Mississauga councillors are unanimous: They want light rail.
They are happy to give up two of six lanes of car traffic on Hurontario Street, aka Highway 10, the city’s busiest north-south thoroughfare. The LRT would run up its centre: 23 kilometres from Port Credit north to the heart of Brampton.
We think of Mississauga as car-dependant sprawl. But Mississauga is changing. About 30 new condo towers are sprouting like spring shoots of corn all around Mississauga City Hall. Increasingly, citizens of Mississauga ride transit.
On Thursday, at Islington subway station, I caught a MiWay bus (the new name for Mississauga Transit) to visit Matthew Williams, project manager, LRT for the City of Mississauga. Boarding the bus I experienced sticker shock: $3.25 for a fare with a transit agency that offers a fraction of the service of the TTC? Then the driver told me my transfer allowed me to ride any bus, in any direction, for two hours. I watched passengers tap their Presto cards on the green reader (paying this way costs $2.70), and almost broke into song: “Everything’s up to date in Mississauga!â€
Mr. Williams works on City Centre Drive across from city hall. It seems a lonely job: he is the only person assigned full-time to bring light rail to Mississauga. Even so, he is upbeat.
“I live in Port Credit,†he says. “I love my community. It’s walkable. How do you replicate that in other parts of Mississauga? It would be nice to live in these condos, take the train down to Port Credit, and go bar-hopping or go to the beach.â€
Mr. Williams, 46, joined transportation planning here in 1990. He remains philosophical about the challenges of this LRT effort. After all, Mississauga worked since the 1980s on a bus-only Transitway adjoining Highway 403. That $250-million project opens next year.
“We can decide to be a suburban city, or we can look at places within the city where we can provide those urban elements that some people like,†he says.
Planning an LRT costs big bucks. Both Mississauga and Brampton councils this fall approved an environmental assessment for the LRT. When they complete the work next June, the two cities will have spent $15-million to $20-million on the LRT, with Mississauga paying 75% and Brampton 25%.
It’s a quiet effort, however. Along Hurontario, nobody is even aware of the LRT scheme.
“What’s the purpose?†asks Angelo Mazaris, owner of the busy Orchard restaurant at Hurontario and Dundas streets for 47 years. “I have never heard of it.â€
A server at Wally’s Restaurant, where I stopped for a burger, greeted an LRT brochure with surprise. “Right now there are too many cars on Hurontario. It will create more problems for traffic.†Mississauga needs a subway to Toronto, she says, not a north-south train.
John Sanderson, a regional councillor in Brampton, voted last week against studying light rail on Highway 10, known as Main Street in Brampton.
“When people go on that train to go south, where are they going to go?†he asks. “To the airport lands? To Port Credit?†Brampton needs more GO trains to Toronto, not LRTs, he says, adding sarcastically: “It would be nice to put all those people on a [light rail] train to go down and spend all their disposable income at Square One [Shopping Centre].â€
Mississauga and Brampton are asking the province, through Metrolinx, to pay the entire cost of the line, about $1.5-billion including the trains. But at this point there is no provincial money committed to the project.
“It’s the future,†says Nando Iannicca, a longtime Mississauga councillor. “It has to happen. The province says, ‘Sprawl is a problem. Go up, not out.’ We say, ‘OK, we will.’ This LRT will take 6,000 movements of traffic an hour off the roads. We are the poster child of provincial policy It’s about time the premier stepped up and rewarded us for playing according to the rules.â€