Dundas BRT hits its first expropriation fight as corridor buying begins
The busway's eastern segments need slices of forty properties. The first holdouts are testing what "fair market" means on a street mid-transformation.
Property acquisition for the Dundas bus rapid transit line has reached the contested stage: the project needs partial takings from about forty properties along its eastern Mississauga segments, and the first group of owners has rejected the opening offers, triggering the formal expropriation process.
The dispute is less about whether the busway comes — that argument ended with the funding agreements — than about arithmetic on a street in transition. Owners argue their strips of frontage should be priced against what Dundas is becoming under its new corridor zoning, towers and all; the appraisals price what stands there today. Between those two numbers sits every expropriation hearing ever held.
The project team insists the schedule holds regardless, since hearings can run parallel to early works. Veterans of the region's last few transit builds will recognize that sentence and reserve judgment.
For Brampton readers the file is worth watching for its ending: the Dundas BRT is the westernmost link in a bus network that eventually meets our own Queen Street corridor. How fast Mississauga clears its right-of-way is one of the quiet variables in when a crosstown trip through the western GTA stops requiring a car.