Yesterday I spoke about why Toronto shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss streetcars and light rail. Today, I’d like to talk about some of the hard decisions we need to face if we really want to get our city moving.

Toronto is a city of neighborhoods and small main streets–at least in the areas where our streetcars live. Streets such as King and Queen are only 4 lanes. And the problem we’re facing is that we’re trying to accommodate every single use case on them: cars, on-street parking, cyclists and streetcars. But in doing so, we’ve made the experience terrible for everybody. Streetcars move at a snail’s pace, drivers are frustrated by the lumbering streetcars, cyclists fear for their life driving by parked cars (doors can swing open at any time), and so on.

And with the rise of downtown shoulder neighborhoods such as Liberty Village, King West, the Distillery District and the soon to be complete West Don Lands, the strain on our east-west corridors is only going to get worse–much worse, in fact. Already the King streetcar is the busiest streetcar route in the city, moving almost 60,000 people per day. That’s more than the (under utilized) Sheppard subway line.

What I hope is clear to the ATC community though, is that the answer isn't uniformly the car. We can’t have every single resident from Parkdale to Leslieville hopping into their car and driving downtown to their office at Yonge & King. It ain’t going to work. And so we’re going to need to make some difficult decisions about how we’re going to get our city moving on the backbone of transit.

Sure the downtown relief subway line (screw the politics I’m attaching it to downtown) would be the ideal solution to connecting our emerging shoulder neighborhoods, but that’s not going to happen overnight. And so how do we improve the efficiency of what we already have? First, we need to accept the fact that every street isn’t going to be everything to everyone at all times. We need to choose who we want to optimize for.

So here’s an idea that’s been floated many times before but never acted upon: let’s get rid of cars on King St and Queen St in the core during rush hour.

This would give our streetcars the room to efficiently move people across downtown, minimizing the dreaded “bunching up” that occurs as a result of traffic congestion. It would make transit a reliable choice and there are ways to pilot it. But let’s be clear: this is not about being anti-car. It’s about optimizing uses and getting people moving. Cars would continue to get priority on Richmond St and Adelaide St, and transit riders (as well cyclists) would get priority on King and Queen.

Of course, the Rob Ford viewpoint would say that we should be optimizing all streets for cars and getting the streetcars completely out of the way. But if that’s the approach we want to take, then we’re building the wrong kind of city. We shouldn’t be focused on intensifying and creating new inner city neighborhoods, because that only tips the scale in favor of transit. Instead, we should be focused on decentralization.

But that’s what not we’re doing. We’re intensifying our city to the point that we’re now faced with a number of difficult–yet enviable–decisions about how we’re going to live and how we’re going to move around in the future. We’re a city in transition.

Our mission here should be to figure out how to move people around the city as efficiently possible. Let’s put politics aside and recognize that time is one of our most precious resources. And when we put people in lumbering streetcars and debilitating traffic jams, we’re completely squandering that resource. It hurts productivity and it hurts our overall prosperity as a global city.

There’s a place for subways, streetcars, buses, bikes and cars in our city. So let’s just get on with making them all work.

This past Wednesday the Globe & Mail newspaper announced that they signed a 15-year lease to be the lead tenant in a new office tower now under construction at 351 King Street East (just west of Parliament Street). This means that the newspaper will be leaving its current digs on the west side of downtown at Front & Spadina.

I have to admit that I was pretty excited when I read the news. The design looks incredibly promising and, as some of you might know, I’m bullish on the east side of downtown.

One of my favourite areas of the city is the Distillery District. But today it still feels very much like an island. And it’s because the city hasn’t really caught up to it. It’s a destination.

However, between the West Don Lands and major office projects such as this one (it’s 500,000 sf), I think the east side of downtown is about to hit its stride.

It’s continuing to “fill in” and this will make more and more people realize how central it actually is to the core - especially in comparison to west side neighbourhoods like Liberty Village.

Amongst my excitement, I did however stop to think about the fact that a newspaper company was taking top spot in a new office tower. Will newspapers even be around for another 15 years?

Yesterday I spoke about why Toronto shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss streetcars and light rail. Today, I’d like to talk about some of the hard decisions we need to face if we really want to get our city moving.

Toronto is a city of neighborhoods and small main streets–at least in the areas where our streetcars live. Streets such as King and Queen are only 4 lanes. And the problem we’re facing is that we’re trying to accommodate every single use case on them: cars, on-street parking, cyclists and streetcars. But in doing so, we’ve made the experience terrible for everybody. Streetcars move at a snail’s pace, drivers are frustrated by the lumbering streetcars, cyclists fear for their life driving by parked cars (doors can swing open at any time), and so on.

And with the rise of downtown shoulder neighborhoods such as Liberty Village, King West, the Distillery District and the soon to be complete West Don Lands, the strain on our east-west corridors is only going to get worse–much worse, in fact. Already the King streetcar is the busiest streetcar route in the city, moving almost 60,000 people per day. That’s more than the (under utilized) Sheppard subway line.

What I hope is clear to the ATC community though, is that the answer isn't uniformly the car. We can’t have every single resident from Parkdale to Leslieville hopping into their car and driving downtown to their office at Yonge & King. It ain’t going to work. And so we’re going to need to make some difficult decisions about how we’re going to get our city moving on the backbone of transit.

Sure the downtown relief subway line (screw the politics I’m attaching it to downtown) would be the ideal solution to connecting our emerging shoulder neighborhoods, but that’s not going to happen overnight. And so how do we improve the efficiency of what we already have? First, we need to accept the fact that every street isn’t going to be everything to everyone at all times. We need to choose who we want to optimize for.

So here’s an idea that’s been floated many times before but never acted upon: let’s get rid of cars on King St and Queen St in the core during rush hour.

This would give our streetcars the room to efficiently move people across downtown, minimizing the dreaded “bunching up” that occurs as a result of traffic congestion. It would make transit a reliable choice and there are ways to pilot it. But let’s be clear: this is not about being anti-car. It’s about optimizing uses and getting people moving. Cars would continue to get priority on Richmond St and Adelaide St, and transit riders (as well cyclists) would get priority on King and Queen.

Of course, the Rob Ford viewpoint would say that we should be optimizing all streets for cars and getting the streetcars completely out of the way. But if that’s the approach we want to take, then we’re building the wrong kind of city. We shouldn’t be focused on intensifying and creating new inner city neighborhoods, because that only tips the scale in favor of transit. Instead, we should be focused on decentralization.

But that’s what not we’re doing. We’re intensifying our city to the point that we’re now faced with a number of difficult–yet enviable–decisions about how we’re going to live and how we’re going to move around in the future. We’re a city in transition.

Our mission here should be to figure out how to move people around the city as efficiently possible. Let’s put politics aside and recognize that time is one of our most precious resources. And when we put people in lumbering streetcars and debilitating traffic jams, we’re completely squandering that resource. It hurts productivity and it hurts our overall prosperity as a global city.

There’s a place for subways, streetcars, buses, bikes and cars in our city. So let’s just get on with making them all work.

This past Wednesday the Globe & Mail newspaper announced that they signed a 15-year lease to be the lead tenant in a new office tower now under construction at 351 King Street East (just west of Parliament Street). This means that the newspaper will be leaving its current digs on the west side of downtown at Front & Spadina.

I have to admit that I was pretty excited when I read the news. The design looks incredibly promising and, as some of you might know, I’m bullish on the east side of downtown.

One of my favourite areas of the city is the Distillery District. But today it still feels very much like an island. And it’s because the city hasn’t really caught up to it. It’s a destination.

However, between the West Don Lands and major office projects such as this one (it’s 500,000 sf), I think the east side of downtown is about to hit its stride.

It’s continuing to “fill in” and this will make more and more people realize how central it actually is to the core - especially in comparison to west side neighbourhoods like Liberty Village.

Amongst my excitement, I did however stop to think about the fact that a newspaper company was taking top spot in a new office tower. Will newspapers even be around for another 15 years?