Riders lament bus-stop sacrifice
Plan to speed Eglinton trips comes at a cost for some commuters
For Scarborough bus riders, it feels like a case of the TTC giveth, and the TTC taketh away.
Transit advocates have been supportive of the transit agency’s plans to install bus lanes on the Eglinton Avenue East corridor this fall, which the TTC says will make service on some of its busiest routes more reliable and help cut crowding during the pandemic.
Those on-street bus lanes are being built in partnership with the city’s transportation department on an 8.5-kilometre stretch of Eglinton, Kingston Road, and Morningside Avenue between Brimley Road and U of T Scarborough, and are a first for Toronto. Before COVID-19, dor carried 56,000 people every weekday.
But some riders are not enthusiastic about one aspect of he RapidTO bus-lane plan — the TTC’s decision to remove 21 of 69 bus stops along the corridor. Six other stops are under review.
The agency says “consolidating” stops along the route is necessary to let buses travel efficiently in the new dedicated lanes. But it means that some riders will have to walk hundreds of metres more than they previously did to get on board.
For example, two of the stops the TTC has removed were directly outside a pair of apartment buildings at Dale Avenue and Kingston Road. The closest stop for residents there is now about 250 metres to the west, at Guildwood Parkway. Under the new spacing, there is a gap of about 950 metres between stops at Guildwood and Celeste Drive.
Advocacy group TTCriders says the stop removals violate the TTC’s service guidelines, which indicate stops on local bus route routes should be no more than 400 metres apart.
“People who use mobility devices or who rely on the TTC to
groceries will be especially impacted,” the group said in a letter to the transit agency this month.
Beulah Esuk, 31, doesn’t own a car and relies on the bus network to travel around the city, including to her job as a respite shelter worker, which she’s continued to do during the pandemic. She lives near Eglinton and Markham Road, and nearby stops at Beachell Street and Cedar Drive are among those under review. If they’re removed and passengers have to walk farther, it will mean “more ing to late to your appointments or arriving late at home,” said Esuk, who works with TTCriders.
She said she supports the buslane plan but “we’re not willing to sacrifice the local stops.”
Mike McKenzie, a community advocate in Scarborough Village, said for many people in his neighbourhood the TTC is the primary way to travel, and making stops more remote will make daily life harder.
“The TTC plays a crucial role to go to school, to go to jobs, to go for training, to go to the doctor, whatever. So it’s not just a bus stop,” he said. TTC spokesperson Stuart Green acknowledged that “the stop spacing exceeds the service standards in some cases” but said the agency considered additional factors like passenger convenience, operating efficiency, safety and community impact.
He said some stops that were removed were at midblock locations not close to signalized intersections, and others were near rail corridors and had few destinations in the surrounding area.
“We continue to work with the community and local councillors to fine tune the list,” he said.
The signs allowing the city to enforce the bus-only lanes have already been installed on the
ntire corridor, but red pavement markings alerting drivers to the new rules have only been completed in the Morningside section. The TTC and city expect to finish the bus-lane installation next month.
Bus lanes are planned for four other busy corridors over the next five years, with Jane St. between Eglinton and Steeles Avenue scheduled for next year.