Round Round Get Around: Introducing Your Fancy New Bus Lane

Bet all you commuters to York University are feeling pretty smug these days. You, with your fancy new bus lane, bet you’re feeling on top of the world; or at least as on top of the world as you can be until your subway finally comes rolling in to pick you up from in front of York Lanes (estimated opening date: sometime in 2015). Good thing the fancy new bus lane is here to tide us all over – or at the very least, act as the official headquarters of Toronto’s drag racing community – because we were sure starting to get impatient with that tired old 196 dragging our dejected asses into campus every day via some of the worst roads in the city.

And occasionally it works. Sometimes the bus lane pulls through in a clutch and shaves off a little bit of time. But in the end, while the new bus lane sure is fancy, it remains as unpredictable and volatile as the old route – just with the heightened illusion that because there is no traffic on the bus lane that it’s going to cut down on the commute by vast leagues, slicing away at those minutes like they were blades of grass at the mercy of the TTC’s fancy cement lawnmower. That said, the University is still the same distance away from Downsview regardless, and while you can control the traffic, or lack thereof, on the fancy new bus lane, you can’t control the traffic on the sections of the route not on the fancy new bus lane. That Northern stretch of Dufferin is just as chaotic as it ever was, so if you hit the York Rocket at the wrong time, you can be sure to be taking the exact same amount of time you would have before.

Ain’t that fresh asphalt so fancy though? I’m not going to lie, I’m more than slightly concerned that this concrete monstrosity is, when all of the construction dust settles, poised to cause commuters a lot more harm than good. Most of this worry comes from the nagging feeling that those powers that be, those who decide where the money goes are going to look at the TTC’s absolutely glowing statistics saying that the fancy new bus lane reduces trips by upwards of fifteen minutes on average and deem the subway extension void because, well, we already built them a fancy new bus lane.

I’m pretty sure that this is a more distinct possibility than even I would have you believe. The Yonge-University-Spadina Extension project has been controversial from the very beginning, with politicians and TTC brass musing publicly and at length about how they don’t know where the money is going to come from to run the thing once its built; not to mention all of the brouhaha surrounding the, admittedly, asinine plan of the Highway 407 Transitway and Vaughn Corporate Center stations, which are likely to go largely unused.

The demand for a subway is certainly there for a subway in the West-North York area, and in particular York University. It has retained for some time the dubious distinction of being one of the handful of pockets of the city to have an unusually large population density and yet not to be served by a subway, not to mention that it also has one of the larger population densities of likely transit riders. Furthermore, the 196 York University Rocket has remained one of the TTC’s most profitable (and because we are referring to public works, I use the term “profitable” loosely) routes for years, holding the extremely prestigious honor of being one of the few TTC operations to regularly make back a substantial amount of the money put into its running.

That said, ours being a largely bureaucratic culture, and also one where compared to, say, Europe, infrastructure and in particular mass transit technology is – as it so sadly turns out – mind-bogglingly pricey, demand is not always the key in deciding where the TTC should fix its almighty gaze. I am just speculating here, but given the gag-reflex-triggering price tag of the Spadina Subway Extension (for the whole thing, about $2.6 billion) I am going to go out a limb and say that extension to York University would have been entirely contingent upon breaking that old sound barrier, and by that I mean crossing Steeles Avenue into the ‘burbs where no one is likely to use their expensive new toy anyway.

And politicians know this, which is why the whole project has been problematic since day one. The money would be there to operate a subway to York, given that the 196 carries more people in a day than some of the lesser subway stations that already exist, however, getting the provincial and federal governments (these days, usually opposed to anything particularly Toronto-centric) on board would mean breaking Steeles, thus operating costs after construction skyrocket.

But I digress. The other downfall of the fancy new bus lane lies in the fact that the city doesn’t know just what they’re going to do with it when the subway happens. It seems like a no-brainer – add a lane on either side and use it as public concession road from Dufferin to Keele – but it’s being treated like a benign tumor that will have turned out to be the biggest waste of public dough this town’s seen since the Allen. I should point out that the money for construction is there (though let’s be honest here, the amount that it will inevitably go over budget will be atrocious) and construction has (sort of) started; my concern is not so much that Harper is going to pull the rug out from under York commuters because, well, they already have that fancy new bus lane, but that once it starts running, the bus lane will be used as an excuse to cut costs once they’ve realized that they’ve gone far, far overboard with this project.

TTC chair Adam Giambrone already threatened to shut down the Sheppard subway a couple of years ago when the TTC fell way, way under budget, so what’s to happen when the subway opens and they were all right when operation and maintenance of the Vaughn stations begins to weigh down the entire extension? We go back to the fancy new bus lane and those glorious fifteen minutes we’ve saved.