On the Buses: Some Personal Thoughts on Transit

(Sorry about the long absence, folks. I figure since my Ward 2 blog has considerable overlap with Sprawlville, I'll start cross-posting some relevant articles from JenSmith.ca here for the next while.)

I was pleased to see that the Champion finally got around to reporting on the transit debate that went on at last month's budget meetings. Although overshadowed by the hospital levy, Rick Malboeuf's motion to slash over a quarter million dollars from the Milton Transit budget was at least as surprising, and considerably more controversial.

As I reported at the time, the motion took everyone off guard and forced engineering staff and transit committee members to leap to the defense of our much maligned bus system. In the end, Malboeuf agreed to set aside his motion on the condition that Council and staff investigate the possibility of cuts over the coming year.

I had the impression that most councillors agreed just so they could move on.

The article has sparked a debate over at the Hawthorne Villager forum. I left a few comments, but I gave up after one person left a post about how someone would have to put a gun to his head to get him onto a bus full of the great unwashed, and how he failed to see any reason why he should choose suffer the grotesque inconvenience of waiting five minutes for a bus when he can jump in any one of his three (three!) cars any time he wants and pull up right to the door of his destination.

The overwhelming sense of entitlement and classism was making me a little queasy, so I decided to make a strategic withdrawal. If I had left a response, it likely would have been to question why someone happily spending thousands of dollars a year insuring, maintaining and fueling three cars - not to mention his tax dollars spent on new and existing roads - would find it so onerous to have to shell out $40 or $50 a year in taxes to provide transit for those who want or need it.

Alas, it would have gotten me nowhere.

I'm going to set aside the practical arguments for and against transit in Milton for a later post, because I want to address what I found most disturbing in all these discussions: the attitude that transit is only for students and tree-huggers or, worse, poor pathetic lowlifes who can't afford any better.

As an old Toronto girl, this attitude strikes me as particularly bizarre. I grew up in what were, at the time, the suburbs of Toronto, and the TTC was simply how everyone got around. My father was a fairly successful lawyer, so we weren't exactly short of money - and yet he took transit downtown to work just about every day of his career. So did all of his friends and colleagues. Even after my parents moved out to Bolton, he would drive to the King GO station and take transit to the office.

We had one car (nobody had two, of course) and my mother used it to run errands and drive me and my sister to skating or wherever. Certainly never to school, unless it was really raining cats and dogs. I walked to school until about grade 4 when I started taking the trolley bus. We moved to North York when I was in grade 6, but I continued to attend school at Avenue Road and Lawrence. I would take a bus, then the subway and then another bus to get there, often with my father part of the way if we happened to be leaving at the same time.

When I moved out of my parents house, I lived downtown and either took the TTC or rode my bike wherever I went. I didn't get my driver's license until I was 23 and living in Ottawa, but even then the car was never my primary mode of transport (my sister didn't learn to drive until she was 40).

Even after I married and we moved to Milton, I rarely drove. My husband would take the GO train downtown every day, so unless I felt like getting up very early to drive him to the station I was without a car most of the day. Which was fine since we still had a grocery store, banks, parks, the video store, and everything else I needed within blocks of my house. When my son was a little older and I got a part-time job up on Steeles, I just caught the bus at the stop right across the street from me.

It was only after we got the second car that I started relying on driving more and more. I was working from home so there was no need to commute by transit, the grocery store and several other amenities moved out of downtown, and it just became too easy to choose to drive.

My point is, I'm no angel. Like many people in Milton, I drive far more than I should. I do try to walk or bike as much as I can, but there's always an excuse - I'm in a hurry, it's too cold, it's too hot, I need to go to the Superstore anyway so I might as well drive. And it's taken its toll - I'm 35 pounds heavier now than when I moved here.

The difference is that I recognize all this as being a Bad Thing. Sure, as semi-affluent North Americans we're entitled to own two or three cars at a time and drive the block and a half to the mailbox and back instead of getting off our widening asses to walk. We're also entitled to throw out our clothes and dishes and buy new ones every week instead of washing the old ones if we have the money, but it's no less wasteful.

My father didn't ride the bus because it was cheaper, or faster, or better for the environment, or because he didn't have a choice. He took transit because it made sense, and because back then most people would have considered driving in your car by yourself to the office every day to be the height of wasteful self-indulgence.

I'm determined to get rid of that second car this year.

From Town to City: Milton's Infill and Intensification Plan

Last Wednesday I had the opportunity to participate in the second of two public meetings discussing plans to increase development and population density in central Milton - otherwise known as 'Infill and Intensification'.

The Province has mandated that, in order to accommodate increasing populations and to avoid sprawl into agricultural areas, that certain towns increase the population density of their built-up areas to reach (in the case of Milton) a minimum of 200 people + jobs per hectare by 2031.

In practical terms, this means allowing for taller buildings, and developing 'brownfields' and underutilized spaces. The plan has resulted in predictable resistance from some members of the community who are envisioning crops of high-rise condo towers springing up in the downtown core, but the reality, thankfully, is much less terrifying.



To start with, the area where they are talking about doing most of this development could definitely use a facelift. I remember when we first came to Milton 15 years ago to look for a house, the first impression we had driving west along Main Street was of a dingy, haphazard collection of industrial units, strip malls, vacant lots - even an abandoned paint factory. The paint factory was torn down a few years later, but the sizeable lot it sat on remains an empty eyesore.

When the Loblaw's Supercentre and the attendant retail complex was built a few years ago at the corner of Main and Thompson, it was literally in the middle of nowhere. But with the residential developments now fully established to the east and southeast of town, the continued existence of this industrial wasteland between 'old' and 'new' Milton has become even more detrimental to the integrity of the town.

Filling that gap with high density housing and retail will (hopefully) create a larger, continuous downtown centre that will be accessible, walkable, and integrated with the older and newer parts of Milton. Additionally, increasing population densities in an area which, fortuitously, includes the GO Station will make in-town, commuter and intra-regional transit far more efficient and cost effective.




Concerns were raised about the loss of parking space at the GO station, but apparently there are several plans in the works that should make that less of a problem. In addition to making it easier to walk or bike to the station, there are plans to add two new stations at Trafalgar and at Tremaine which should ease the pressure on the downtown Milton station considerably. Also, at some point the line is going to be extended west. This should help a lot because a significant percentage of people using the Milton GO station are actually from Guelph, Cambridge and Kitchener.

Other interesting plans in the works include:

- moving the GO parking lot to south of the tracks, leaving the Main St. frontage for retail and apartments / condominiums.

- extending Main St. to Trafalgar, giving access to the 401 and the future GO station there, thus relieving traffic congestion downtown.

- incorporating a park / trail corridor parallelling Main Street to the north, thus allowing an alternate east-west route for pedestrians and cyclists.

- additional intensification to the west of the historic downtown core to create a western 'gateway' into both the old and new downtown areas.

I'm personally pretty excited by all this. Short of stuffing the whole town into a time machine and sending it back 20 years, I see this approach as being the best way of counteracting the sprawling, uncontrolled, unbalanced residential development that has been going on for the past decade, and transitioning Milton from a medium-sized town to a small city.

It's a shame they couldn't have done the infill first, but it is what it is.

(There's lots more information about the Town's plan on their website.)

Milton Transit: Change is Coming!

I grew up in Toronto, which probably has the best transit system in the country. No matter where you are in Toronto, you are rarely more than a few blocks away from a bus, streetcar or subway stop. More importantly, even if you are unfamiliar with the specific TTC routes, you can generally find your way to where you're going because the routes are all on a grid system. So if you know you want to go southwest, you just get on a westbound bus and then onto a southbound.

It doesn't quite work that way in Milton.

Back when we had one car and my husband was commuting to Toronto, I got myself a short-lived job doing layout for a graphics company up on Steeles Avenue. It was too far to walk, so I used to take the bus. Back then they only ran once every hour, but I was fortunate in that there was a bus stop right across the street from me, and that bus went straight up Commercial and Martin Streets to Steeles and then back again.

Today, getting to that same location would involve a 15 minute walk, two different buses and a rather extensive scenic tour of Milton.



The current Milton Transit system is a classic case of "you can't get there from here" - unless, of course, "here" is one of the new housing developments and "there" is the GO Station. If, on the other hand, you live in 'olde Milton'* and want to get to the Wal-Mart or the movie theatre or the grocery store, you're better off taking a cab. And you really, really don't want to take a cab in this town.

Happily, a Strategic Plan Study has been underway for some time now, and proposals are now being made for an overhaul of Milton' beleaguered transit system. As reported in today's Champion, draft recommendations were presented at a public meeting on January 19th (which I missed because of work), and are now available online for public comment until Feb. 2nd.

The new routes proposed still aren't perfect, but they're a significant improvement.



With this I could get to my old workplace using only one bus and a considerably less circuitous route, although there'd still be a 15 minute walk involved. And although it's still a radial system, they do seem to have more two-way routes and fewer complex loops, making the whole thing easier to navigate.

All this will cost more money of course, but as luck would have it, Milton is about to get a big boost in the amount of gas tax revenue it receives from the federal government as a result of our growing population. Perfect timing!

Just as long as they don't blow it all on another million dollar imported glass wall.

* yes, the realtors actually call it 'Olde Milton'.