Traffic goes by parked cars on Queen St. West in Toronto.Fred Lum
Sometimes weighing the greater public good isn’t complicated. Removing subsidized street parking to speed up the trip for tens of thousands of bus riders is so self-evidently logical it shouldn’t require debate. Unfortunately, as Toronto is finding, the status quo is stubborn.
Some residents are pushing back on a plan to create transit priority lanes on a few of the city’s busiest surface routes – including Dufferin Street, where Toronto Transit Commission buses carry as many as 40,000 riders daily. It’s a version of NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) that might be dubbed NIMPS: not in my parking spot.
What these residents forget is that these parking spots are not actually theirs.
As similar debates play out across the country, it’s worth remembering two things. One, public roads are public resources, to be used in the way that offers the greatest benefit. And, two, the current use is not necessarily the best one, no matter how entrenched it may be.
Canadian cities are growing and struggling with congestion. Subways are expensive and can take many years to build. Transit priority lanes in Toronto could help make the case that there is, in the short term, a cost-effective way to speed up traffic in a major way.
However, the controversy in Toronto also illustrates the difficulty of these debates, as residents fight hard to protect street parking. Their zeal is understandable. They’ve become accustomed to using public land as cheap storage for their personal vehicles.
Of course, the fact that parking is underpriced leads to demand outstripping supply.
North Vancouver voted last month to tackle that by adding a charge to some streets while boosting the cost of a permit fourfold, to $8.33 per month, to park on others.
That’s not nearly enough, but it’s a start.
One of the greatest resources for cities is the vast swaths of public land, including curb lane parking spots that residents tend to see as their own. Cities reclaim that land by using a price to manage demand – or decide there’s a better use for curb lane.
In Toronto, the best use of those lanes on Dufferin is turning two of them into spaces primarily for transit buses. Also allowed access under the plan would be emergency vehicles, transit for disabled people, school buses and bicycles. This change would save transit riders up to 10 minutes for those going the full route, according to a TTC report, while improving on-time reliability for buses by 17 per cent.
For comparison, Toronto politics was convulsed early last decade with debate over whether to build a light rail line in Scarborough or extend a subway, the latter approach costing a premium then pegged at $1.1-billion. Coincidentally, that subway extension was projected to save downtown-bound transit riders 10 minutes.
While the capital costs to put bus-only lanes on Dufferin are not yet public, it’s safe to say that it would cost an awful lot less than that subway extension.
Not having the Dufferin bus stuck as much in traffic would also save the TTC money, the report says, while the improved service is expected to attract nearly 3,000 new daily transit riders to the route. Net annual benefit to the agency: more than $3-million.
A counterargument, from a group Protect Dufferin that speaks for some homeowners on the route, is that their parking needs are being ignored. One way to assess the competing needs is to look at the relative benefit of better transit versus convenient parking.
The value of the bus improvement is reasonably easy to quantify. It is projected to go faster, be more reliable, carry more people and boost revenues.
The true value of the parking spaces is harder to determine, because Toronto has long underpriced its public land. As in much of the central city, parking spaces along Dufferin are a mix of free, metered and permit parking. Permits in Toronto are priced below market rates and work out to less than $1 a day, if the homeowner has nowhere to park on their own property, or about $3.50 if they do.
Urban curb lanes are valuable real estate. If they were priced accordingly Toronto would quickly find out how much NIMPS really want those spaces. And that should demonstrate that city hall has the latitude to roll out bus-only lanes much more broadly. The public good demands it.