City council passed a motion to speed up the Finch West LRT
Only one councillor opposed it, citing traffic congestion concerns
After complaints regarding the efficiency of Toronto’s newly-opened Finch West LRT line, city council passed a motion yesterday that could help speed things up.
Mayor Olivia Chow’s motion, which passed almost unanimously, will allow the city manager to implement signal priority over vehicles at surface portions of Line 6. The Finch West LRT’s previous lack of signal priority has been criticized over the last week, including by a runner who raced a Finch West LRT car and beat it by 18 minutes.
Related: “We are fixing this”: Mayor Olivia Chow wants to speed up Toronto’s newest LRT
According to CBC, runner Mac Bauer’s Instagram experiment was discussed at city council on Tuesday. “We can’t allow that to ever happen again,” said councillor Josh Matlow. “The LRT is meant to be rapid transit.”
The only dissenting council member was Stephen Holyday, who argued that giving signal priority to streetcars and LRTs over vehicle traffic could clog intersections with cars. “If you have a public backlash, people lose faith in the government decision and the infrastructure in front of us, and then it taints all the transit proposals going forward,” he said.
Maybe the city should pay Bauer and his friends—one of whom drove a car as he ran the route—to do another experiment once signal priority kicks in. That way we can know for sure.
Related: City council will vote on what to do about a contractor that overbilled by $1.1 million
Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
