Giant hairy-chested capital projects have an uncanny ability to commandeer public attention — the latest choice example, of course, is the Big Doug, about which there has and will be much commentary (including from yours truly).
Necessary, on one hand, because this insane scheme deserves as much light as possible to dissuade decision-makers. Yet all the tunnel chatter takes away from the equally critical debate about alternatives that might reduce the horrendous congestion along Highway 401.
The GTA’s traffic problems are the result of years of lazy planning and wrong-headed transit investment. But one particular failing stands out, which is the fact that we’ve built a lot of hub-and-spoke rapid transit in order to bring people into the core, while neglecting to create east-west transit connections to complete the network.
If you have to get across the top of the city, and a great many people do, your transit choices are extremely limited, and made worse by the fact that with each widening of Highway 401 to accommodate the resulting traffic, the congestion becomes that much worse. The problem, then, is how to break this vicious circle, with its destructive feedback loop? Ford’s highway burger, needless to say, won’t solve that problem, but it will bankrupt the province.
Let me propose a solution hiding in plain view. Instead of spending hundreds of billions on a literal traffic sewer, why not resource GO to invest as heavily as possible in its bus network, massively building out its fleet and service levels and then — here’s where the province comes in — creating bus-only lanes on the 401.
Why hiding in plain view? The TTC, for its many flaws, is uniquely skilled at leveraging its bus service to bring transit riders to subway stops. The commission has long been known in transit circles for the close integration of the two modes, which has gone a considerable distance towards attracting and sustaining ridership in low-density post-war suburbs and compensating for decades of under-investment in rapid transit lines within the City of Toronto.
Want to see busy east-west transit corridors in Toronto? Check out the long-haul trunk routes on Eglinton, Lawrence, Finch and Steeles, which are among the TTC’s work horses.
Institutionally, GO is a kind of inverse — heavy and continued capital investment in its rapid transit service, with only the most modest amount of attention paid to its bus operations, which encompass about 750 vehicles and carry something like 18 million riders per year (by way of comparison, the TTC has 2,100 buses that carry over 200 million passengers annually).
The GO bus division’s share of Metrolinx’s total capital budget is a rounding error, and the agency’s effort to transition to e-buses is barely out of the feasibility study phase.
However, demand for GO bus service is growing. Metrolinx reports that the current ridership is now 1.3 million over 2019 boardings and 3.1 million over 2023 boardings, according to an agency spokesperson. Some of those riders rely on the east-west corridors, including those that run along Highway 407 or traverse portions of the 401, mainly west of Yonge Street. Earlier this spring, the Ontario Ministry of Transport announced it will be adding more bus service, new routes and additional stops, although the destinations — an outlet mall, Canada’s Wonderland — suggest this fix isn’t about improving rush hour service.
Here’s my question: besides actually burying hundreds of billions of dollars under the 401, what else could the Ontario government invest in to really take a run at the congestion on the 400-series highways? The low-hanging fruit, which I’ve written about elsewhere, is zero-rating trucks on the 407 so freight haulers, especially those bypassing the city, use that route for free instead of taking the 18-lane hell across the top.
I’d argue that the next step would be for the province to go way beyond the incremental expansion of the GO bus network and focus on creating absolutely irresistible east-west bus service along the 401 and 407 corridors, which involves adding way more buses so there’s essentially no waiting; offering potential riders substantial loss-leader offers to switch; and then carving out dedicated lanes on those highways. By which I mean actually dedicated, as opposed to the phony HOV lanes on the QEW, where two passengers count as high occupancy.
To the field-of-dreams critics, I’d note that Metrolinx/Queen’s Park is spending vast sums on hail Mary rapid transit projects — not the expansion of the GO Train corridors, which are totally justified, but rather the newer LRTs and the subways out into the remote suburbs. Indeed, creating BRT-grade GO bus service (not just the rights-of-way, as on Highway 7 or in Mississauga) would be far less pricey than any of those schemes, much less the Big Doug, and the only distasteful political sacrifice involves hiving off bus-only lanes on the highways.
It’s worth noting that the city’s own bus rapid transit debate — with dedicated lanes proposed for Dufferin and Bathurst in the face of mewling by a handful of retailers who believe they own the street parking spaces — will only pay off if the TTC significantly up its service levels. Then, and only then, will those routes function essentially as surface rapid transit, linking east-west corridors (the Bloor subway/the Crosstown LRT) into a proper network.
We’ve never really tried this approach to congestion-busting anywhere in Greater Toronto. But what we do know is that properly resourced BRT (i.e., both dedicated lanes and lots of buses) works really well in lots of other congested cities. Why? Because those cities’ transit operators have taken the critical time/convenience variable off the table. We haven’t.
Setting aside all of the debates about transit planning, the most important point here is the superlative-defying opportunity cost associated with the Big Doug, which is ball-parked to cost $120 billion, but will surely end up sucking up twice that amount.
Context? The entire Metrolinx capital budget for the next five years is $45.5 billion — a third or a fifth of the projected tunnel spend. GO Transit’s annual operating shortfall is in the vicinity of $1 billion a year. Think about those numbers relative to the ballparked tunnel estimates. Queen’s Park could — could — say to itself, “we’re going to build a BRT network across the top of the city that will be so convenient and so comfortable that a non-trivial share of the driving public will switch,” and they’d still barely graze the amount required to build Ford’s asphalt sandwich.
Two decades of adding lanes to the 401 has only made it more congested, a perverse but entirely predictable outcome. Perhaps it’s time to try the bus instead.
