Mississauga Has Some Big Plans for this Major Street in the City

As it has been stated numerous times, Mississauga is growing.

The city touted as Canada’s sixth largest has gone from a collection of rural farmland and villages to a bustling urban area of some 800,000 residents, eventually reaching 1 million on its own by 2041…maybe even sooner.

With such undeniable demographics staring at you in the face, the city has been planning for years in various neighbourhoods on how to manage growth and traffic. Vision Cooksville, Dundas Connects and Downtown 21 are some of those plans that Mississauga has laid out over the years.

One of them concerns Lakeshore Road, or at least the portion within Mississauga, as shown below:Public meeting were held back in 2016 to determine how best to connect the communities of Clarkson, Port Credit and Lakeview “while preserving and enhancing the unique character and sense of place of each community,” in a project called Lakeshore Connecting Communities. Out of the nine meetings held, some 700 people attended according to staff.

Those meetings have now concluded and staff presented a report to council on their findings of how to move this project forward. As seen above, three community nodes at Clarkson Village, Port Credit and Lakeview will be the focus of the study.

According to the report, by 2041 these Lakeshore Communities will grow by approximately 56,000 people along with over 16,000 jobs. Areas like Clarkson will see an additional 7,000 residents, West Village 5,000 residents and the Lakeview Waterfront approximately 20,000 residents.

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Here are some general themes and key messages people provided during the public consultations:

As this is Lakeshore Road, one of the busiest roads in Mississauga, the main focus was on what kind of transit services would be implemented to accommodate the incoming density.

During General Committee on Wednesday May 29, councillors heard from a member of the transportation planning staff that phases were in the works to start implementing the vision behind LCC. 

Phase 1 (between 2020 to 2025) would be divided into three sub-phases. 1a would be about increasing local transit services and reducing wait times. 1b would be upgrading local buses to 60 foot articulated buses to increase capacity.Phase 1c will introduce an express bus layered on top of the existing bus service between West Village and the Long Branch GO station.Phase 2 (from 2025 to 2030), a ‘multi-modal’ phase, would include two sub-phases along Lakeshore from the intersection with Shawnmarr Road to the city’s border with Etobicoke. Phase 2a would implement wider sidewalks, streetscaping, street trees and furniture. Other features of 2a would be a two-way, continuous, dedicated and separated cycle track, as well as median dedicated transit lanes for express bus and BRT services. Vehicle lanes would be maintained during this time.

Phase 2b (between 2031-2041) would be the exact same plans for 2a, except going in the opposite direction of Lakeshore from Shawnmarr Road to Winston Churchill. 

Phase 3 (from 2041 onward) would involve the extension of rail based transit service into Mississauga, creating more seamless transit from Toronto. There are also plans to improve ‘the public realm’ and streetscaping by removing some parking spaces in Port Credit which would get continuously reviewed to determine the ‘appropriate balance for the area’. 

Staff recommended the report be approved by Council and to begin the environmental assessements along Lakeshore, but some were not convinced. 

Ward 1 Coun. Stephen Dasko, whose area is located within the Lakeshore Connecting Communities study area, asked that this report be deferred because he believed some of the issues regarding accommodate more people in the coming years were actually going to be ‘compounded by what was in the report’. “I think there are more questions and concerns that need to be answered before proceeding; we do have a dramatic increase of people coming down there. Not everybody that uses that corridor is local,” Dasko said. 

But Mayor Bonnie Crombie was more adamant in moving forward with the project, saying that there needed to be action in putting together a plan for providing public transit, agreeing with the other councillor who represents the area, Karen Ras, that ‘tweaks’ could be made. “We have over 50,000 people coming into the areas along the Lakeshore corridor in the next 5, 10 to 20 years. We have gridlock down there now, so we need to get people out of cars and onto public transit,” Crombie said, saying it is ideal to build in the transit while building those new communities. 

More information on Lakeshore Connecting Communities can be found here.

Would you be interested in seeing a more diversified use of Lakeshore Road in Mississauga in the future?