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Who is a street for? For people in cars, or for everyone?
That’s the question at the heart of the City of Toronto project to remake King Street. The three options for the bold pilot project, revealed at a packed public meeting this week, would each give priority to streetcars and pedestrians at the expense of private vehicles.
Each would save untold hours for the 65,000 people who crawl along on the King streetcar each weekday; each would shift some of the space along the street from its current arrangement, in which the 16 per cent of users in cars occupy 64 per cent of the space. Any of these schemes would make King Street safer. They make sense.
So get ready for an endless opera of complaint. Whether City Council can tough out the inevitable car-centric whining, and defend a more just and sensible approach to the streets, will be an important indicator for the future of the city.
In Toronto, it’s not traditional to think about road users as equals. The primacy of the car is still unquestioned in city politics. Just look at the recent decision, championed by Mayor John Tory, to spend nearly an extra $1-billion to rebuild the eastern Gardiner as an expressway, to save a few minutes a day for 3 per cent of downtown commuters. You could add a lot of transit service for that kind of money.
Inspired by trial street interventions by other cities, Toronto looks to take a short-cut in reaching a demonstration of what is possible with pilot configurations using a minimum of construction. This has several advantages. A trial avoids the lengthy, complex and finality of a formal proposal assessment, which can take years before anyone has a chance to learn whether a scheme actually works. A pilot can use temporary, movable installations such as planters, signs and road markings that can be quickly changed for fine tuning, to test alternate arrangements, or to undo the changes. Residents, businesses and politicians can buy into a trial hoping to see improvement, or at least to determine that side-effects are tolerable for the broader goals, without fearing they are locked into major expense and upheaval that might not work.
This is a refreshing change from endless studies producing little action, with the only downside being that some changes are simply beyond the limitations of a pilot. If a trial works well enough, then more lasting changes requiring construction can follow.
King is not a street like others in Toronto where transit priority has been attempted. Spadina, St. Clair and Queens Quay are all wider, and options for increasing road space on King are few. Traffic patterns and business needs differ on each street, and a layout that works in one place may not be appropriate for others. Equally, the benefits or horrors of these streets do not necessarily apply on King.
The city has three proposed layouts for a transit-first King Street. At this stage they exist only as general schemes, not as detailed, block-by-block plans. On that fine-grained level any new scheme will succeed or fail. Even if a plan achieves transit improvements, too many small annoyances, too many details overlooked could collectively derail a scheme. The planners flag this as a need for both a “micro and macro” view of the street – the big picture of better transit, and an awareness that every block, every neighbourhood along the street is different.
Common to all plans is a substantial reduction in the space available for cars and trucks. Some areas now used for loading, drop offs and cab stands would be repurposed either as through traffic lanes with no stopping, or as expanded sidewalk space into what is now the curb lane. Left turns would be banned throughout the area.
Anyone who was gearing up for a fight over a car-free King St. can stand down.
The Star was given an advance look at the long-awaited proposals under consideration for the pilot project.
When the options are publicly presented at a meeting Monday night, all will include space on the road for automobiles. Perhaps controversially, none of the proposals will include bike lanes. Two of the three proposals give more space to pedestrians and public realm improvements such as seating or patios. And all are intended, first and foremost, to “move people” by giving priority on the road to streetcars, according to Toronto general manager of transportation Barbara Gray and chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat.
“Transit first is the frame around which we’re going to lead this decision,” Gray says.
“The objective is to create a transit priority corridor. The objective isn’t to create a car-free corridor,’” Keesmaat says. “It’s about being transformational, improving streetcar operations, and innovative placemaking.”
City staff members will present three options to the public for consideration a meeting at Metro Hall on Monday evening at 6:30, the start of a public consultation process during which proposals will be evaluated and refined over the next few months. A final recommendation will be voted on by city council in July, and if approved, will launch on the street for a pilot project period this fall.
The city is considering a number of options for a King Street pilot project, including making it solely a transit, pedestrian and cyclist zone in the downtown core, Toronto's chief planner told a conference Wednesday.
At a Green Cities conference Wednesday morning, Jennifer Keesmaat,announced the launch of a website that will look at a range of pilot options for King Street along the six- kilometer corridor from Dufferin Street in the west to River Street in the east.
"We want to make sure that the areas of the city that we are directing growth to in fact have excellent transit service and the King Street corridor can be a big win," she said.
The idea of King Street going car-free is just one possibility floating around. Keesmaat won't confirm what the options are yet but says the city will propose them at a public meeting Feb. 13.
"There are a series of options that we will be bringing forward to the public looking at how we can essentially get cars out of the way," Keesmaat said. "We'll get the public's response and then we'll try it so we can see how it works in practice."
The 514 Cherry car has been running since June 2016. Although originally planned as a net new service, budget for the route fell victim to the 2016 round in which headroom for the “new” service was created by reallocating vehicles from 504 King. The purpose was to concentrate service on the central part of King where there is higher demand, but in practice, the original schedule did not work out. In November 2016 the headways on 514 Cherry were widened to compensate for longer-than-planned running times.
The 514 Cherry car has been something of an afterthought for the TTC in several ways. Planning and construction for it began years ago, but implementation was delayed until after the Pan Am Games were out of the way and the Canary District began to populate with residents and students in the new buildings. Another major blow has been the failure to build the Waterfront East LRT which is intended to eventually connect with the trackage on Cherry Street as part of a larger network. In effect, the spur to Distillery Loop is treated by the TTC as little more than a place for a scheduled short turn of the King Street service, much as trackage on Dufferin Street south of King is for the route’s western terminus.
Riders bound for the Distillery District face two challenges. One is that the older streetcars do not have route signs for 514 Cherry, only a small dashboard card wrapped over the “short turn” sign. Tourists might be forgiven for wondering if a 514 Cherry will ever show up. As new streetcars gradually appear on this route, this problem will decline, but it is an indication of the half-hearted way service was introduced that good signage was not part of the scheme.
Remember the plan to overhaul King Street? City staff want to make this main thoroughfare better for pedestrians, drivers and commuters who rely on the streetcar by giving it an extreme makeover.
One of the ideas is to make dedicated sections for a streetcar right of way and to reduce vehicular traffic on the street. King would be known as a "Transit Priority Street" according to the preliminary plans.
[. . .]
Public consultations for this pilot project are supposed to begin this winter. As previously reported, the pilot might come to fruition as early as spring 2017.
It can be almost impossible to find peace and quiet living downtown, but some Corktown residents say the screech from the recently installed 514 Cherry Streetcar is unbearable.
"It's become a form a torture for us," said Jason Mednick, standing at the corner of King Street East and Sumach Street. "Equivalent to waterboarding."
The 514 went into service in June. The TTC introduced the service to relieve crowding along the congested King streetcar route and to connect new residential developments in Corktown and the Distillery District with the rest of the transit system.
But Mednick says the noise was instant and alarming.
"About every 10 minutes or so, 20 hours a day, we listen to excessive screeching and squealing as they negotiate the turn," said Mednick.
The 514 runs along King Street and makes a sharp turn south at Sumach, heading to Cherry Street on its way to the newly-constructed streetcar loop across from the Distillery District. That tight turn is partially what's causing the sharp squealing sound that's irritating many residents.
The King streetcar route has been split into two for the first weekend of the Toronto International Film Festival.
TIFF festivities have closed part of King Street West for a second straight year. As a result, the TTC is not servicing any streetcar or bus stops between University and Spadina Avenues from Sept. 8-11.
Instead, there are eastern and western loops for the streetcars. Rush-hour buses that serve the route are diverting around the festival closures.
The Cherry branch is intended to serve the developing eastern part of the Distillery District which is just becoming occupied after its use as the Athletes’ Village for the Pan Am Games. Substantial additional development is planned here over the coming years, and eventually the route could be extended south to link with a reconfigured Queens Quay East and the Port Lands redevelopment.
The scheduled service is every 8-9 minutes peak, every 12 minutes Saturday afternoons, and every 14-15 minutes at all other times. Any irregularity in headways can lead to long waits defeating the attractiveness of this service.
Service at Mill Street northbound (just leaving Distillery Loop) shows a wide variation in headways, and the standard deviation of the headways for weekday service is regularly at or above 6 minutes. This means that a substantial share of the headways lie in a range at least 12 minutes wide. This is vastly beyond the TTC’s goal for service reliability at terminals. The situation on Saturday is slightly better with SDs in the 2-6 minute range, but the Sunday stats are the worst of all. Note that these numbers include only one Saturday and two Sundays with an infrequent service. Therefore the number of observations per hour is small.
At Dufferin Loop (measured at Springhurst, the street immediately north of the loop), the situation is slightly better, but not by much.
Quite evident in the charts is that cars running on very close headways, under five minutes, are not uncommon. For a route with a wider scheduled headway, this means that would-be riders will often see two 514 cars followed by a long gap. If they are simply travelling along the central part of King, this does not matter, but if they actually want to use the stops on Cherry or Dufferin because they live or work nearby, they face an uncertain fate.
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