It’s very easy, and very valid, to declare that Toronto is irreparably broken. But I don’t think it’s quite fair to describe the city as lazy or complacent with the status quo. Toronto has already thoroughly transformed itself — to an extent that required a lot of big decisions from a lot of actors — and will continue transforming at breakneck speed. To some extent, we’re in a trough where the external changes are upon us, but our policy responses are still underway and yet to be completed (this is most notable in the case of transit). And to some extent, we’re realizing that the changes we’re seeing are even bigger than anticipated, and the ambition of our policy must be ramped up to another level. Either way, it’s worth taking stock. I’ll focus on the urbanism aspects, since this is the topic I read about the most, and (as a single, childless, able-bodied twenty-something) my primary form of interaction with the city.
Mass Transit
The GO Expansion is a massive conversion from “commuter rail” to the kind of “regional rail” system found in the rest of the world, and the only such conversion in North America. This package of infrastructure upgrades and electrification will lead to more trains to more destinations, faster. Weekly trains will quadruple to 6,000, as five of the seven lines get all-day two-way service. Trains to Hamilton will take less than an hour. Ridership is projected to soar from 68.5m in 2017 to over 200m eventually.
Line 5 will open soon and an extension is already under construction; Line 6 will open soon after; Line 3 (an automated Skytrain with super-high frequency) will finally add a third trunk to the downtown core; Lines 1 and 2 are being extended. Light rail will open in Peel Region and Hamilton, and will be extended in Kitchener-Waterloo.
Equally heartening are the smaller things that the subway is getting right: since 2011, Line 1 has trains with open gangways (something New York’s MTA, for example, is dragging its feet on), and Line 2 will follow suit. Line 1’s conversion to Automatic Train Operation was completed last year, with Line 2 to follow. Every station will be accessible within a year or two, and Bloor-Yonge will be thoroughly rebuilt (as Union was in 2014) for more capacity.
The “RapidTO” network of dedicated bus lanes opened its first segment in October 2020, and a total of twenty routes across the city are under consideration for the coming decade. Electric buses are being added to the fleet.
Room for Improvement: Yes, there’s always more that could be done, but Toronto should be proud of its current pace of progress.
- Dedicated bus lanes could be going much faster, especially when considering Montreal’s “Mouvement Bus”, which hopes to carry 70% of bus riders on dedicated lanes by 2025, including on six full-time lanes. (25 busways have been installed since 2017, mostly rush hour-only.) Meanwhile, neighbouring York Region has done the difficult task of building out a network of bus-only “rapidways”, but runs paltry service on them outside of rush hour.
- Line 5 is infuriatingly designed and risks being the worst of both worlds: the construction costs of a subway and the unreliability of a tram. An Eglinton East LRT that is separate from Line 5 (which is the current plan) would also be infuriating. We’ll have to wait and see how much the surface segment disrupts operations—a fundamental rethink (such as cutting the line in two) should be on the table.
- The Front-Spadina station should have platforms for all services rather than just some, which is the current plan. And other infill stations would be nice — some Line 3 stations that are being shut down can be replaced on the Stouffville Line; a Lakeshore West station at Roncesvalles/Queen/King would complement the streetcar network excellently.
Then there’s this report, which suggests that all this building will barely shift the mode share of transit vs. car through 2041. It might suggest that improving the extent and quality of transit + bike isn’t enough — that actively penalizing car travel (through eg. tolling and congestion pricing) might be necessary.
Place-Making
The city’s main streets have increasingly made room for bikes: the Bloor St. lanes began with a temporary lane in the Annex in 2016, and will be extended along its entire length (across the whole city!) by 2024. Yonge Street up to Davisville has gotten bike lanes (in a 2021 pilot, recently made permanent), College Street downtown is getting separated bike lanes, and much of Eglinton will as well. All of this progress is quite recent — and yet we’re now at the point where bike lanes are expected in the average major-street redesign.
Bike Share Toronto has seen its ridership triple between 2017 and 2022. E-bikes were launched in 2020 and will be 20% of the fleet by 2025.
Yonge St. downtown will be redesigned to become a shared space.
Lastly, I’ve noted in this thread that mixed-use developments appear to be getting normalized, with Mirvish Village doing a particularly good job of delivering on housing, commerce, and good street design.
Room for Improvement: I’m afraid there’s little creativity from me regarding street redesigns, besides wishing for more, faster — each implementation should shrink the preparation time for subsequent proposals. I’d love for other commercial arteries to get the shared-space treatment, particularly roads like Queen and College, where clearing car traffic would also make streetcars more reliable. (Incidentally, all of the streetcar routes will be part of the RapidTO study.)
I also have some particularly maximalist ideas, informed by my time in Tokyo, about allowing commercial use along most major roads and normalizing commerce above the ground floor. This will be fleshed out in the future.
Housing
This is something that, as a newcomer to Toronto, I needed explained to me: downtown Toronto has completely changed its appearance in the last 20 years. The city as a whole added 100,000 condo units in the 2000s, more than doubling the pace of previous decades, and then did it again in the 2010s.
While these clusters of towers are concentrated in the downtown core, they are also sprouting up in Midtown, North York, and in city centres across the GTA. By Johnny Renton’s tabulation, adding together the residential units “under construction, in sales, proposed, or being planned” within a half-mile of a GO train (existing or planned) yields enough homes for over 485,000 people. (Whether “planned” towers are likely to actually come to fruition, I am unsure.) This figure includes the units planned for the Port Lands (near the East Harbour station), which number 4900 in the latest plan but are likely to be increased further. And I believe the figure excludes Square One in Mississauga, which is not within walking distance of a GO train.
And this is before the recent spate of legislation to boost housing supply: the province’s Bill 23 would allow three units per lot as of right and higher densities near transit (along with… other things). Toronto has legalized Multiplexes of four units in all neighbourhoods.
Room for Improvement: In short, a lot: Ontario is falling far short of its target of 1.5 million homes in 10 years, and that’s even after counting the sprawly development that we don’t necessarily want more of.
“Tall and sprawl” is the current model of development — building more means leaning in harder on the tall, while densifying the sprawl.
- Ford’s own Housing Affordability Task Force recommended four units in four stories allowed as of right, and eleven stories on major roads. Even better would be four stories everywhere with no unit caps — even by the standard of maintaining “neighbourhood character”, it makes little sense to regulate more than height and lot coverage.
- If the present provincial government wants to lean in on high density around MTSAs (though its prescriptions there still seem vague?), it could approve infill stations on the five frequent GO corridors and build dense communities around them. The Kitchener Line is particularly attractive for this, given that Kitchener-Waterloo is fast becoming an economic hub in its own right.
Cover photo including Raysonho/Wikimedia Commons and TheTrolleyPole/Wikimedia Commons
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