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The Dundas Dilemma

The corner of Richmond and Dundas is home to several bus stops — around 55 per cent of all bus routes stop here. (Corey Stanford/Gazette)

Standing around the four corners of Dundas and Richmond on a cold January day, everyone looks chilled to the bone. There’s a few guys smoking cigarettes, a couple of panhandlers, a young family with a baby in tow.

It’s hard to walk in a straight line without getting lost in the bustle of people — an estimated 13,000 to 14,000 of them a day, in fact — who linger around London’s infamously gritty downtown corner.

But many critics in the city want to push the crowds away from these corners to change the downtown’s growing reputation as a dirty and congested terminal.

“The streets need to be more pedestrian friendly,” says Bob Usher, chair of the London Downtown Business Association.

Thousands of people clogging up street corners has lead to a less than ideal atmosphere for shopping, dining and simply living in the Dundas area, he argues.

Forget about having patios, for instance. Constant bus fumes and loitering are an ongoing deterrent.

“If you think about it, if you were a restauranteur […] you wouldn’t do it right now with the diesel going by,” Usher adds.

These critics have pointed a finger at public transit as the culprit behind the problem. More than half of the city’s 39 bus routes make a stop near Dundas and Richmond.

But a pilot project to shift bus routes away from the downtown could help fix all that.

The idea of tweaking bus routes in the downtown core has been tossed around for over a decade. Now a concrete idea is in the works that, if approved, would start as early as June.

The London Transit Commission’s pilot project would eliminate all routes on Dundas between Ridout Street and Wellington Road. The routes would be shifted one block south to King Street, and one block north to Queens Avenue.

LTC general manager Larry Ducharme says 55 per cent of LTC riders travel downtown — and their main transfer point is currently Dundas and Richmond.

Eliminating routes along a section of Dundas will cost about $583,000. But many argue it’s a small price to pay to support more retail and commercial opportunities.

“The underlying goal,” says Ducharme, “is to support the revitalization of [London’s] downtown.”

The grittiness of Dundas and Richmond seems out of place when compared to other parts of downtown London. Further along Richmond, heading closer to campus, are dozens of unique shops and restaurants. And London started building an entertainment hub about a decade ago after the John Labbatt Centre was built.

“Compared to the way the downtown was 10 to 15 years ago […] there’s been new energy and new ideas, building upon past successes,” recalls Kathy Navackas, executive producer of the London Fringe festival.

Since the ‘80s, revitalizing the city’s core has been an ongoing project.

Back in 1998, the city’s Millennium Plan strived to breathe new life into a tired downtown core that lacked arts, culture and viable businesses.

About $135 million in city money went towards building the JLC and Covent Garden Market alongside other initiatives to stimulate downtown investment.

New retail spaces and restaurants have also popped up throughout London’s downtown in recent years, with 50 new businesses opening in the past five years alone.

But Dundas Street still serves as a black spot on the downtown landscape. And so politicians, city planners, business owners and regular citizens continue clunking their heads together.

Back in November, an interesting variety of movers and shakers attended the annual meeting of the LDBA and Downtown London — including incoming and outgoing mayors Joe Fontana and Anne-Marie DeCicco Best.

Ideas for cleaning up downtown are tossed around at these kinds of meetings. Everything from better recycling efforts in the core to more spaces for the arts.

But one thing highlighted regularly is that the buses just have to go.

“There is a real desire to work with the LTC to get the buses off Dundas Street,” says Navackas. “The corners there were not made for the kinds of numbers that are riding the buses. That’s a big thing.”

Fontana has hopes of turning the core into more of a promenade, where it could become a hub for arts and music.

“[Let’s] clean it up, make it look great [and] look at the incentives of how we can turn downtown into a cultural district with boutiques on the second and third stories.”

But the pilot project is not without critics.

Last year the president of the LTC’s union, Pat Hunniford, expressed his hesitation about the project to AM980.

“There’s good parts of it and bad parts,” he told the radio station. “It still comes down to when you separate our main corner, which is Dundas and Richmond, it becomes a big inconvenience for transferring.”

And Fontana admits some business owners will claim new bus routes will hurt their downtown business rather than help it.

“Let’s face it — some businesses will tell you they need the bus stop right there,” he says.

But Usher — who has long been one of the strongest proponents of the project — says it’s worth a try.

“Will it work? Wont it work? I don’t really know for sure […] This discussion has been ongoing for 10, 15 years or more,” he explains.

“So lets just find out.”

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