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So as you've seen in the title, today's topic is Mississauga.
Mississauga, being Toronto's Western neighbor, is obviously an important city for us to talk about.
And, of course, I could go and bash it because Mississauga in some ways is a suburban hellscape.
It's full of parking lots and office blocks, and it's just not super pleasant for a lot
of its area.
However, Mississauga is trying to redevelop itself.
And since the city is pretty much entirely developed, it has to densify, which is what
an urbanist likes to see in a city: density — medium density and transit.
And Mississauga of course, in the past, hasn't had a lot of these things, but the past is
the past, and I'm excited to see where Mississauga can go in the future.
In fact, Mississauga has some towers that are proposed that are 270 metres tall —
It'll take the title of Tallest Tower Outside of Toronto back from Edmonton at the Stantec
Tower, and put it in the GTHA, which is pretty cool.
That being said, today we're talking about the transit network, and to start, we have
to talk about the GO lines.
Now, of course, Mississauga is served by three GO lines, as well as the UP Express if you
consider that a GO line, or maybe it's its own thing — it's hard to say.
Everyone thinks of it differently.
First, we have the Lakeshore line, which travels across the south of the city, with the most
important station obviously being Port Credit, because it will have a future connection to
the Hurontario LRT.
It's fantastic to see that the Lakeshore West line now has service every 20 minutes during
the midday and every 30 minutes outside of that.
It's an awesome service.
It's relatively frequent, and it means that there are decent connection opportunities
at Port Credit, and that will only improve with RER in the future.
Next up, just to the north of that, we have the Milton Line, which is only a commuter
service, which is limited of course, but it still offers some useful commuting opportunities
for people in the center of Mississauga as well as Western Mississauga out to Toronto
and Toronto Union Station and all the jobs of Downtown Toronto.
Next up, just to the Northeast, we have the Kitchener line, which has a stop at Malton.
There's only one stop there, and currently, there's kind of limited service.
However, in the future with RER and all-day two-way service out to Kitchener, we'll probably
see more trains stopping here, so it's an important point.
And then finally, the UP Express.
Now, since Pearson doesn't currently have a great transit connection to Mississauga —
though it's technically not as bad as it has always been given that the Mississauga Transitway
is around now.
The UP Express is less considered a Mississauga transit asset, though in the future, as transit
connections to Pearson improve, and there's perhaps an Eglinton connection to Renforth
Gateway, where the Mississauga Transitway stops, this connection with the UP Express
will actually be really important, because it will mean a direct express connection to
Pearson in only 25 minutes, and then you can continue on to Mississauga, saving you a lot
of time over perhaps taking the Eglinton LRT across to Mississauga.
Then we have the Mississauga Transitway.
Now, the Transitway is something that we've already kind of discussed in some of our station
focus videos —
we'll link to those in a card.
But the Transitway is pretty cool.
Now, it does kind of run through some industrial areas and lower density kind of zoned areas,
However, we're starting to see a bit more density around some of the stations, which
is fantastic.
It also is the closest thing we have to a higher-order transit connection all the way
to Pearson airport that stops at Renforth Gateway, but that's pretty much at the airport
lands already.
And when the Eglinton West LRT is brought over, then you'll have a connection directly
to Toronto's Rapid Transit System, which is exciting.
The Mississauga Transitway though, for me is more of an exciting thing in the long-term,
because it's fully grade-separated —
well for the most part, which means that eventually, similar to how Ottawa converted their transitway
to a very nice great-separated LRT, the same thing can happen in Mississauga.
That is what I kind of envisioned as Mississauga's second LRT line, once the Hurontario Line
is built, then we can talk about perhaps an underground connection to the very conveniently
located LRT terminal at Square One, and then have a line that basically turns the Mississauga
Transitway all the way to the Eglinton line into a very nice high-order LRT.
So that would be very nice to see in the future, and the Mississauga Transitway is a fantastic
kind of lead to that.
Next up, it's worth talking about the bus network.
So as a whole, the bus network in Mississauga in the past was relatively weak, but thanks
to kind of a redesign that Mississauga has been doing, along with lots of other North
American cities, including Edmonton —
Mississauga is trying to change its network to be more like a grid network.
Now, it's doing it over five years, and overall, the results are fairly positive.
MiWay now comprises of MiLocal and MiExpress, which is something I like to see:
Express vs. local services is definitely something you see in kind of more premium transit networks,
and so it's a positive to see that for sure.
It's also fantastic to see that Mississauga is finally getting night buses.
Only a few routes will have the night bus services, but the fact that Pearson will actually
should be connected to Mississauga 24 hours a day — or at the centre of Mississauga
24 hours a day — is fantastic to see.
It really makes the central area of Square One an actual viable place to live without
a car, because no matter what, 24 hours a day you can go to Pearson, which means that
you can technically, 24 hours a day, go pretty much anywhere in Toronto as well, because
there's 24 hour bus service from Toronto to Pearson.
So it's fantastic to see.
Now, kind of the final and perhaps the most interesting piece of the Mississauga transit
puzzle is the Hurontario LRT.
Now, the project is kind of currently in the RFP stage, which means that it's being bid
on, but we'll probably see an announcement on it very soon.
And when that happens, of course, we'll have to make a video about that.
The Hurontario LRT is kind of one of the most underappreciated projects in Ontario and perhaps
all of Canada.
It’s going to connect to two GO lines: the Milton and Lakeshore lines as I mentioned,
however, the Lakeshore line connection is definitely more important since that's an
all-day service.
So you can imagine people coming from west of Mississauga will transfer onto the Hurontario
LRT, and perhaps people will take the Hurontario LRT from downtown Mississauga at Square One
down to Port Credit, and then across to Union Station for jobs in downtown Toronto, which
is fantastic when you imagine that.
It will also connect up to the Brampton Gateway terminal, which is a key transit node in Brampton,
as well as the Mississauga Transitway as I discussed before.
So that Hurontario LRT project connects tons of important transit nodes in Peel Region,
and it's kind of going to reorganize the entire Mississauga transit network to really focus
on the Hurontario corridor, which is awesome to see.
It means that Mississauga will then have a north-south primary transit corridor and an
east-west primary transit corridor, plus the Lakeshore West line, which means it Mississauga
is actually being covered pretty well by higher-order transit, once that's completed in about 2023,
2024.
Anyways, those are kind of my thoughts on Mississauga's transit.
Of course, there's lots of improvements that need to be made, but overall it's actually
not that bad.
And for the sixth-largest city in Canada, and a city of over a million people, which
is kind of crazy — that's not something that many Canadian cities have —
Mississauga is doing pretty well.
The fact that it doesn't have a ton of higher-order transit seems negative, but that actually
means that they can invest a lot to improve bus service and that the LRT lines that Mississauga's
getting are already going to have a lot of demand from day one.
So all of this is super exciting.
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And as always, have a nice night guys. Thanks.