Facts About the RapidTO Plan for BATHURST Street
The City of Toronto is planning big changes to Bathurst Street — but they come at a real cost to residents. The City is moving to eliminate all curbside parking 24/7, turning a lived-in, residential street into a nonstop transit corridor. Homeowners, drivers, and even pedestrians are being rushed towards these changes.
We are missing and have been given misleading information, we are asking the TTC for the info!
THE TIMELINE
We were given May 10, 12, 14th to talk about this plan with the city, and had to complete an online survey by May 26th. The TTC project team delivered flyers to only %16 of affected residents.
Other corridors were projected to have 2-3 years from design - implementation, with sizeable ad campaigns. We got less than a month and a few flyers.
THE FAKE FACTS THE TTC KEEPS PUSHING
Here are the counter arguments (direct excerpts) for the facts the TTC keeps repeating over and over:
That 34% improvement on Bathurst is commonly cited, but it only actually applies to northbound trips between Bloor and St. Clair from about 2pm to 6pm.
Both routes suffer from appallingly irregular “dispatching”, if we can call it that, of vehicles from their northern and southern terminals. Before service even reaches the proposed transit priority areas, the headways are erratic with gaps and bunching. This worsens as buses travel along routes. This happens all of the time, every day of the week. This is not a case of chronically late buses leaving at random times, and tracking data show that much of the service enjoys a reasonable terminal layover time.
A related problem for riders is that the scheduled service on 7 Bathurst is not frequent, compared to other routes in the city with reserved lanes. This compounds with irregular headways to produce unreliable service.
The savings per vehicle hour range from about $59 to $86 with an average of $67. This is not a fully allocated cost, and one must ask why it varies from route to route when the primary variable in marginal costs is the driver’s labour.
The estimated revenue works out to $2.43 per rider, a blended value across all fare types. This assumes a ridership increase of 7-8% over 2023 levels, a very hefty bump compared to what we see on the system as a whole, and considering that the RapidTO benefits will not affect all time periods, locations and riders.
TTC Service Standards give considerable leeway to what is reported as “on time performance” and allow management to report better results than a typical rider would find credible. I have covered this topic in other posts and will not belabour the problems here. The “Standards” badly need revision, and along with them, the quality of service management.
Some commentary about the RapidTO changes focuses on the idea that people do not have an absolute right to park on the public street. That statement is true as far as it goes, but it has an underlying tone that all parking is “bad” and must be expunged. That is easier said than done in some areas.
The southern parts of Bathurst and Dufferin Streets date from the 1880s when driveways were rare and even a rear lane access might not be available. Residents and businesses have been using the curb lane for various reasons for well over a century.
The idea that daily ridership on the corridors will rise by almost 13,000 on a base of 60,000 is simply not credible, and I challenge the TTC to substantiate their estimate with a detailed breakdown of when, where and why these new riders will appear.
Their entire analysis is, to use parliamentary language, misleading. This has broader implications for other transit priority schemes. If the TTC cannot be trusted to produce reliable plans and financial analyses, future proposals will suffer.
One can easily argue that “thousands” of bus riders should take precedence over a few hundred parking spaces, but this assumes that those thousands actually exist. The Bathurst bus operates every 10 minutes during most periods, and with articulated buses this translates to a capacity of 450 passengers/hour, assuming a full load of 75/bus. This is not “thousands”, even allowing for some “churn” as the passengers leave and board enroute. The 20k daily ridership includes many who do not travel in the times and locations where the red lanes will have their benefit.
Bathurst rose to prominence thanks to the anticipated need for transit priority during the six FIFA World Cup games in 2026 - over other more equitable corridors, and making what could be a temp solution, permanent.
Excerpts from Bathurst-Dufferin Revisited & A Contrarians View of RapidTO by Steve Munro.
Here's A BIGGIE
Steve did mention that there is an issue with highlighting the “business successes” of other projects similar in scope, so we looked into it:
The King St. project saw businesses lose 41% in revenue when comparing VYA.
The city actually had to PAY FOR PARKING to encourage people to return to the area.
The St. Clair project shuttered 100 businesses. They lost a total of $100M combined and sued the city.
Eglinton businesses saw similar results in revenue loss - 30% or more is estimated.
These are real people and their livelihoods. And the city is very flippant about this.
Here's why it matters.
Permanent parking removal is unnecessary.
Rush hour isn't all day. Today, parking is already restricted during peak times — and actually, the implementation of a dedicated bus lane would make traffic untenable in some parts. There’s no justification for dedicating the curb lanes to buses all the time if the data doesn’t support an impact on bus travel time.Bathurst is very residential, not just a transit corridor.
From Bloor to Eglinton, Bathurst runs through dense urban neighborhoods where most homes have no driveways. Single family homes and older duplexes line the street — often just steps from the curb. This isn’t a suburban arterial road. Bathurst is home to thousands of Torontonians who rely on curbside access for daily life. How are we expected to move, or manage repairs without curb access for moving vans, disposal bins, or trades? What about loading kids into a car? Helping an aging parent to a medical appointment? Accepting large deliveries? These aren’t luxuries. They’re everyday needs — and the City has offered no plan to support them.Speaking of our parents…
The Annex and Casa Loma are home to a higher percentage of people over 65, the Annex in fact has the highest number of people over 85 in the city. Yet the TTC keeps saying these changes will work for our neighborhood, and the bullies call us anti progress, because we are kind.The shifting cost.
Losing curbside parking means families will need to secure street parking permits — if they can even find spots nearby. Residents planning essential repairs may face rising costs and complications if tradespeople can't access the curb with their tools and materials. That adds time, money, and stress to projects that are already expensive. Affordable transit matters. But this plan just shifts the burden onto residents — and calls it progress.There is no plan to increase safety measures.
Study after study suggests that when traffic is pushed into interior neighborhoods, the risks to vulnerable people (children in particular) increases. The combination of high density play + new drivers in a neighborhood they don’t know = high mortality rate for youth 5-29. The city hasn’t made any plans for increased signage or lights to keep our kids safe.