Curb Versus Median Bus Lanes: The Yonge Street Case Study

The City of Toronto is placing a greater emphasis and priority on the development of “higher-order” public transit operations to respond to increased travel demand in a sustainable fashion. This study is focused on addressing the short-term ten-year needs within the Yonge Street corridor, recognizing the adopted long-term proposal to extend the Yonge Subway. Although extension of the Yonge Subway is in the City of Toronto’s long-term plan, the TTC has identified other corridors as priorities for subway extensions. Over the next ten years, significant growth in population north of Steeles Avenue is expected. In order to identify surface transit opportunities for improvements on Yonge Street between Steeles Avenue and Finch Avenue, the City of Toronto, together with the TTC and GO Transit have initiated a Class Environmental Assessment, which is being carried out according to Schedule C. The impact assessment recognized that the preferred alternative should allow for the integration of transit services with the proposed Yonge Street Transitway north of Steeles avenue by York Region. The Study, at the time of writing this paper, has not concluded which approach to implementing surface transit improvements will be used. This paper focuses on the constraints, analyses, and trade-offs between competing objectives that occurred during the development of design concepts, and identify practical lessons and generic conclusions that can be applied to similar studies. The initial screening process of assessment factors revealed that the design alternatives exhibit significant differences in the following assessment factors: - transit system performance; - disruption of present land use development; - traffic infiltration into the adjacent residential neighbourhoods; - traffic delay; - road safety; - access to adjacent businesses; - fire, police and emergency services access; and - construction cost The procedures applied to quantify the implications of alternative design concepts appear to have been successful in providing reasonable estimates of the potential impacts and communicating these potential impacts in meaningful terms to the various stakeholders.