Week of November 15th
Davisville buses may be on the chopping block and the growing (lingering?) concern around traffic safety in midtown
Last week I mentioned this newsletter hit 100 subscribers - which is awesome! I’m starting to branch out a bit, beginning with Instagram. If insta-ing is your thing, you can follow the Davisville Digest here for mix of coverage on important local issues, interesting community updates, & sweet Toronto memes. If it’s not your thing, well, at least we’ll always have email.
The Province is making the TTC review its bus network - and several Davisville routes could be in the crosshairs
When the TTC Board meets on Monday its finances will be one of the top points of discussion. Through the end of September the results were naturally grim: a nearly $600 million budget hole created as a result of COVID-19. This was largely as a result of far fewer people taking transit during the pandemic - a trend that’s only gotten worse in the past two weeks as the second wave has truly taken hold.
Fortunately, the province has stepped in with funding to keep the service running. Its support includes a first phase of “immediate relief funds” in September as well as a larger second phase of “ongoing relief funds” to cover shortfalls over the winter months. Though the TTC has still had to make some significant service reductions, the provincial funding has thus far helped it avoid some of the harsher measures.
But more significant changes to service could still be on the way. In particular, the province’s second phase of funding offered to the TTC comes with many more strings attached. Some of those strings include asking the City to cooperate on longstanding goals of the province - like “fare and service integration” and “new governance structures” (a.k.a. “TTC uploading”) - but some are new and raising eyebrows.
In particular, as part of release the phase 2 funds the province has requested the City review it’s lowest performing bus routes and consider other methods for servicing them - if they continue to service them at all.
In principle, the ask is completely reasonable. And indeed the TTC already conducts such reviews to a degree, such as its 5-year transit service plan which indicated its intent to cancel several underutilized downtown express buses routes like our very own 141 Mt. Pleasant.
But the province hasn’t been clear on exactly it intends to define an “underperforming” route and so communities have been left to guess. That’s why we see posters like the below starting to crop-up across Davisville from advocacy groups such as TTCriders raising the alarm bells of what could happen.
Their assumption was that any route with fewer than 4,000 riders per day would be at risk for cuts. This is probably a bit aggressive, as it would represent nearly one third of the network. It is also likely an oversimplified metric, as it doesn’t take into important factors like the number of vehicles needed for any given route. But it’s still illustrative of where we might be headed, and the results in neighbourhoods like ours would be dramatic as most of our routes are of the low passenger variety.
We are still probably a ways out from any changes as there has been little (public…) movement on this topic since it was announced in August. In fact, the only bus-related item on council’s committee agendas this week is a plan to actually expand service along high priority routes - which seems particularly important given mounting concerns around bus overcrowding.
But the TTC is clearly going to continue to need the province’s money well into next year, and so a review of our buses is coming. Davisville’s bus routes - which are relatively less productive than most of the TTC network and more likely to be deemed replaceable given the impending LRT - are going to be under the microscope.
If you’re interested in contributing to this debate - as well as the one about whether we should in fact be expanding the bus network - the TTCriders’ “Where’s my bus?” campaign is a good place to start. For those interested in digging a bit deeper into the stats behind bus service and what metrics we should be using transit guru Steve Munro has a pretty detailed evaluation of what “underperforming” actually means. Unrelatedly, he also has some neat photos from the last ride of the Mt. Pleasant streetcar for those who need a healthy dose of nostalgia.
Traffic safety is still (no surprise) an issue in Davisville
When I started this newsletter I set for myself a rule that I wouldn’t let it turn into a blog about “things I read about Davisville on Facebook / Twitter”. So far, so good (I think?) but occasionally, perusing the commentary on social media has yielded some interesting topics.
Late last week, one such topic cropped-up. Residents in the north-end of Davisville were startled Sunday morning by yet another car accident, this time at Mount Pleasant & Broadway Avenue. The accident itself was a minor, but the response to it on social media was interesting as there was immediately a flood of responses identifying other intersections that are unsafe around the neighbourhood.
Davisville is not exactly a hotspot for the road safety debate that’s raging across the city (which, of course, is a very good thing!) Over the past 10 years it has had 5 fatal accidents involving pedestrians, cyclists, or drivers, as well as 55 non-fatal-but-serious ones. Those numbers are still too high, but relatively small given our size in comparison to other parts of the City. Non-fatal collisions are a bit harder to track in just Davisville because the City’s data is (surprise!!!) not great but by best estimates it too appears to be lower than the rest of the city (good!), even though it is still growing (bad…)
Regardless of what the comparisons say, there are plenty of issue areas that have been unaddressed. To date, most of the City’s traffic safety work in the area has been focused on the immediate vicinity of Yonge & Eglinton (see below). While this makes good sense given the volumes on those streets, most of the concerns being raised were focused on the spillover streets that were being impacted by the Eglinton construction - like Broadway or Duplex. Mt. Pleasant was another interesting area of focus within the comments - and indeed has accounted for nearly a third of the fatal / non-fatal incidents in the area - even though the City has made few traffic safety improvements over the last 5-10 years.
The topic is probably one to raise at the councillor’s midtown safety town hall that take place on November 24th (details here), even if it will be secondary to some of the other public safety concerns. In the meantime, I’ve created this map to track known areas that the City should be looking at - you can send me your ideas at will@davisvilledigest.ca. If there continues to be a flood of ideas, it may be worth pushing the topic harder.
Coming up
This is a shorter newsletter this week, but between now and the end of the year there will be a flurry of activity. Some of the topics I’m working on right now include:
How our small businesses are faring and a few new campaigns to support them
The pandemic impact on everyone’s favourite topic: housing and real estate
Updates on several big developments, including the massive Canada Square
As always, if you have suggestions on topics worth exploring don’t hesitate to drop me a line at will@davisvilledigest.ca. It’s a pandemic and we’re all stuck inside, so email is all we’ve got :)
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