouffville Hospital (9th Line) to Napa Valley (which is basically at Islington). It now stops at Vaughan Mills Mall. That route in of itself can take me to every destination that I could want, if I really wanted to take the bus instead of the car. It services residential areas, malls (Hillcrest), plazas, business districts (Leslie), Canada’s Wonderland, Vaughan Mills Mall, etc. And along all of those destinations, I can transfer to any southbound bus I want to go to a different destination. It’s a very handy bus route.
3. 16th Ave has also been seeing a sharp increase in “drivership” recently, including some very large trucks who now use it as an alternative to the clogged Highway 7. Having a massive truck barreling down a 2 lane road, in a primarily residential area is not something that most people approve of. Now imagine what would happen if they bow down to the drivers and expand the road? Even more alternative-Hwy7 drivers that nobody on 16th Ave wants in the area.
The 16th Ave bus route can very well become a very popular and busy bus route without much effort at all. Just simply by increasing the frequency of the route to 20 minute intervals (which only happened this past June) the route has seen more ridership than it ever has before. And this isn’t the end by any means, because there is still development along 16th Ave near the Kennedy area, the 9th Line area, and in general the entire Markham portion of the route.
That said, I think the only way to get people in the 905 out of their cars would be to give the bus advantages over the car. A bus lane (dedicated and in the middle is a decent option) would bypass a lot of the congestion that plagues the road, which would make some drivers think twice about their method of transportation. The only problem is that a lot of the drivers along these types of roads are only clogging up the roads because they are all trying to get to the same place: the 404 on-ramp.
Now it becomes a game of improving local public transit to get to GO stations, and improving GO lines in the York Region area to make them convenient and reliable. But that’s a whole other situation.
Oh, and for the record, the Viva’s ridership is nothing to shrug off. The simple fact is that the Viva finally has managed to get 905ers to take a bus rather than their cars. Sure, it only really serves two major routes right now, but almost every single bus on the Blue or Purple lines during or around rush hour is always packed to the brim with people. That, in my eyes, is a successful implementation of a transit system in a car obsessed region. It’s one step closer to the overall goal.
Also, I think that the only viable option for transit for 905ers is only for the commuting 905ers. Not many people are going to take the bus to the local store and back, but if your commute is farther away, or out of region (as many bus trips in York Region end up with a destination in Toronto) then you have a better chance of convincing people to take transit instead if you make it fast and convenient to transfer services at connection points.
Steve: Just to be clear — I am not shrugging off the riding on VIVA, but much more service is obviously needed. It is good to hear that going to a 20 minute headway has made a real difference. Imagine what it would be like at 15, or 10 or better.
A gaping hole in the Metrolinx plans is any estimate of the additional funding, both capital and operating, needed to improve the quality of local transit service. That’s as much a “regional” issue as lines that happen to cross Steeles Avenue.
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Wider roads accomplish three things
1) It walls off one side of the road from the other, discouraging non-automotive traffic.
2) It discourages building on a human scale, so you have more and more building done on an automotive scale.
3) It encourages more traffic.
This all raises a question, should Metrolinx be encouraging driving as the only method of transportation outside the 416.
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The concept of York Region roads being widened to 6 lanes (with one turning lane in the middle) is nothing new. This has already been done in several places in the Toronto area itself. Don Mills, Lawrence, Eglinton, Kingston Road, Yonge (north of Finch) and Steeles (east of 404) come to mind. Said roads also have an HOV lane for public transit. Each of these six lane roads have public transit which runs lesser than 10 minutes during rush hours. It is not a stretch to assume that 16th Avenue can also enjoy such accomodations. Such additional lanes would be of benefit to the YRT bus on 16th Avenue as it would no longer be tied up in traffic but rather given a much needed shot in the arm for service reliability. Given that ridership is indeed increasing on this route, why not promote this route as an alternative “trunk route” than the busy Highway 7 corridor?
Peter Miasek probably does not speak for most York Region commuters who would gladly appreciate this change. As such he is doing a disservice to improving the commuting picture in York Region.
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I would like to expand on Raffi’s comment about the YRT route 85. On Saturdays and Sundays the route is no diffrent then any other route.
On the route you can see upon viewing that the Saturdays service runs good during midday and on Sunday middays. 30 min headways on a 905 route is good service and even on the weekends I have noticed a diffrence in ridership as there seems to be a lot of off peak travel going on by choice commuters.
As you can see in the link you can see in the centre part of the route the headways are at 10 mins in the peak, and ridership is growing. The changes in this route started to really take shape since VIVA was put in place. This growth is all over the place and this route is just a prime example of the growth of YRT services.
I do think the city should widen roads only to give all aspects of commuters a piece of the pie.
Bike lanes, a new thing on Birchmount rd. south of St. Clair, have been implemented with the sacrifice of one auto lane for everyone else with a left turn lane at intersections. I personally don’t agree with taking auto lanes away without higher order transit, but the traffic flow is actually better keeping the bikes off to the side. Off topic? Perhaps but it’s actually better now then it was for flow.
Getting back on topic, 16th ave. should be widened to accominate bus only/HOV lane in each direction. (3 persons per car in the HOV) And bike lanes on the curb, with cyclists having to yield to buses at stops. I do agree with road widening but only in this scenario.
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Regarding the width of the road allowance for Burnhamthorpe road in Mississauga, there are two factors here. First is the planned width of the road which is 7 lanes across (3 for traffic each way + 2-way median/left turn lane) all the way through Mississauga with additional room for space at the wide intersections.
Then you have Hurontario, already 7 lanes from Queensway up to the 401 with plans for widening it up through Brampton. Hurontario actually has been designed with space for 9 lanes (plus space at intersections).
Why does Mississauga (and much of the 905) need these wide roads? Clearly to serve car traffic – since the number of main roads is fewer in the 905 area than in Toronto.
I recall reading that Toronto had 4 lanes roads every 500m up to North York, and no main roads are more than 1 km apart in most cases. Compare that to Mississauga and other 905 areas with fewer main roads – many at least 2 km apart.
Toronto has spaced out the traffic volume and also managed to use public transit to reduce the volume. In 905, on the other hand, traffic volume is more concentrated – more cars, fewer roads to use – hence the massive widening.
I agree with the concern here – the primary purpose here is road widening for cars and if it is being couched as “Transit-friendly” then the best solution is to take advantage of that claim and call their bluff…these widenend roads can and should make space for effective and reliable bus lanes.
regards, (from here in Malaysia)
Moaz Yusuf Ahmad
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Actually, to put all speculations to rest – Burnhamthorpe is wide because it was planned as the main east-west rapid transit corridor in the late 70s/early 80s. The City sought property protection in anticipation that there would be rapid transit down the middle of the road. That changed when the City shifted its focus on the hydro corridor that parallels Hwy 403 and Eastgate Parkway which became the Mississauga Transitway.
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Moaz Yusuf Ahmad commented on road spacing in the GTA and I thought I can add a little bit of insight to this…
Much of the GTA has roads that were laid out in a surveyor’s grid pattern that is more or less a NS/EW pattern (slightly adjusted to the lakefront). Some adjustments are made as one moves around the lake – just look at Gore Road between York and Durham.
The most common grid pattern was to lay out concession roads in a township beginning at a baseline every 66 chains, which is about 1.25 miles, or 2 km. Running perpendicular to concession are sideroads that are also spaced the same way. In York Region, Yonge Street is the baseline and concession roads run east and west of here. So, going east the concession roads are Bayview, Leslie, Woodbine, Warden, Kennedy, McCowan, Hwy 48/Markham Road/Main Street, and Ninth Line (counting Yonge, Ninth Line really is the Ninth Line!), and Reesor Road (formerly 10th Line). There is an 11th Line, but because of the angle between York and Durham, it hits the York/Durham townline south of the 407.
Beginning at Steeles, the sidelines are 14th Avenue (I don’t know what this was 14th from!), Highway 7, 16th Avenue, Major Mac (formerly 17th), Elgin Mills (formerly 18th), 19th Avenue, Stouffville Sideroad, etc. This 2 km by 2 km grid makes it easy to estimate distances.
One exception to this pattern was common for townships that have a major waterfront, such as Scarborough. Concession roads are still 2 km apart. Eglinton was the baseline, and an imaginary extension was used as the baseline for Pickering township as well. The old city of Toronto used Queen as the baseline (which was originally called Lot Street for this reason). Sidelines in these townships were only a half mile apart (about 800 metres – placing Sheppard LRT stops at crossroads and midway between them gives an average stop distance of 400 metres). Due to adjustments at the Victoria Park border, Pharmacy is only a quarter mile away (about 400 metres).
As mentioned, adjustments to this grid pattern are made at township borders, especially due to some townships being laid out with concession roads running east-west (e.g.: Toronto, Scarborough, Pickering) and some the other way (e.g.: North York, Markham). Due to this, and also due to adjustments made for the earth’s curvature, some roads must stagger. More recent road reconstruction has eased this staggering at many intersections (think of the curve on Sheppard between the 404 and VP).
That’s enough for today’s trivial lecture! (I’m not an expert in this area, and would appreciate any corrections and additions – especially why 14th Ave is called that!)
Steve: One small correction.
A surveyor’s chain is 66 feet. This is the standard width of a Toronto street lot line to lot line. Ten chains make a furlong, eight furlongs make a mile, ten furlongs give the 1.25 mile concession road spacing. Hence there are 100 chains separating each of the main concession roads.
Why 1.25 miles? A space 10 x 10 furlongs contains 1000 acres.
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When it comes to Toronto (inner) vs suburban surroundings (including some parts of outer 416), what is particularly noteworthy is the maintained grid of the small streets working with the larger streets. Valleys and rivers among other natural barriers will cut off the grid for smaller streets, but where no such barriers are present, it is fairly common to see small streets continue the grid complementing the major arterials.
This doesn’t happen in suburban neighbourhoods though, as cul-de-sacs and almost continuous meandering of virtually all residential streets make a network that is horrendously impractical for working with the major arterials. Every neighbourhood ends up with a limited number of “main gateways” so-to-speak that not only heighten congestion at select points on the major arterials, but also create congestion within the neighbourhood itself that would not be as likely to happen if a grid were employed to allow a network of “minor gates.”
This is what makes it very challenging to run bus service in the suburbs. You can’t have a bus serve every other cul-de-sac (assuming the cul-de-sac is even big enough for a bus to navigate). The alternative, by-and-large currently employed, is to run suburban bus routes along arterials that nobody actually lives on.
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Calvin said:
The most common grid pattern was to lay out concession roads in a township beginning at a baseline every 66 chains, which is about 1.25 miles, or 2 km. Running perpendicular to concession are side roads that are also spaced the same way.
Steve said:
A surveyor’s chain is 66 feet. This is the standard width of a Toronto street lot line to lot line. Ten chains make a furlong, eight furlongs make a mile, ten furlongs give the 1.25 mile concession road spacing. Hence there are 100 chains separating each of the main concession roads.
Why 1.25 miles? A space 10 x 10 furlongs contains 1000 acres.
Since an engineer’s chain is 100 feet, 66 engineer’s chains = 100 surveyor’s chain and you are both right.
The Story that I heard about roads in Ontario is that they were laid out by the Royal Navy and they used baselines parallel to the lake and roads [perpendicular to them. Look at a map of Ontario and follow the roads from one lake to where they intersect roads from another lake and you can see this effect.
The other problem with North South roads is that the meridians of longitude get closer together as you go North and therefore at every base line, like Steele’s you get jogs where they move the roads East or West to get the correct spacing from the centre road like Yonge St.
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I’m a little late on this but there are some remarks that have to be heard from a former Markhamite.
My parents moved our family to Markham in 1985. Back then, 16th Avenue was just a two lane road. It was also split at several main streets as when it stops on one street, you would have to drive several meters to continue to the next part of the street. Sort of like Gerrard and Coxwell, multiply that by around 10.
16th Avenue is no longer that road. Neither is 14th. Major Mackenzie which used to be a 2 lane road has recently been widened to 4. Warden Avenue was 2 lanes between 14th and 16th when I first moved to that area. It was widened to 4 lanes several years later, now it is 6 lanes between 14th and Highway 7.
The biggest problem is that almost all development in this area are single family dwellings. Most apartments and condos in that area are located in the older section of Markham, that is between Markville Mall, and Main Street Markham. There is also a condo complex located near Markham City Hall, next to a townhouse complex.
The problem is that whenever anyone suggests a higher density housing complex like condos or townhouses, the entire city is up in arms, crowing up and down about falling property prices and the stuff. My parents were at the forefront of the battle to stop those townhouses and condos when the proposal came about. It is this NIMBYism and the desire to have nothing but single, detached homes which is the reason why public transit cannot adequately service an area such as Markham.
Expanding 16th Avenue to have 3 lanes in each direction is an overly bad idea. This is not one way to promote public transit together as it would only encourage more people to drive. Never mind Stephen’s point that reliability would be increased with the use of HOV lanes. Who obeys them anyways? I have seen many vehicles violate the HOV lanes on Don Mills during rush hours and realize that they cannot be of any use when it is run by the overly inept YRT which is worse than the TTC, one of the reasons I moved to the big city. Their Viva experiment fails, not only on the basis that it runs in mixed traffic, but it does not address the root cause of their problem, that is the direction of York Region’s urban planning department, which advocates more singular housing and not a shift to higher density development in the corridors that Viva services. As it stands, the Viva experiment is nothing more than a fancy bus moving grannies to their bingo halls, and not a real solution to solving the commuting puzzle. And because it moves in mixed traffic, it justifies their terrible urban planning skills.
I would rather have York Region choke on their own gridlock first before commiting to a road widening project that will only make things worse, not better. Only then will they realize the folly of their unbridled development.
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Eric, I agreed with most of your post up until near the end. The Viva is not a failure. It got people out of their cars and onto buses. Whether or not it eased any gridlock along the routes that it services, those buses are clearly taking many cars off the road and there is no way of denying that.
Second, it came to my attention just recently that there are several spots along Yonge Street north of Hwy 7 that have notices posted up declaring a zoning change. There were two spots in particular that I noticed in the past week. One just near Bantry-Scott, where they plan on building a high rise apartment with retail strip. And another at 16th Ave where they are planning 5 condo apartments and a retail strip. That sounds like intensification to me.
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