It seems like most north-south routes through the core of the city are under construction (Bayview, Mount Pleasant, Yonge and Avenue). And a select few east-west streets are also under construction, namely the Gardiner Expressway and Bloor Street, Toronto’s main lateral arterials.

Construction is only adding to an existing gridlock problem. Last week the National Post reported that Toronto was rated the 2nd worst city in the world for traffic congestion by IBM. Johannesburg took the #1 spot for worst traffic. Residents perceive that traffic is getting worse (9% of commuters felt the quality of their commute had declined) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OCED) estimated that Toronto lost $3.3 billion last year in productivity due to the congested roads.

Toronto’s gridlock is getting worse, between the increase in population and the increase in construction it is excruciating to travel through the city by car. And currently there is no public transit solution worth considering (would you rather be stuck on a crowded bus or in your own car?)

Someone said to me the other day,

Is all the construction a conspiracy by David Miller to convince Dalton McGuinty and Queens Park that we need Transit City Now?

The solution is not just a mass transit upgrade for Toronto. Part of the solution also includes a cultural shift (i.e getting people out of their individual cars and back on to buses, getting people to move back into the city and out of the suburbs). It should also include more bike lanes, but bike lanes with a buffer from traffic; Toronto’s driving culture still isn’t capable of sharing lanes.

Regardless of the outcome, Toronto is stuck with massive delays, congestion and, thus, pollution from the added construction to the gridlock. And while I understand that there is a huge infrastructure gap and the roads NEED to be fixed a better construction mitigation plan should have been sought out.

As much as we try in North America, it is almost impossible to give up driving. Not because we aren’t trying but because we lack the infrastructure to get anywhere without a car.

Tips for efficiency

Thanks to Sierra Magazine’s The Green Life: Daily Tips for Living Well and Doing Good for providing these simple tips.

I think the most important tip of all is to drive a fuel efficient car. With the ‘cash for clunkers’ program in the US individuals can trade in their old, gas-guzzling, monsters for smaller more efficient cars; unfortunately at this time Canada does not have a similar program, but Chrysler Canada is offering an incentive.

The reality is everyone does have to drive at times. By reducing the amount we drive and following these simple tips we can all help to reduce the footprints of our cars.

…when you close a road you create mass congestion on the parallel routes.

On Friday I had one of those frustrating drives home at 2pm. Usually there is a little congestion at this time of the day on a Friday but last week it was unbearable. With Lakeshore Blvd closed, between British Columbia Drive and Strachan, people were forced on to the Gardiner Expressway, King Street, Queen Street and any other parallel route they could find. At the root of the congestion, street parking on these parallel routes.

Temporary parking limitations

In the future Toronto should consider eliminating the street parking on for the two week days leading up to the Indy event. For any major event that closes a major thoroughfare the city should consider limiting street parking on weekdays on these major routes. Given that these street parking closures are temporary businesses should be willing to cooperate; especially considering that there are usually additional revenues from the influx of people drawn to the event.

Events are a huge part of Toronto but more planning is always needed. With congestion due to out limited public transportation system and mass numbers of people commuting it is imperative to keep our roads from reaching those critical volumes.

That is the slogan for the 2009 Pollution Probe Clean Air Commute Week; contribute nothing to pollution. It is an attempt to get individuals to re-think how they travel to work everyday. Instead of driving, carpool, drive a hybrid, bike, walk, take transit or telecommute.

I started my week off by riding my bike to work. Tomorrow I think will be a transit day. And then hopefully alternate bike-transit until the end of the week (I play ultimate Frisbee on Tuesday and Thursday and it’s never safe to bike to the fields).

Smog is all around us

Why is Pollution Probe asking us all to change our commuting habits? Because of the increased levels of smog. Smog originally known as a mix of smoke and fog, it is now more commonly known as a noxious mixture of air pollutants, including vapours, gases and particles that can often be seen as a yellowish-brown haze in the air.

Some quick facts about Pollution Probes Clean Air Commute Week:

• Began in 1993
• Registered over 650 GTA workplaces
• Saved over 4,000 tonnes of air pollutants from going into the air (NOx, SOx, VOCs, CO, CO2) (since 2000 when reporting of pollutants was introduced to the event)
• Over 80,000 diary cards returned by participating employees.
• On average, between 70-80% of the individuals who switched from driving alone to a cleaner mode of transportation during the event said they intend to continue on a permanent basis (based on surveying done since reporting began in 2001). Over the past 16 years, the event has succeeded in switching thousands of people to public transit, carpooling, biking, walking and telecommuting.

With an estimated 500,000 cars travelling on the 401 everyday programs like this are needed to remind us that every little bit makes a difference

Transit City: Planning for Light Rail in Toronto
By now many of us have seen the Transit City proposed map and typical street cross-section (I’ve included links here to both). None of the proposed routes are expected to be subway routes, they should all be LRT (light rail transit); there is a huge cost savings by using LRT’s over subways. From the presentation it seemed as though many of the routes were currently being put through the EA process.
What can commuters expect? Vehicles that will be up to 90m long, 3 to 6 minutes between vehicles during peak hours, likely no rate hike in the central zone (potentially a zone system like many European cities), and a loss of parallel local public transportation on these routes (i.e. no TTC buses making frequent stops).
What’s still missing? The key to the future is multi-modal transit, being able to park your car somewhere so it is convenient to use these routes. From what was said it seems as this will be the TTC’s biggest weakness. It is an absolute must to have parking lots at major stations.

Best Practices for the Delivery of Long-Term Projects in Small to Medium Sized Communities
This presentation was aimed at the suburbs of Toronto. The presenter challenged the city engineers present to think outside the box, to use accepted innovative techniques and to plan from the best perspective of the community; was the community stable and slow-growing or was it a high growth area subject to peaks. She commented on how necessary it was to use good data and to verify data often.
There are limitations with planning right now, namely: staff resources, data sharing and cooperation, appropriate tools and data, funding, political and community support and an overall transportation planning strategy with regular data collection. From Toronto to Mississauga to Pickering to Vaughn, ask anyone of those city planners and I’m sure the plans between them all vary greatly.

Twin City Cycling: Burlington’s Lessons Learned from Apeldoorn, NL
Creating a cycling network in the community should be a part of all city and regional transportation plans; to date it is usually an after thought. It is well known that cycling in Europe, more importantly in the Netherlands, is a part of the culture. Cyclists in the Netherlands don’t have to contend with road traffic and have designated one-way cycle tracks (better than a bike lane it has a buffer from the vehicular traffic).
When engineers plan a bike lane they think about planning, designing and construction. While the users think about directness, safety, comfort and attractiveness. To design bike lanes in Ontario we need to use engineering but to design for the user.
Canada vs. The Netherlands: Did you know that in the Netherlands if a motorist hits a cyclist or a pedestrian than the motorist is at fault? Instead of thinking injury prevention like we do in Canada, the Netherlands is thinking collision prevention. By making the motorist responsible there has been an overall increase in the level of duty of care.

Driving the Debate: The Challenges and Opportunities Facing Canada’s Transportation Network
Canada has over 900,000km of road network! And up to 38% of that might be substandard, a total of 22% of our bridges are likely substandard (according to a 1998 report by the council of Ministers – 1998!?! How much of that is substandard now!) More importantly the people driving those roads think they are unsafe, crowded and that there are too many trucks on the road.
How do we solve this? According to CAA Governments need to view roads as investments not as expenses, we need to work within the available funding commitments, commit to “shovel ready” projects, invest in all forms of transportation an forge strong working relationships amongst the provinces

The other day the Toronto Star published their version of the Toronto Neighbourhoods.

Really all it is telling us is how to further divide ourselves culturally – I actually grew up in the York Mills area, which is near the Graydon Hall Area and Bayview Village Area.

What I would be interested in knowing is how each of the neighbourhoods compares in terms of sustainable development
• How many of them use public transportation? Active transporation?
• How accessible is the public transportation? (A bus that runs every 30 minutes in an area does not seem to be very accessible. But if you live steps from the subway line it’s a different story)
• Can the residents easily walk to grocery stores? Restaurants? Retail?
• How Many of the residents use a compost? Use their green bin? Their blue bin?

Not that I want to provide incentive for neighbourhoods to compete, but I would like to know how we can improve the sustainability of our city.

Here’s what happened: The bus driver pulled into the right hand lane approaching the Eglinton intersection. I went through the intersection behind other vehicles in the left-hand thru-lane to continue going north on Royal York. Just north of the intersection is a bus stop where the bus was proceeding to. No one wanted to get on or off the bus so the bus never slowed down or stopped. Instead of merging when it was safe the bus pulled over into the left lane without checking to see if there were any vehicles. But there were, I was there and have to slam on my brakes and veer into the right lane. Who needs caffeine when you have drivers like that!

Ontario Highway Traffic Act 142.1

I decided I would look up the law governing buses merging back into traffic, HTA 142.1. The requirement on yielding applies to buses merging back from the bus bay. The law states:

Every driver of a vehicle in the lane of traffic adjacent to a bus bay shall yield the right of way to the driver of a bus who has indicated his or her intention, as prescribed, to re-enter that lane from the bus bay.

But the law also states when the bus must wait:

No driver of a bus shall re-enter the lane of traffic adjacent to a bus bay and move into the path of a vehicle or street car if the vehicle or street car is so close that it is impractical for the driver to yield the right of way.

Buses are governed by the same driving laws as the rest of us.

My issue this morning was that the bus merged into my lane without checking to see if it was safe to merge. The bus is governed by the same laws as the rest of us, it must only merge when it is safe. I was lucky in that no one was coming in the south direction and narrowly avoided being hit by the bus.

I’m sure I’m not the first person to have a close call with a bus. I suppose it is about driver education, both vehicle and bus, and possibly about changing the Highway Traffic Act.

No, once you click on the article you’ll see that it is actually titled GO Transit Service Is Expanding: A Summary of Improvements Since 2003. How disappointing.

Does this mean that we should not expect too much in the future from GO Transit?

Don’t get me wrong, I think GO Transit is doing well considering we live in a somewhat anti-transit environment. I do fear that this article sets the stage for McGuinty to say with the next budget that there is no money for any GO expansion in 2009.

The budget is to come down on March 26th, I guess until then we’ll just have to wait and see what the future is for GO Transit.

As reported by Steve Munro here is what we can expect:

• Peak bus loading standards are reduced by about 10% (a route will be considered to be “full” with a lower average load).  This triggers service improvements on many routes, but loading generally has been rising and there is already a backlog of changes waiting to begin.  This affects 62 routes with a total of 89 more am and 65 pm peak buses.
• Off peak bus standards, as well as streetcar and rapid transit standards for all periods, are unchanged at, effectively, a seated load.  Note that this is an average over an hour and local variations will occur.
• Routes with services less frequent than 30 minutes will be improved to the new 30-minute maximum headway.  This affects 26 routes.
• All routes will operate seven days a week during all periods until at least 1:00 am.  This affects about 86 routes.

Routes Affected:

The full list of routes affected can be found here. As you can see it’s a lot of routes!

I’ll test out this new plan tonight. One of my usual routes is the 501 Queen, notorious for not running on schedule and breaking down. I’ll keep you posted on my experience tonight.

Here are some of my suggestions:

1. Paying with Plastic: We live in a plastic society. Rarely do I carry any cash on me. Like so many others I rely on my debit and credit cards. I find it increasingly annoying that I cannot buy tokens from the machines with a card.
2. By-Pass lines: Have you ever taken the bus or streetcar to a subway stop and been stuck in line while people are purchasing tickets, tokens, passes, etc? I find it very inefficient and extremely annoying that I have to stand in line once again. Aren’t those token machines there for a reason? And can’t I walk around the individual counting change and just show my transfer? (I’ll try it in the coming weeks and let you know my experience)
3. Stop-off Passes: The rules with your TTC fare – one ride, no stopping. Unless you have a metro-pass (which I do not) you cannot stop to grab a coffee, a bite to eat, your dry cleaning, etc. What about paying an extra $0.50 to have the right to make multiple trips within a certain time frame?
4. Student Pass: Ryerson, U of T, and York could all do with cheaper passes. Want to get students out of their cars and on to transit than make the metro pass really inexpensive for them (somewhere in the range of $25 to $50). When I was at Western we received Bus Passes when we picked up our registration packages. If you returned your bus pass for credit you only got $100 back, meaning the school gets bus passes really cheap.

As my frustration grows with the TTC my car becomes more and more attractive. I am trying to minimize my carbon footprint but my sanity is quite important to me to