Competing Interests and Trade-offs

Cities are full of them

This week was a big one for cyclists and transit riders in Toronto. City council voted in favour of installing dedicated transit lanes on parts of Bathurst and Dufferin streets, while a court ruling denied the provincial government’s plan to remove bike lanes on Bloor and Avenue Rd. While the timing was coincidental, it’s not often that more than one transportation policy change happens at once.

While each of these changes will have some impact on people transporting themselves around the city, neither is a game changer. No single change can make enough of an impact to really move the needle—that requires systems thinking. In simpler terms, we must determine the outcomes we want and then plan all required changes to the whole transportation system to achieve those outcomes. Then make all of those changes in the right order.

Let’s double click on the dedicated transit lane situation. Some of the pushback was that the dedicated lanes would only save transit riders about 3 minutes per trip while inconveniencing drivers. On its own, this does seem like a not-so-great trade-off. But is transit ride duration the only measurement of success? No, of course not. Moving more people efficiently and safely is the goal. To do that, we must encourage more people to choose transit. And for that, reliable, predictable service is much more important than trip duration. People will choose transit if they know when the bus will arrive, and that time is relatively soon. An extra 3 minutes on the bus after that is not a factor.

Achieving reliable and predictable service should be the goal. Dedicated transit lanes may be a part of the plan to achieve it—a comprehensive, long-term plan that with many parts. Seen through this lens, I’ll bet that even some of those currently opposed to the transit lanes may support them. Because reliable, predictable transit service means a better experience for everyone, drivers included, since they will experience less congestion as transit use increases.

The magic and chaos of cities comes from throwing together many people with competing interests and views about how things should work. There are no perfect solutions that allow everyone to get what they want. Every decision comes with trade-offs. The two decisions in Toronto this week are examples of this. Rather than framing the decisions as a win for cyclists or transit riders, we could choose to take a step back and think about all the different competing needs and intersts here. That way, we may see that these are not two isolated decisions, but perhaps components of a larger plan to continue the push and pull of planning a city’s future.