🔭 PLATFORM VIEW: Anthony Furey’s plan to reconsider RapidTO lanes.
🔗 LINK: furey.ca/2023/06/14/rapidto-fails-to-se…
🔧 DOABLE? Sure.
💰 COSTED? No.
✨ OVERALL: ⚫️ (Zero out of five)
So Anthony Furey had a “dedicated young campaign worker” go out and stand on a bridge over “Morningside Drive” and count the number of vehicles using the red RapidTO lines. The count was taken between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. on Tuesday, June 13, and was reported like this:
Total number of vehicles: 4,127 (an average of approximately 32 cars per minute)
Total number of transit buses: 26 (an average of approximately five minutes per bus passage)
Total number of bicycles (including a person in a scooter who in fact used the sidewalk): seven
This is, we’re told, evidence that Toronto’s RapidTO program is a failure. “The RapidTO program isn’t living up to expectations. It’s just worsening peoples’ commutes and making life more stressful for Scarborough residents,” Furey says.
There are so many things wrong with this. First, bikes can technically use the red bus lanes, but this is decidedly not bike infrastructure. That was not the intention behind the RapidTO program and the RapidTO lanes are not part of Toronto’s cycling network.
There’s no separation and sharing a lane with a bunch of buses is hardly a great time for any cyclist. These bike numbers are irrelevant. (The expectation that a person on a mobility scooter might use the bus lane is especially ridiculous.)
These lanes were put in place for transit riders. Duh.
But Furey’s numbers comparing cars and buses are of course disingenuous. Each of the articulated buses serving the RapidTO route has a capacity of about 77 riders. So those 26 buses his intrepid young campaign worker counted could carry up to 2,002 people.
And the number of buses is lower than it would have been just a few months ago, because the TTC and City Hall — motivated by the same kind of cost-cutting zeal Furey has championed — recently cut service on several routes, including the 116 Morningside bus route.
Before those cuts, the RapidTO lanes succeeded in boosting transit travel times and service reliability. They also saw faster ridership recovery after the pandemic than other TTC routes, according to a report comparing their September 2021 comparing data to a pre-pandemic baseline.
Instead of looking at removing the lanes, another approach for Toronto’s next mayor would be looking at ways to restore service so they can provide a faster and more reliable option for thousands of Scarborough transit riders who have been jerked around with broken transit promises for years.
Oh, and one more thing: it’s “Morningside Avenue,” not “Morningside Drive.”
PLATFORM VIEW is a daily(ish) feature by City Hall Watcher on Substack Notes. Got a request for a candidate policy proposal I should review? Let me know.