Council caves and all lose to the precious car

By Albert Koehl

In the run up to the city hall debate about the proposed RapidTO busway on Bathurst Street, everyone played to script, and we all lost. 

RapidTO would have created priority transit lanes on Bathurst and Dufferin Streets from the waterfront to the soon-to-be-completed Eglinton Crosstown LRT.

In a city where transit projects are measured in years of delay and billions of dollars in cost overruns, RapidTO offered a quick, inexpensive solution for long-suffering transit riders. 

Indeed, there are few fixes in our toolbox that address a similar list of urgent problems: affordability, traffic congestion, and climate change. Even the Toronto Region Board of Trade supported the RapidTO lanes. 

For these reasons—and solid public support—the project should have coasted through executive committee and city council. Instead, only the RapidTO lanes south of Bloor were approved. 

What happened?

For starters, the media got excited about a loud group of merchants on Bathurst (between Bloor and Dupont Streets) who predicted doom and gloom from the loss of curbside parking. What else is new, except research that contradicts them? 

The opponents actually used, until they were caught, fake, AI-generated “concerned residents.” The Toronto Star nonetheless characterised the RapidTO lanes as a “heated and politicized” debate. 

Second, local councillor Dianne Saxe championed delay, a beloved approach among politicians who want to avoid making a decision. 

Her “compromise” undermined her own pronouncements about the urgency of climate action: “The climate crisis is not a normal political negotiation between different interests, where solutions come from compromise. The climate crisis is a collision between human beings and physics. Physics, like gravity, doesn’t compromise.” 

Urban affairs commentator John Lorinc ridiculed Saxe as having “caved spectacularly.”

Third, some merchants, true to an old script, championed parking spots over people. 

When a bike lane was proposed on Harbord Street, the local business association said “no bike lanes, period.” That was in the 1990s; today the upgrade of the existing bike lanes got little attention. 

More recently, merchants on downtown Yonge predicted “catastrophic consequences” from a pedestrianization initiative. City council ignored them. And, by contrast, the Bloor Annex BIA was among the first to fight back when Premier Doug Ford threatened to remove bike lanes on Bloor.

Ironically (or hypocritically), at their June protest, opponents to the Bathurst busway stood on sidewalk-level parking spots that the merchant had converted to a vibrant, permanent patio. Indeed, the city initiative should have been an opportunity to re-think—and to more rationally use—the extravagant amount of precious urban space that is devoted to parking, instead of to people (and trees, sidewalks, bikeways, and benches). 

Finally, TTC riders, environmental groups, and local residents all rallied for the RapidTO busways. An overwhelming majority of the 60+ speakers at the executive committee supported complete busways. 

For TTC patrons at bus stops, the recent scorching temperatures are certainly more than the “abstraction” described by opponents. In fact, the Bathurst busway would have delivered thousands of potential new shoppers—people who could hop off the bus and into a business. 

A study partly funded by the Bloor Annex BIA showed that over 90 per cent of patrons at local shops arrive on foot, bikes, and transit. 

It was left to Mayor Olivia Chow to offer a way forward without embarrassing Councillor Saxe. The mayor should have intervened more forcefully. 

Instead, we got a project that will “explore” tried-and-failed options for the stretch north of Bloor to Eglinton, including HOV lanes that have never worked on nearby Bay Street. Councillor Saxe should have chosen her script from neighbouring Councillor Alejandra Bravo, who devoted herself to educating Dufferin residents about the vital importance of RapidTO and identifying feasible options for loading and access. 

It’s no longer acceptable, given today’s urgent problems, to allow some groups to carve out exceptions for themselves, while others suffer. 

We needed local merchants, the media, and politicians to show leadership. Instead, they simply kicked the can forward.

Albert Koehl is coordinator of Community Bikeways, author of Wheeling Through Toronto, and former vice-chair of the Annex Residents’ Association.

READ MORE:

• NEWS: Pushback on Bathurst bus lanes (July 2025)
• LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Empty cars don’t buy things responses (July 2025)
• OPINION: Empty cars don’t buy things—people do (May/June 2025)
• FORUM: Easing congestion into summer (May/June 2025)
• FORUM: Changing times and travel modes (October 2018)
• FORUM: A magical new supply of parking spots (Oct. 2017)
• FOCUS: An early advocate for bike lanes (June 2016)
• FORUM: The faster we lower speeds, the more lives we save (Oct. 2015)