One Great City
During a Jane’s Walk earlier this month (some highlights were captured on video here), I walked along a portion of the multi-use trail in the Finch Hydro Corridor.
It was not visibly used by neighbours on a sunny Saturday afternoon, but for what little it costs to build these connections, they ought to blanket the suburbs. A network of trails would be a lot more useful than a single linear path.
It also couldn’t hurt to clear them of snow in the winter.
Above is the road down into Bluffers Park. It has no sidewalk. As a pedestrian, the safer way down to the lake involves so much clambering and scrabbling that it must be doing ecological harm to the bluffs.
But you should still go. (Maybe drive.) I’ve lived in Toronto for two years now and I had no idea that the Scarborough Bluffs are serious features of the landscape — an imposing and beautiful flank for a city whose topography is otherwise predominantly gentle. These pair well with the more picturesque ravines.
Wired reports scientists have observed that most subway networks evolve certain similar patterns over time, among them:
The distance from a city’s center to its farthest terminus station is twice the diameter of the subway system’s core.
So I took this rule and applied it to Toronto’s subway network, such as it is. (I have to admit, it is pretty remarkable to see all the funded rail extensions—black dotted lines—in the city all on one map.) Click on the map above to view it at a better resolution.
The distance from Bloor-Yonge station, Toronto’s main subway interchange, to McCowan at the far end of the Scarborough RT is roughly 16 kilometres. That means Toronto’s core, centred on Yonge and Bloor, should be 8 kilometres across.
And it turns out that isn’t an implausible definition of Toronto’s core: between the existing Dufferin and Donlands stations in the west and east, and from the waterfront in the south to Eglinton in the north. Eerily, the boundaries of this mathematical core are roughly outlined by the underground Eglinton LRT, under construction at this moment, and the general route of the forever-delayed Queen/Don Mills subway (represented by the grey dashed line).
On yesterday’s Jane’s Walk “From Finch to Farm.”
If a transit agency’s objective is to get cars off the road, then like any business you start by focusing on your competition’s weaknesses. The car is least convenient in areas of high density and good walkability, and geometrically these also provide the the highest ridership per unit of investment. The one other area is the suburban commute corridor — the freeway into the city — where congestion during peak periods makes the car a weak competitor. That’s why peak commute services — to Park-and-Ride, not to people’s front doors — is also a high-ridership prospect, and one that gets cars off the road efficiently.
Again, there’s nothing wrong with running bus routes around in low-density suburbs. But it is a low-ridership proposition and therefore can’t be justified by many sustainability outcomes; it’s justification has to lie in social needs and perceptions of equity among neighborhoods. If your city really wants to get cars off the road, however, it’s not a good way to serve that purpose.
This kind of confusion is why elected officials should be asked to think more clearly about how they want to balance the conflict between ridership-related goals (including lower subsidy, fewer cars on the road, and resulting sustainability outcomes) or coverage-related goals (including lifeline access and “equity” across all arts of a community. Both goals are noble, but don’t pretend to be doing one if you’re really doing the other.
I’m reading Jarrett Walker’s book Human Transit. It has really helped, along with his blog, to clarify my thinking about what public transit is for and what it can achieve.
This passage reminds me how lucky we are in Toronto that the choice between equity and ridership isn’t as stark (and difficult) as in many American cities. Toronto’s suburbs are reasonably dense and organized in a way that supports transit. The main 2-km grid of roads supports a network of frequent—if not rapid—buses across the city, and while the TTC loses money operating it, we manage to sustain high ridership without hemorrhaging an operating subsidy at the same rate as most peer cities.
The Finch West bus for example, starting 14 km north of downtown at Yonge Street, promises a bus every 10 minutes as far west as Martin Grove Road, 15 km away, from 6 AM to midnight. And service is 5 minutes or better for a substantial portion of the route until early evening. If we could get the buses out of traffic congestion (coming in 2020 with the Finch West LRT, fingers crossed), a huge swath of post-war suburbia would be cost-effectively served by what is practically rapid transit.
Most of the credit for our lucky circumstances doesn’t go to the TTC and its frustratingly irregular service*, but to decisions made by politicians and planners several decades ago about the form of suburban growth in the city. It is heartening to see townhouses being built on the urban fringe again because even if the new suburbs are dominated by cars today, they will hopefully be easy to serve with public transit in the future.
*Although it no doubt helps that the TTC has been running buses out to the post-war suburbs since shortly after they were built.
There are so many different ways to be upset with this development that it is hard to know where to begin or what is most important to emphasize.
As a practical political matter, this is discouraging because it sucks the oxygen out of the room and basically shuts down whatever serious discussions we were starting to have as a city, despite the mayor, about important things. It occurred to me tonight that Mayor Ford is kind of like a Kardashian, in the sense that he is very good at getting media coverage but he does not intentionally wield that exposure to the benefit of the public.
And of course, I know it happens in other countries, but no reporter should fear for his or her safety for covering municipal politics. This is not Moscow. It’s not even Chicago. We rightly hold everyone to a higher standard of behaviour. The mayor shouldn’t be acting like a vigilante to protect his family. And in his defence (somewhat undermined by his over-reaction to Mary Walsh’s comedy routine, but nonetheless), he shouldn’t feel like he needs to protect his family by force; the police ought to have a constant presence near chez Ford considering the mayor’s controversial public life and the troubled private life of his extended family.
This is such a mess. Such and unhelpful mess.
I’m worried that no matter how much City Council gets its act together and governs through a vacuum of leadership for the next two years, these kinds of incidents will periodically be ignited by the mayor and derail everything.
EDIT: Now that I’ve had a day to think about it and wait for the smoke to clear, I think this captures the whole mess perfectly: send in the clowns.
This past Wednesday at 401 Richmond, the Centre for City Ecology held an event called Let’s Make a Deal to help explain to interested lay-people and community members how Section 37, the density bonusing section of the Planning Act, actually works.
They intend to post a video and/or podcast of the event online (probably here) but it wasn’t up yet the last time I checked. Luckily, Torontoist was there to recap the conversation.
The legal and political mechanics of Section 37 bonusing are undeniably important, especially to communities staring down a developer and/or a megalomaniacal councillor. But I found the discussion of the purpose of Section 37 particularly interesting.
Those of us who think about the city a lot do take Section 37 for granted. It’s an all-purpose way to get the stuff we want, from flavours-of-the-month like green roofs to staples like affordable housing. Or at least I do. But what is it actually meant to accomplish and what does it achieve in reality?
Why do we have Section 37 in the first place?
The way one of the panellists, lawyer Patrick Devine, described it, Section 37 of the planning act was intended to give cities the same oversight and control of vertical developments that they already had over horizontal developments through the subdivision planning process. Essentially, it is supposed to be a carrot that cities use to ensure vertical developments make good neighbours and positive contributions to the city.
This challenges the more popular view of Section 37 bonusing as a way of extracting as much blood (or treasure) from developers as possible. At the extreme, this is justified by the belief that essentially all the profit from building above whatever the base zoning allows should flow to the community. More reasonably, I think many people see Section 37 as a way to make up for the hardship of living under longer shadows and tolerating greater traffic congestion.
Whatever it was supposed to be, Section 37 of the Planning Act is written in such a way that cities can trade increased height and density for just about anything, provided they clear the minor hurdle of allowing for such things in their official plans. For better or worse, it grants cities the kind of autonomy and responsibility they so desperately need but are too reluctant to prove they can handle. Given such flexibility, what should we actually want to accomplish with Section 37 density bonusing?
What is Section 37 good for?
In principle, I’m not sure we should even be exercising this power because it deters density by putting an extra cost on it. Over time, these costs make our city more expensive for everyone by restricting the supply of housing. (If the rich can’t build their towers in Yorkville, they will buy up more modest duplexes in the west end and push the rest of us out to Oshawa.) The cost of housing aside, density is what makes cities great places and we should encourage it for its own sake. There are fairer ways to pay for the benefits that the city extracts from developers.
But there are people who say that Section 37 is an effective workaround of the glacial bureaucracy at City Hall. In the parts of our city that receive a lot of Section 37 benefits—the parts that are also experiencing rapid redevelopment—they are filling an urgent need for investment that the machinery of city government can’t keep up with. You need serious repairs in your local park due to all the new residents in your neighbourhood? Your choices, apparently, are to wait years for your request to be processed through the municipal meat grinder and hopefully be deemed worthy of assistance from the city’s general revenues, or to convince your local councillor to direct Section 37 benefits to the same end in a much shorter time.
One man at the Let’s Make a Deal event—I didn’t catch his name but he plays an important role in a residents association somewhere between downtown and midtown—complained that Section 37 benefits function exactly as described above, but in more pejorative terms: essentially, as a way to buy off everybody involved by throwing around a nearly meaningless amount of developers’ cash. (The amount of money involved is, in fact, a pittance. The other panellist, planner John Gladki, reported that developers have paid about $200 million over the past decade under Section 37, which is in the ballpark of what the city collects from the land transfer tax in a single year.) Developers buy councillors, councillors buy communities, and communities re-elect councillors who play the game.
Greasing squeaky wheels for a good cause.
I think this this system of mutual back scratching might, on the whole, be OK. Some councillors certainly encourage cynicism, but the downtown councillors who shepherd the bulk of the city’s development (and Section 37 benefits) are getting pretty good at aligning community and developer interests. They are squeezing thousands more people into the city, including many neighbourhoods that are already established and often wealthy, without provoking a voter revolt. That’s no small accomplishment.
Just yesterday, I learned a new word (in the context of food trucks): kludge. “A kludge (or kluge) is a workaround, a quick-and-dirty solution, a clumsy or inelegant, yet effective, solution to a problem, typically using parts that are cobbled together.” “Something that works for the wrong reason.” That sounds like Section 37 to me.
If or when Cumberland Terrace is redeveloped, I hope the city takes the opportunity to upgrade Cumberland Street itself. East of Bay Street, it’s a dead zone of unfriendly design—public and private—in an otherwise very walkable neighbourhood.
It’s also just looking a little tired and out of date. The purpose of this traffic sign, for example, could be accomplished so much more elegantly with a nice planted bollard.
And of course I hope the new building is required to actually address the street .
There is already an excellent framework for developing the Port Lands over the next few decades. It is troubling that we are revisiting this framework and risking, apparently, cheapening the outcome, particularly what was supposed to be a spectacular new park at the Don mouth. This is a once-in-a-generation chance to build new, high-quality urban neighbourhoods and a public asset on the scale of High Park.
If we need to take the development slowly to get the Port Lands right, there is no doubt in my mind that we should take it slowly. If the problem is that governments cannot stomach the necessary up-front investments, Waterfront Toronto should have the power to borrow money so that future Torontonians—who will benefit from our investments today—can help shoulder the burden.
Let’s not mess this up.
Let’s compare the Port Lands to Manhattan.
