Arlington Street residents have told The Leaf that some of them will have to move if no changes are made to the City’s new transit overhaul that has made their residential street into a throughway for route #28.
The changes, in effect from June 30 this year have brought more than 100 bus trips up and down their street per day, as part of the newly designed high frequency route #28, and residents say they are experiencing noise, shaking in their houses, and sometimes speeding buses, with traffic following closely behind them up their street.
“The bus comes at 5:47 every morning,” said a resident who wanted to remain anonymous. “I know because it wakes me up. I have lost sleep. It shakes the house.” The route runs until after 11 pm in the evening. Arlington Street north of Portage Avenue was built to handle a higher volume of traffic, and was built with a wider width to accomodate heavier vehicles. But Arlington street south of the Portage Ave intersection was built much earlier by the city, and doesn’t meet the city’s regulated width for bus traffic.
It’s a point that was raised at council meetings by residents before the route changes were set to come into effect, and is something residents on the street had to sometimes deal with when the previous #10 Wolseley bus traversed their block.
That bus only ran one way on their street, and one resident, Sally Papso, was well known for her effort every year to place seating and flowers around the bus stop. It also was a much less frequent bus that ran at a more leisurely pace.
It’s not that anyone doesn’t want a bus in the neighbourhood, emphasizes Margerit Roger, a resident who implored city council to work with residents and community members to find a better option for the route when hearings were still being held at city hall – its that the volume of buses are making it almost unbearable, she says.
“I don’t think any of us want to come off as anti bus because public transportation is really important,” another resident Rebecca Forgan said. “I just think the whole process wasn’t done properly or with a lot of care or thought.”
Forgan, like Roger was disappointed by the consultations done by the city. “We’ve been blatantly, overlooked through the the whole consulting process until it was essentially a done deal,” said Forgan.
The long term resident says that the frequency of the buses, and speed, and shaking has made hanging out at the front of her house much less enjoyable, and that the street feels too narrow for the amount of traffic it is sustaining.
“I have arrived home and been getting things out of my car and have been honked at by a bus. I guess I’m not going fast enough,” she said.
Residents on Arlington Street said they weren’t properly or adequately consulted, and Roger, who looked through city documents, said the percentage of responses to city surveys on transit before the overhaul added up to a response rate of less than two percent. “So you’re not going to have gotten the information that you actually need to make decisions,” she says.
According to the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) Wolseley has the highest percentage of people walking or biking to work. “I’m not thinking we don’t need buses, but we don’t need 100 buses,” Roger said.
The call for a speed reduction
Residents on the two blocks of Arlington Street south have been working with area Councillors Cindy Gilroy and Sherri Rollins to extend the 30 km speed limit on Wolseley Avenue to their section of the street, brought in last year since Wolseley Avenue’s designation as a city greenway, to “help mitigate the negative effects of the new bus corridor.”
It will face a vote by the Standing Policy Committee on Public Works on October 7, in which Waverly West Councillor Janice Lukes has indicated she will vote against it. Lukes has said the speed reduction will affect the route’s schedule, but Roger says “it is a really small ask for such a huge impact.” She even timed out how much longer a vehicle would take to go down the two blocks at the slower speed and says it will increase the time by less than a minute, but would make for less shaking, noise and disruption on their old residential street.
Moving the current route to instead go south on Maryland Avenue was proposed by residents last year in city hall meetings, and to provide On-Request bus service through the neighbourhood’s residential streets.
It was a request that city representatives said couldn’t be accomodated by the budget dedicated to the transit overhaul at the time, but since July, the On Request service has expanded to 12 other city zones.
Forgan says that she has often seen lots of people waiting for a transfer at the Portage Avenue intersection, but few riders waiting at other stops in the neighbourhood.
All in all, she points out, the traffic congestion and negative effects are being highly felt in the neighbourhood, with little benefit to its residents. “Its a very frustrating thing, feeling like we’ve been flung to the wolves,” she says.
Roger has been looking through the new routes and points out that as far as she is aware, the city has around 20 greenways, and can’t imagine that any other greenways have 100 buses going up and down them every day. “Like we said last year, it wasn’t going be tolerable, and it isn’t tolerable.”
“But ultimately, you know what, we are going to keep making our voices heard, because I think it’s really important for the community. It’s important for our street,” she says.
The resident who wished to remain anonymous said that they have not felt supported by neighbours on the Wolseley Facebook and other sites when they have communicated their concerns, and are no longer posting information about how it is affecting them and others on the street. But the resident said that the constant noise, and shaking is interrupting their work at home, and the energy they are able to dedicate to their business. “I’ve spent years fixing up my house,” they said. “I love it here. But I dont know if I can stay if changes won’t be made.”