Toronto, by and large, does not like car-free urban streets. I mean, we have very few of them. Let's try and name them. The most notable would be the Distillery District. Next to this would perhaps be the intersection of Gould Street & Victoria Street on TMU's campus. Then there's Willcocks Commons at the University of Toronto, though it's not the prettiest.

After this, I can only think of small, unremarkable or temporary ones. I'm not counting seasonal closures. Technically, the Toronto Islands are the largest car-free community in North America, but I wouldn't call this urban. So I'm now at a loss. If I've missed any noteworthy ones, I would be happy to be corrected.

This concise list makes the recently revealed masterplan for the island formerly known as Villiers — now called Ookwemin Minising (or OM) — all the more exciting. The 16-block plan now includes a 760-metre-long, fully pedestrianized public space called Centre Commons. It runs east-west in the site plan below, and is intersected by a north-south street called The Sandbar Trail.

As designed, Centre Commons is expected to be the longest car-free street in the city and look something like this:

This is the space in between the buildings. Equally important is the fact that the new masterplan unlocks a 27% increase in finer-grained density, without compromising on the quality or quantity of public space on the island. This is a major improvement over the previous masterplan, which had all the hallmarks of bland pseudo-urbanism. Meaning, it was supposed to be urban, but it wasn't actually.

I love the above massing diagram because it feels like a real, organic city, as opposed to just a series of repeating towers on podiums. It has a variety of scales and a more fine-grained urban pattern. This, as we have talked about, is notoriously difficult to achieve in new master-planned communities. But it is possible: loop transit through the island, lower the parking requirements, and give developers the freedom to build.

The design team includes SLA of Copenhagen (landscape architects), Trophic (Indigenous-owned landscape architects), GHD (prime consultant and technical lead) and Allies and Morrison of London (architectural lead). And when built out, OM is expected to support approximately 12,000 new homes (including 3,000 affordable homes) and 2,900 new jobs.

I say we build it.

Cover photo by Allies and Morrison

Aerial image from Waterfront Toronto

Centre Commons rendering by Norm Li via SLA

Area plan and massing diagram by SLA

One generalized truism is that European cities are walkable and transit-supportive, and North American cities are not. This is not universally true, but it's often thought to be directionally true. However, a recent paper called "Car Dependency in Urban Accessibility" reveals that this may not be as true as we think.

The study introduces something called a Car Dependency Index (or CDI). What it effectively does is compare accessibility to jobs and services within a city by car versus public transit. They did this for 18 European and North American cities, and here's what they found:

A positive score (red on the map) means that a car can access more opportunities than public transportation, and a negative score (blue on the map) means the opposite. What's not surprising is how car-dependent the outskirts of most cities are, including European cities. Car dependency was high in over 70% of the urban territories that they analyzed.

What is more surprising to me is that most cities don't have much, if any, blue. The best-case scenario seems to be a lot of white (which represents accessibility parity between cars and public transit). Hmm. Does Manhattan really not have any blue? The glaring exception is Paris and, to a lesser extent, Zurich, though keep in mind these are only city proper boundaries.

Another finding is that car dependency remains a primary driver of car ownership, even when accounting for income. What this means is that if you took two people with the exact same income, one living in transit-rich Paris and the other living in the suburbs of Rome, the person in Rome is much more likely to own a car.

Once again, this supports the obvious fact that if we design cities so that they're inconvenient to navigate without a car, well, then more people will get cars. It's not easy to build a transit network that can compete. Individual lines won't do it. The key word is "network." And you need the right land-use policies to support it.

Cover photo by Alessio Ferretti on Unsplash

Charts from "Car Dependency in Urban Accessibility."

Here are some interesting charts from a16z showing that, despite its dominance today, tech still represents a smaller percentage of the US stock market than railroads did at the turn of the 20th century. One parallel you could draw from this is that "tech" as we know it today, may not be so dominant a hundred years from now.

But railroads continue to play a critical function in the modern economy. They are still the most cost-effective way to move heavy goods over long distances. A single freight train can carry the load of several hundred semi-trucks.

The more interesting parallel might be the one that a16z raises in its post: railroads both led to further economic growth and rewired the way businesses and organizations were structured.

Railroads were a new kind of business requiring massive scale and coordination, which led to new ways of thinking about "management." Perhaps not surprisingly, it was around this time (1881) that the world's first collegiate business school was formed at the University of Pennsylvania.

The parallel to AI today, as argued by Jack Dorsey and maybe others, is that it's going to similarly rewire how businesses are organized and what middle management does:

"Instead of absorb and route information, maintain alignment, pre-compute decisions, etc.—the kind of coordination that management typically is responsible for—in an AI business, humans move to the edges, to focus their judgment on customer contact and human interactions."

At least, this is the hypothesis.

But if it does prove to be true, let's consider what we often discuss on this blog, which is: what will it mean for our cities and built environment? Well, what I find interesting about the above quote is that it suggests AI will push humans further toward the things that we are uniquely suited to do: interacting with other humans and building meaningful relationships.

And if that is, in fact, what happens, then there's no more efficient place to be than in dense urban cities. Looking someone in the eyes, shaking their hand, and slurping ramen noodles together at a busy bar counter is not something that AI will be able to do for us.

Cover photo by Mike Beaumont on Unsplash

Charts from a16z