Electric Dreamway by Jonathan Teo on 500px
As disappointing as this week’s vote on Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway East was, there is one good thing that has come to the forefront and that is the will to explore road pricing. At this point, I have almost no confidence that this City Council would ever vote it in, but at least we’re talking about it. That’s better than not talking about it.
If you’ve been reading Architect This City since the beginning, you might know that I’ve been a vocal supporter of road pricing. I wrote two posts on the topic: The case for electronic road pricing (which was based on an HBS case I did as part of my MBA) and More on electronic road pricing (which was a Lunch & Learn I did while I was at TAS).
I continue to believe that road pricing is a highly sensible solution to big city traffic congestion. But I do think that an electronic/variable pricing model is preferable to and more equitable than a flat toll model. A variable model means that the price of using the road adjusts based on congestion levels and/or the time of day. I also think that we should use as much of the revenues as possible to fund continuous transit improvements.
If you’re interested in learning more about this topic, check out the two posts mentioned above. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on road pricing in the comment section below. Would you welcome it in your city?
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.
Thorncliffe Park Drive (TORONTO) by Jenver Rosales on 500px
Between the 1950s and 1980s, Toronto built a lot of towers. A 2010 report by the Centre for Urban Growth and Renewal identified 1,925 rental apartment towers of 8 storeys or more across the Greater Toronto Area.
That’s the second largest inventory of apartment towers in North America – many or most of which are in car-oriented suburban neighborhoods.
Of course, Toronto continues to build a lot of towers. But this second and current wave of towers is quite different than the last. Virtually all of them are now condo (as opposed to rental) and most are concentrated in central neighborhoods that are generally well-serviced by transit.
This has created a lot of positives for the city. It brought more people into the core to live, which in turn brought more retailers and employers into the city. It has created what I believe is a more vibrant and exciting 24/7 city.
But this return to city centers (as well as the economic spikiness it has created) is now well established both in Toronto, as well as in other cities all around the world. Every real estate conference or panel you go to now talks about Millennials and their desire to be in walkable communities. We got it.
And relatively speaking, those kinds of communities aren’t that difficult to create when you’re infilling city centers. Certainly not at this point. The street grid and bones are usually all in place. And the urban form is often conducive to transit.
The real challenge – and thus opportunity – for Toronto and lots of other cities is how to urbanize the (inner) suburbs and in particular these “towers in a park”. If you follow this space, you’ll know that there’s a lot more that we could be doing.
How do we rethink their relationship to the rest of the city? How do we better connect them through transit? How do we plug them in economically? In my opinion, these are far more difficult tasks. But they’re important ones for the long-term success of our cities.