I try not to focus on local Toronto issues this much, but this morning an important initiative was announced and it’s blowing up my Twitter feed.
By spring 2017, the city hopes to have a pilot project in place that will transform King Street – running from Liberty Village in the west to the Distillery District in the east – into a priority-transit and pedestrian corridor.
This isn’t to say the street will be closed to cars. I would imagine that at least 1 lane would remain for cars going each way. Instead it will be redesigned to prioritize transit, pedestrians, and cyclists.
So why is this exciting?
The King streetcar is currently broken. If you’ve ever taken it across downtown during rush hour, you know exactly what I mean. It’s infuriating. You might as well be crawling on your hands and knees. One of the goals of this initiative will be to get it working again. Good.
The shoulders of downtown – along King West and King East – are seeing some of the greatest intensification in the region. So much that it’s common for people in this city to complain that Toronto misplanned it all by allowing this development before the transit was there. Well, this is a quick and inexpensive way to get the transit there. Remember that when the inevitable “war on car” rhetoric ratchets up over the next year.
The project will be deployed, first, as a pilot project. That will allow the project team to test and iterate. It has also become the way you get things approved in cities. You first make them temporary.
But I am certain that we will quickly discover how necessary these changes were.
Last week I tweeted out a Tweetstorm with some of the key facts from this City of Toronto study on the downtown core. Here are two of those tweets:
1/ Since 2006, downtown Toronto ’s population has been growing at 18%. That’s 4x the growth rate of the entire city. #athiscity
— Brandon G. Donnelly (@donnelly_b)
12/ Over 40% of downtown Toronto residents walk or cycle to work. 34% take transit. And 25% drive. #athiscity
— Brandon G. Donnelly (@donnelly_b)
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While I realize that reading city reports is probably not everyone’s idea of fun, it is a good one if you want to understand the massive change that is taking place in Toronto right now and also the importance of the downtown core for this region.
To put things into perspective, consider that the downtown core (including King West, King East, and the Portlands) is estimated to be responsible for 51% of the entire wealth generated in this city. And yet its physical area is easily less than 10% of the entire city (which is about 630 square kilometers).
That’s fascinating to me.
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?
