60 SECONDS FROM CRASHING
FROM APRIL/MAY 2022 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX
The Dufferin 29 bus is a true workhorse: one of the city’s top five busiest surface routes, hauling 32,000 people per day along the long, strange arterial that is as hostile to pedestrians and cyclists as any other in the city. According to the TTC’s metrics, the route is one minute away – measuring head time, or the time between buses – from being unsustainable. With thousands of new condo units – and future bus riders – on their way to the area, John Lorinc asks: What’s the plan?
A few months before the World Health Organization declared the global pandemic in March 2020, a Toronto developer began marketing the first phase of a condominium project that will dramatically transform a sleepy and somewhat neglected corner of the West End.
ELAD Canada’s Galleria Mall project at Dufferin and Dupont, which broke ground early in the lockdown, is a massive two-phase undertaking with 2,850 new condo units, almost half of which will have two or three bedrooms. ELAD, which built the 35-acre, nine-tower Emerald City complex near York Mills and the Don Valley Parkway, agreed to add a new diagonal road that will cut through the Galleria site, shift around park space and triple the amount of retail floor space.
According to city documents, the whole development, which will take five years to complete, will feature almost 2,100 parking spaces, adding a significant number of cars, and therefore traffic, to the area. (City Council earlier this year voted to end the practice of requiring developers to provide a minimum number of spaces.)
The new Galleria will, in short, become a dense, busy place, which is a good news story. Density is better than sprawl. And despite all those parking spaces, the project’s proximity to the Bloor-Danforth subway line, and thus the rest of the downtown, also holds out hope that a good portion of the people who move into this highrise neighbourhood will be – or will become – transit users.
Here’s the wrinkle, however: The distance between the Galleria and the Dufferin subway station is a kilometre, considered more than the maximum distance most people will walk to get to a transit station. For those who do, the most direct route is along Dufferin, which isn’t exactly a pleasant walking or cycling experience. In short, it’s likely that the new Galleria residents who take transit will opt for the Dufferin 29 bus, and may quickly learn why it’s long had the nickname the Sufferin’ Dufferin, infamous for its overcrowding and bunching, the annoying phenomenon of buses that end up clumped together.
The line, which extends from Highway 401 down to the CNE, is one of the TTC’s workhorses: It regularly ranks in the top five busiest surface routes (including streetcars). Before the pandemic, the 29 recorded about 43,200 boardings on a typical weekday, up nine per cent since 2011. As of March 2022, the daily boardings exceed 32,000, and TTC officials say the 29, which now carries about three-quarters of its pre-COVID-19 volume, has seen its ridership grow faster than any other bus or streetcar route in Toronto. “It’s the city’s top corridor in terms of recovery,” says Mark Mis, a senior TTC service planner.
There’s no single answer, obviously, as to why this particular corridor is so intensively used. Clearly, the transfer to the Bloor-Danforth subway has long been a big draw, as will be the interchange with the Eglinton Crosstown a few years hence. But there are many other traffic generators along the way, from Yorkdale to the Dufferin Mall to Liberty Village. TTC surveys, moreover, show that more than four in 10 riders travel past the Dufferin subway station.
What’s increasingly clear, however, is that the Dufferin bus could become much busier in the years to come, due not only to the Galleria redevelopment, but dozens of other large and small redevelopment projects that are in the approvals pipeline right now. Among them are a huge cluster coming to the former TDSB (Kent P.S.) lands at Dufferin and Bloor, as well as the long-anticipated redevelopment of the Dufferin Mall, owned by Primaris REIT, only two blocks south.
According to 2018 city data, the 2011 population of the Dufferin corridor, a swath of Toronto that includes neighbourhoods both east and west of the arterial, was about 150,000, with 68,000 jobs. By the early 2030s, only a decade hence, the population will be nudging toward 240,000 people, and more than 90,000 jobs. (Those figures may well be higher today.)
In recent years, in response to persistent rider complaints driven, in part, by the steady increase in housing and employment along Dufferin, the TTC has added articulated buses and express service, and eliminated a short-turn rush-hour loop. TTC officials say the service on the route is currently running at 96 per cent of pre-pandemic levels, with four-minute head times (i.e., the average span between buses). The question is, how much more can this workhorse haul before the city needs to come up with a Plan C?
In some ways, Dufferin reads like a kind of core sample of Toronto’s history. The variety of urban forms along the entire length of the 29’s route runs the gamut from 19th-century brick factories to 1980s vintage public housing, sleek east Parkdale mid-rises, rundown working-class row houses with street parking, light-industrial buildings, car dealerships and post-war suburban strip malls. Up toward Lawrence sits a mansion-like funeral home called Bernardo’s, across from the oddly named supermarket Lady York, which carries some of the city’s best Italian fare. Dufferin is a six-lane road north of Eglinton and a four-lane road to the south. There’s a dog-leg jog, a deep ravine and a gordian knot of ramps around Yorkdale.
While no one who’s watching packed buses go by is interested in excuses or explanations, there’s no question that running regular service along a route that diverse is challenging. The stretch north of Lawrence gets gummed up by Yorkdale and the 401. The Crosstown construction has created a decade-long bottleneck at Eglinton, which is exacerbated by the three-lanes-to-two-lanes transition. As with all surface transit operating in mixed traffic, however, the X factors are the real killers: not just accidents, but boarding delays, weather, missed lights and so on.
Transit activist Steve Munro says there’s no one stretch that sticks out as a major source of delays, beyond these obvious ones. “My gut feeling is that travel times are affected by time lost to serve riders, and this is compounded by crowded and poorly spaced service.”
He adds that the TTC’s service data about average head times can be misleading. “If there are two buses, one with 50 riders and one with only 10, that’s 30 per bus on average, but most of the riders are on the crowded bus,” he explains. “So the perceived crowding is much worse than the average loads that TTC planning cites when talking about service standards. That’s why regular service, and hence fairly regular loads, is so important.”
These problems aren’t unique to Dufferin; indeed, the city is in the throes of one of its extensive transit-planning exercises – dubbed RapidTO – in a search for solutions. Early in the pandemic, a number of major cities, led by Paris, undertook major changes to their road networks, significantly expanding the space available for pedestrians, cyclists and transit vehicles operating in their own rights-of-way, the holy grail for transit planners.
Before the pandemic, the city and the TTC succeeded in transforming an extended stretch of King Street into a streetcar-priority corridor, which did marvels for service on a notoriously ponderous line. (A 2019 city evaluation of the King Street pilot project found increased ridership, more predictable service and higher customer satisfaction.) After the pandemic began, the city established red lanes (i.e., bus-only lanes) on a few suburban arterials – Eglinton East and Finch – and is actively looking at other busy corridors for what staff reports politely describe as “enhanced priority.” The city has identified 20 such arterials, with Dufferin ranking fifth in terms of urgency. A November 2020 staff report predicts that the design for establishing bus priority service on Dufferin will land next year, with the project completed in 2024. Matthew Davis, manager of capital projects for the city’s transportation division, expects the plan will go to council in June. “It looks like Dufferin will be studied fairly early on in the process,” he says. But, he adds, the exercise may require the city to conduct an environmental assessment, which will slow things down.
It’s highly unlikely that Dufferin will get a red lane, as Davis makes clear. “RapidTO is not just bus lanes, but all kinds of options.” There is a veritable shopping list of them – stops situated before and after traffic signals, bus bays, queue-jump lanes, which allow buses to nose back into traffic more easily, and a buffet of signal priority alternatives, all of which are meant to ensure that buses get a head start.
Trevor Green, a senior planner working in the south district, points out that in the case of the Galleria Mall site, the city pushed ELAD to create a wider public realm along Dufferin, which includes a double-sized lay-by (an area at the side of the road where the buses can pull in for stops) that’s long enough for two articulated buses, as well as signal priority. The idea is to provide more space for the buses to load, as well as more space for people to wait – unlike the perpetually jammed sidewalks outside the Dufferin subway stops.
“Every [development] application that we’re reviewing, [we’re] always asking for a comprehensive [transportation demand management] plan,” says Green, using the planning jargon for the provision of urban design features, like bike lanes, that reduce car use. “We’re always asking for any suggestions for improvements in local transit.” And as more developers take advantage of the city’s new policy on lowering parking space requirements for large developers, those improvements will become increasingly important to residents who have chosen not to own a vehicle.
But Munro argues that the RapidTO project, with its promise of all sorts of new features, can serve as a distraction from what he argues is the core issue with the Dufferin 29, which is an inadequate number of buses, not just on Dufferin but on many other heavily used routes. “We could run a few hundred more buses at peak today with no new capital cost, but it would blow the [TTC’s] operating budget and city subsidy,” he states. “Nobody wants to hear that. They prefer to believe that we can get something for almost nothing with some red paint.”
What will the Dufferin corridor be like two or three decades from now, as the world gets closer to those point-of-no-return climate change milestones? At present, there’s nothing quite like it in the city, with the possible exception of Yonge Street north of Bloor, where major intersections – and subway stops – are marked by clusters of very tall buildings. On Dufferin, those high-density nodes are already taking root at King and Queen, and this kind of built form will be replicated, at varying scales, north, at Bloor, at Dupont, at Eglinton, and so on. Farther north, the car dealerships and plazas will give way to more mixed-use buildings. Even Yorkdale is in the process of intensifying, with highrise condos planned for the parking lots that encircle the mall.
Dufferin, in short, won’t look at all like it does today. Still, it’s not so clear how future Torontonians will move up and down this long, strange street, an arterial as hostile to pedestrians and cyclists as any suburban arterial. “We have to think about mobility in a completely different way in the next 20 or 30 years,” says Parkdale-High Park Councillor Gord Perks, whose ward includes the southernmost stretch of Dufferin. “We can’t [electric vehicle] our way to a sustainable transportation system.”
Most would agree that transit has to be part of the picture, but what kind of transit? Circa 2040, will articulated city buses running the gauntlet of traffic still serve as the primary means of moving tens of thousands of people north and south along Dufferin? Set against an expanding forest of highrises marching all the way up to the 401 and beyond, the image doesn’t really compute. Perhaps all those tweaks – priority signals and lay-bys and smoother east-west transfers, etc. – will allow the 29 to survive to mid-century, but no one can really say for sure. As Munro, ever trenchant, observes, “It’s sort of like boiling the frog.”
However, Mark Mis, the TTC’s service expert, has a particular number on his planning horizon, a kind of saturation point that serves as one of the agency’s key performance indicators. The maximum capacity for bus service, he says, is a three-minute head time, meaning the average interval between vehicles. The Dufferin 29 right now operates at four minutes, which is a level that satisfies the TTC’s financial models but still generates a lot of crowding and kvetching. “Bus service loses its ability to be effective at three minutes,” he says. Less than three minutes and the operating costs – drivers’ salaries, fuel, maintenance, etc. – become unsustainable. “We have until three minutes before we have to look to other technologies to improve the service.”