The pandemic is hard enough on all of us without politicians using it to their advantage to push a political agenda.
Toronto Councillors Brad Bradford and Jennifer McKelvie plan to bring a motion to the TTC Wednesday to ban cars and other non-TTC vehicles from curb lanes on five busy corridors in the city.
The CBC reports, “Where these communities have some of the highest rates of COVID-19 infections, it can be challenging to get around in a safe manner and the TTC needs to respond to those concerns and do it in a timely fashion,” Bradford said.
“Providing bus priority transit lanes is certainly going to help with that effort.”
How does once again pushing back against cars in the city help anyone with the pandemic?
The last thing the city needs right now is more buses on the streets. No one is riding the buses we do have.
In late May, the TTC laid off 445 workers as part of a plan to possibly reduce employment by 1,200 workers due to a dramatic loss in ridership costing $90 million a month in lost revenue.
Only a politician says, when losing 90% of their business, “Let’s do more.”
Social distancing on buses would not seem to be a huge problem at the moment, so anyone using the TTC is already accommodated.
Of course, pushing cars off the road is a long-time dream of some in the city and COVID-19 has nothing to do with it, so in their minds apparently ramping up the bus service and taking away lanes makes political, not business, sense.
According to Statistics Canada, 23.3% of commuters in Toronto (this is pre pandemic) use public transit to get to work.
Toronto has more workers living outside the city core than any other Canadian city, at about 75%.
Cars are a huge part of the commuting mix and trucks moving goods are essential to the well-being of the city. Automobiles are not the second-class citizens of the traffic world.
The move to add bus lanes comes only weeks after the city put the hurry-up on adding bike lanes to accommodate the least-used form of travel to work.
Many people, including the TTC, worry that even as we open the economy back up people will not rush to use transit.
Some will have no choice if they can’t afford a taxi or Uber every day and if they don’t own a car.
But for those who can, and that will include many people who previously used transit, they will likely be in cars, the safest bubble they can be in while travelling.
There is a chance that after months of working from home many workers and businesses may opt for a model that sees fewer people commuting post pandemic than before. That won’t help the TTC recover the money they have been hemorrhaging but it will reduce gridlock.
As such, increased bus service might not be needed at all for a while.
We could wait and see, but that sort of planning is not conducive to agenda pushing.
So in both the case of increased bike lanes and bus rights of way, politicians are operating from the principal of never letting a good crisis go to waste.
Is that responsible leadership?
