Dedicating Light Rail Lanes

16 March 2007 - 7:00am

The city of Toronto plans to devote dedicated lanes to some of the city's major light rail routes. The project was promised in the mayor's re-election campaign and is expected to cost more than $2 billion.

"The TTC will unveil a plan Friday to build dedicated light-rail lanes on key routes across the city – as promised in Mayor David Miller's re-election campaign – laying out a blueprint that could see new state-of-the-art streetcars gliding down Eglinton and Finch Avenues."

"'The plan will be unveiled [Friday]... and it will outline a vision of how we would deal with traffic congestion and the environmental affects of car travel by building an environmentally sustainable, transit-friendly city,' TTC Chairman Adam Giambrone said."

"The general concept is to run streetcars – or the sleek new light-rail vehicles the TTC plans to buy in the next few years – in their own lanes, or rights-of-way, down the middle of as many as a dozen major roads across the city."

"The idea, in place now on Spadina Avenue downtown and still under construction along St. Clair Avenue, has proved controversial with some businesses and residents, especially on St. Clair, where a local group raised concerns about traffic and parking problems and even took the city to court."

Source: The Globe and Mail, March 15, 2007
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For the past half century we have been building communities for the wrong reasons. We built them to sell cars. This created all sorts of problems.