Last month, I wrote about Toronto's proposal to add additional "Avenues" to its urban structure. ("Avenues" is a defined term that I touch on in last month's post). Well, this week the new Avenues Policy went to City Council for debate and approval. You can read all the back and forth via Matt Elliott on X. Not surprisingly, some Councillors were/are opposed to it, fearing it will create some sort of dystopian future for Toronto. An attempt was made to send it back for further study and consultation, which is the typical delay tactic. Comments were made that people in multi-family buildings are lonely because they don't know their neighbors. And it was argued that Kipling Avenue should not be a designated "Avenue", even though it's already called one. (Toronto street suffixes can be weird sometimes.) Thankfully, the new Avenues passed. And this is a big deal for Toronto. Over time, this expanded Avenue network is going to create new housing and employment opportunities, and make transit and other forms of mobility far more viable all across the city. As I said last month, I think it's going to be foundational in helping us move away from the outdated model of the monocentric North American city. Slowly but surely we are laying the groundwork for an urban structure that is actually, and more uniformly, urban.

This is Map 2 from Toronto's Official Plan, dated January 2024. It shows the city's "urban structure", and one of the main things it tells us is where the city is anticipating growth. You have the downtown and central waterfront, urban "Centres", and then "Avenues." All three of these colored areas are where growth and intensification are encouraged. The problem, however, is that it still resembles a mono-centric city, with a dominant core and then mostly low-rise housing surrounding it. The Centres in the inner suburbs are relatively small and many of the Avenues are broken up without a lot of connectivity back to the rest of the city's grid. It sets us up for a divided city -- core versus the rest -- because different built forms naturally create different political priorities.

Now let's look at what Toronto has just proposed in terms of new Avenues (shown above in purple). This is the kind of thing that immediately gets me excited because, as proposed, it implies a significant upzoning for a large portion of the city and it creates a much more uniform urban structure. Here, we have a blanket of intersecting Avenues, which will open up a ton of new housing opportunities and make it far more feasible to build efficient transit and other mobility solutions across the city. In fact, I'd argue that this is one of the most important land use discussions taking place in Toronto today. It's foundational to moving us away from the anachronistic model of the car-oriented North American city.

Now we just need to make it happen, and then empower developers and builders of all scales to build housing and a mix of uses all along these purple lines. For more on this, check out the City of Toronto's Housing Action Plan.

Cover photo by Adam Vradenburg on Unsplash

Sometimes I'll hear people in Toronto talk pejoratively about all of the development that's been happening at Yonge & Eglinton (in midtown). They'll say it's too much density.

But then you come across charts like the ones above (source previously shared here) and you realize that this location is the only section along the new Eglinton Crosstown LRT line that is actually starting to have enough people.

Based on 2021 Census data, there were about 40k people within 800m of the future Eglinton and Mount Pleasant stations. In contrast, there are many downtown stations along the Ontario Line (also under construction) with around 80k people.

Why this is important is because if the objective is to get people to ride this new transit and collect a lot of fares, then the single most important factor is going to be the amount of people that live, work, and play adjacent to each station.

Now, I'm not a transportation planner, but in my mind there are three simple ways to think and go about optimizing for this:

1. You can look at where population densities are already high and then add new transit to service these densities. This is what is happening with the Ontario Line and it was long overdue. We know that ridership is going to be relatively high because of the chart at the top of this post.

2. You can look at where there's existing transit and then work to optimize the land uses around it. This is what we should be doing a better job of along the Bloor-Danforth line, where certain station areas have actually lost people over the last few decades. This is the opposite of what you want next to transit investments.

3. Lastly, you can also proactively plan new transit while simultaneously encouraging more density. An example of this would be the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre (just north of Toronto). Extend the line and encourage growth. This is good. The only thing with this approach is that it can seem a bit misaligned if you're currently failing at #1 and #2.