Three months ago when Toronto City Council voted not to remove the Gardiner Expressway East (which in my view was a mistake), it did so with a commitment to look at tolling options for both the Gardiner Expressway and the Don Valley Parkway (which in my view is a positive thing).
Last week a preliminary report was released discussing some of those tolling options. If reading dry city reports is your thing, you can do that here.
The Coles Notes version (CliffNotes for you Americans) is that a $3 flat toll on both the Gardiner and the DVP – the same cost as riding transit in this city – would be expected to reduce vehicles on the highways by 9% and 12%, as well reduce end-to-end travel times by 3 minutes and 5 minutes, respectively. There’s obviously a lot more in the report, but these figures stood out for me.
Given how monumental the 3 minute delay was in the Gardiner East debates, it will be interesting to see whether people treat a 3 minute time savings in a similar way. I suspect they won’t. The cost will be the larger issue.
I’ve been a vocal supporter of tolls and road pricing on this blog. One of the main reasons for that is because I view the demand for highways as being largely inelastic and therefore a potentially great source of transit funding.
The discouraging part of the above report is that its primary goal is to explore tolls for the purpose of “offsetting capital, operating, and maintenance costs.” The primary goal is not to come up with sustainable sources of transit funding.
Having these costs paid for by user-fees as opposed to general taxes is still a good thing in my view. But an even better thing would be to help fund mobility solutions that we know will be far more effective at getting people around this region as millions more people move here in the coming decades.
The other discouraging part of the report is that near the end it explains that while the City of Toronto Act of 2006 allows for toll highways, they cannot be implemented without the Province passing regulation.
It’s a reminder that our governance structures do not reflect the current urban reality of this country.
Toronto Slide by Kyle Anstey on 500px
Next weekend a good friend of mine from architecture school will be visiting Toronto from Philadelphia. And I’m really excited to show him the city. (Next month it’s my turn to go to Philadelphia.)
He’s a fellow city geek. He hasn’t been to Toronto in a number of years. And I haven’t seen him since our trip to Detroit 2 years ago.
For those of us living and working in Toronto, there’s a lot to celebrate. Sure the Gardiner Expressway East decision didn’t go as I – as well as many other urbanists, including our Chief City Planner – had hoped. But there’s no shortage of other things to brag about.
So here are 10 reasons to visit Toronto right now:
1. We’ve created an entirely new business district south of Union Station called South Core. Now the region’s primary mobility hub is in the middle of the country’s most important business district, as opposed to on the edge of it. It’s a better use of infrastructure.
2. We now have a dedicated train (the Union Pearson Express) that takes you from the country’s busiest airport directly to downtown in 25 minutes. You’ll find local retailers at the stations and a brand created by the brain behind Monocle Magazine. You can even use a smart card to ride it and our local transit system.
3. We didn’t shut down Uber. Instead our mayor wants to create new policy that will allow these services to coexist with conventional taxi services. We don’t yet know how this will turn out, but I believe it’s a step in the right direction. It’s Toronto taking a leadership approach to innovation as opposed to trying to stomp it out.
4. We are about to host the largest sporting event in Canadian history. The 17th Pan American Games will have double the number of athletes competing as the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.
5. We created an entire neighborhood from scratch in order to house all of these athletes (Canary District). And I think it’s destined to become one of Toronto’s great neighborhoods. I’m saving my first visit for next weekend, so expect a follow-up post on this.
6. We are dramatically rethinking this city’s public realm. From the plaza out front of Union Station to the new Queens Quay Boulevard along the waterfront, we are prioritizing people and creating more complete streets. It has given Toronto an entirely new urban feel.
7. We are slowly starting to embrace our forgotten laneways and alleys through the help of organizations like The Laneway Project. And this is going to eventually lead to a further rethink of our pubic spaces and urban fabric.
8. We continue to be one of the fastest growing cities in the world (certainly in the developed world). As a result, we are building some really exciting buildings by some of the top architects in the world. This includes everyone from Norman Foster to Frank Gehry.
9. According to a recent report coming out of the Martin Prosperity Institute, Canada is one of the most creative and globally competitive countries in the world, as well as the most open to “ethnic and religious minorities and gay and lesbian people.”
10. The ATC community is in the process of identifying a new, quintessentially Toronto food dish. But since we have every type of imaginable cuisine here, we’re struggling to pick just one. When you visit, you can help us identify the best and most Toronto dish.
So there’s a lot to be excited about. I for one can’t wait for us to host the Pan Am Games, starting tomorrow. It’s a chance to show off this great city.
So if you’re also in town next weekend and want to geek out about cities, drop me a line.
Today is very sad day for Toronto.
After 2 days of debate, City Council voted this afternoon, 24-21, in favor of rebuilding the elevated Gardiner Expressway East (”hybrid” option) that runs along the city’s eastern waterfront.
And once again, Toronto is largely divided. See above image prepared by Joel Eastwood and William Davis.
It’s the old city of Toronto (who uniformly wanted the elevated highway replaced with a boulevard) versus the rest of the city (who for the most part voted for the hybrid).
I can’t begin to tell you how deeply disappointed I am by not only the outcome, but also by how it happened and why it may have happened. For all of our talk about being a progressive global city, today we are clearly not that.
Because more than a vote on what to do with the Gardiner East, today was a vote on how we believe we should be building this city for the future.
When the Gardiner East was first built, the vision was one of fluid private mobility, where it would be possible to quickly circle around and across the city on an endless sea of highways. Detroit was doing it. Baltimore was doing it. Everybody was doing it.
In other words, we were building our environment around the car. And our primary – some would say singular – focus was to ensure that the car could move unencumbered around the city. That’s why Toronto is now home to the busiest and one of the widest highways in the world.
But despite all this, Toronto remains crippled by gridlock. And so does every other big city city in the world that has bet on cars as the solution. Why is that?
Because that model doesn’t work.
The I-10 Katy Freeway in Houston is 26 lanes at its widest point. It is the largest highway in the world by number of lanes. But from 2011 to 2014, commute times in some sections increased by as much as 51%. Is that because they haven’t built enough highway? How much is enough?
By comparison let’s look at a city that has bet on transit as the solution: Tokyo.
The metropolitan area of Tokyo is approximately 37.8 million people. That’s more than the entire population of Canada and by most accounts is the largest urban region in the world. But despite its size, Tokyo is consistently ranked as one of the most livable cities in the world and also one of the most efficiently run.
Interesting.
So when I heard Councillors going on today about how a vote for the “hybrid” is a vote not to increase congestion and gridlock, it became abundantly clear that many – apparently most – people in this city still do not appreciate what it is going to take to get us efficiently moving as this region approaches 10 million people by 2041.
This should not have been a debate about 3 minutes. That, as I’ve said before, is a red herring.
Of course, there was lots of lip service to transit. Many seemed to agree that transit is the future. And some even went so far as to say that removing the Gardiner East and replacing it with a boulevard is the right thing to do, but that we simply can’t do it now because we haven’t made the requisite investments in transit.
If transit is truly what we want, then we why don’t we take the boulevard savings and put it directly into transit?
To me it’s like saying: I really want to be homeowner, but I can’t afford it right now. So instead, I’m going spend more on rent so that I can burn through more money and make it even more difficult for myself to eventually become a homeowner.
Because that is what happened today.
We voted to overspend on a stretch of elevated highway that is used by a small sliver of downtown commuters (~3%), instead of replacing it with a cost-effective surface boulevard (with similar road capacities) and then prioritizing the proven solution to urban congestion: transit.
At the same time, we also made a number of other things clear in today’s vote.
We made it clear that cars matter more than our city’s public realm; that cars matter more than our waterfront revitalization plans; that cars matter more than our environment and our “efforts” to reduce GHG emissions; and, frankly, that cars matter more than our overall quality of urban life.
I believe that cars will always be a part of our cities, but I don’t believe in putting them ahead of you and I. I guess old habits die hard. That my friends, really sucks.