These charts, from the School of Cities at the University of Toronto, are an excellent use case for a ternary chart. A ternary chart is a triangular plot with three different variables that all sum to a constant. In this case, the charts compare driving, walking/biking (active transport), and taking transit, with the constant being 100%. The data is from the 2022-23 Transportation Tomorrow Survey.

What is clear from the first image above is that Old Toronto (also known as the former City of Toronto before amalgamation) is unlike any other municipality in Ontario. Its tight, pre-car urban fabric and transit coverage mean that nearly 65% of people walk, bike, or take transit! This is compared to about 43% for the entirety of the city today; meaning, Old Toronto is the only place where driving isn't the majority mode.

The second chart above shows mode share by age. What is interesting to see, though not surprising, is that younger people are more likely to walk, bike, and take transit. Here, the figures peak between the ages of 15-19 with over 66% of trips falling into these categories, which is just slightly above the Old Toronto figure. Then, as people get older and have greater incomes (which is another one of the charts), they move toward driving.

Of course, this doesn't mean that all older people must drive. There are lots of older people who live in Old Toronto where doing something other than driving makes up the majority of trips. Urban form, density, and access to transit play the most important roles in determining what modes of transport people will choose and what they find most convenient.

Cover photo by Mitch Hodiono on Unsplash

Charts from the School of Cities

Back in 2016, the New York Times published an article where it cited that at least 40% of the buildings in Manhattan could not be built today because they don't conform to the city's zoning code for one or more reasons. These reasons might include too much density (FSI / FAR), too many units, inadequate setback requirements, or something else.

This is a tricky number to estimate as most cities don't track it, but I asked Gemini and Claude to try for Toronto, and they returned 70-80% and 45-55%, respectively. Claude's estimate seems to be lower because it assumed that all of the subdivided single-family houses are now legal because of the new multiplex permissions.

I don't know about that, but the point is that there's a meaningful, non-zero quantity of buildings in our cities that we decided to make illegal, and generally difficult, or impossible to build again. The thing that I'm most interested in dissecting is: why?

Here's one way to look at it. My follow-up question to both AI models was: What percentage of buildings within a Heritage Conservation District would you say are illegal to build in Toronto today? And both models agreed that the number is 90%+, and probably very close to 100%.

Heritage Conservation Districts are a way of saying "these buildings and this urbanism is so good, that it's worth preserving through extra layers of planning protection." But at the same time, our other policies say, "you shall never build anything like this ever again." It's incoherent.

A more coherent approach might be to call them Heritage Renewal Districts where we instead codify the following: "this district is now illegal based on our current planning rules and so the objective is to tear it all down and replace it with new, approved buildings." Sounds like blasphemy, doesn't it? So then why block more of it?

If it's worth conserving, then it's worth building more of. What ought to be obvious is that we need more rather than less planning flexibility, and we need to legalize the things that have been proven to work, like traditional fine-grained patterns of city-building.

Cover photo by Ayman Hallak on Unsplash

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