RapidTO: Transit commuter’s dream or 'absolute nightmare?'

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After years of planning, two downtown-area bus-only lanes got the green light, triggering outrage among those affected by the new rapid-transit lines on Bathurst and Dufferin Sts.

In July, city council approved plans to set up transit-only lanes on Bathurst and Dufferin Sts., south of Bloor St, – and quickly. Mayor Olivia Chow wants these lanes, which are to be painted red, done in time for the FIFA World Cup in June 2026, and later to be expanded north.

The RapidTO idea isn’t new, it just took years to get out of the planning stage. However, Bathurst wasn’t initially picked as a RapidTO priority – and now that it’s suddenly in the fast lane, some people are howling.

“Public consultation was an outright disgrace, if they want to even consider it that,” said Paul Macchiusi, whose pot shop, Minerva Cannabis, is on Bathurst, near Dupont. “There was a lack of transparency, a lack of collaboration.”

Macchiusi also lives in the area, and his group, Protect Bathurst, spoke out against RapidTO. South of his business, the streetcar lanes will soon be marked red, street parking will vanish and a single lane of vehicle traffic will stop every time someone gets on or off transit.

“It’s gonna be an absolute nightmare,” he said.

The ward’s councillor, Dianne Saxe, might not call it a nightmare, but she knows it will be disruptive. She said Bathurst is overdue for change.

“The fundamental point about RapidTO is we have streets that were built for a city of maybe 500,000,” Saxe told the Toronto Sun. “That’s not the city we have. There’s nowhere to put bigger streets, nor would it be good for our city.”

That means Torontonians will have to get used to fewer trips by car, Saxe said. In her University-Rosedale ward, most people don’t own a car, she said – which is a good reason why streetcars and buses on Bathurst should get through their routes faster.

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The city has a few tools to clear the way: remove the parked cars, remove the cars blocking an intersection trying to turn left, and give transit its own lane. That’s RapidTO.

“Those are the only things we got. There is no magic wand to make the bus go faster when there’s a car in front,” Saxe said.

But the RapidTO worries don’t end there.

The red bus lane concept, which already exists in the city in Scarborough, allows bikes to use the lane. But bikes aren’t being encouraged on Bathurst south of Bloor, an area Saxe said would be rough for cyclists.

At July’s council meeting, Jacquelyn Hayward, transportation services planning director, said RapidTO could push drivers away from Bathurst and Dufferin to Spadina, Jane or Keele – but that last street exists south of Bloor as Parkside Dr., perhaps Toronto’s most notorious problem street for planners, typified by the drama over its speed camera.

The city is projecting improved transit speeds and ridership, but those are just predictions. For some, the greater unknown is what the changes will do to traffic.

“RapidTO,” Councillor Stephen Holyday scoffed during July’s meeting. “It should be CongestionTO! I think it’s rubbish, and a lot of other people do, as well.”

Then there is the accelerated timeline, done to get the red paint down in time for the World Cup next June.

“Quite frankly, it’s bulls—,” Macchiusi said. “Who in their right mind is coming to FIFA, spending $2,500 minimum on a single ticket, and then staying up at Eglinton and Bathurst, expecting to take transit down to the game?

“It’s so far-fetched. It’s just another excuse.”

Saxe said she gets this response.

“The World Cup is a big event,” she said, “but we have lots of big events, and we have lots of big events that come every year. What the World Cup did was give us a kick in the rear, to look again at plans that had been stalled for years.”

In what was the “nicest part of this horrible experience,” Macchiusi said, the RapidTO fight planted the seeds for a BIA in his neighbourhood. He intends to speak at the Toronto and East York community council meeting in September when Saxe and her colleagues discuss more ways to speed up the Bathurst bus route.

Saxe said she’ll do even more community consultations on those ideas once they’ve been fleshed out. There’s a rough plan to remove parking only on one side north of Bloor, to address an unusual problem with northbound traffic in the afternoons. She also wants to hike parking rates on Bathurst from $3 an hour, which she said is “way too low.”

But Macchiusi is stuck with the sense that substandard consultation “is just an ongoing trend, I guess in this city, but especially in this ward with Dianne.”

City hall has admitted things aren’t perfect.

“The consultation process for RapidTO Bathurst and RapidTO Dufferin was certainly more accelerated than we would typically undertake for this kind of a project,” Jacquelyn Hayward, of the transportation division, said at July’s meeting after a question from Councillor Jamaal Myers.

Bafflingly, Myers asked Hayward soon after: “So, this has been consulted to death. Is that a fair statement?”

Macchiusi said it fell on his group to tell an arena and rec centre near Bathurst and Dupont about the changes. Saxe said the city spent months on consultation and heard from “hundreds and hundreds of people,” but of those two institutions, she admitted, she “didn’t specifically ask them their opinion.”

“I am well aware of their parking concerns,” she said. “Again, we need people … to switch. They can’t all drive. More people need to take the bus, and that’s only possible if we make the bus better.”

And as for those who feel City Hall just doesn’t listen these days? “The people who don’t want change tend to say, ‘I wasn’t consulted enough,’” Saxe said.

jholmes@postmedia.com