Recently a good friend of mine told me that I had conflicting views in the world of politics.
She more or less said to me: I know you’re a real estate developer and obviously a capitalist (read: right of center), but you also support what are often considered to be left of center issues. Issues like tearing down the Gardiner Expressway and building more bike lanes.
I thought this was an interesting comment because, regardless of whether or not you agree with the categorization she was making, the unfortunate reality is that sometimes (oftentimes?) city building issues do become about left vs. right. Bike vs. cars. Urban vs. suburban. And the list goes on.
My response to her was that I don’t care about what side of the political spectrum an issue supposedly falls on. That’s a distraction. When I think about something, I try and apply rationale thought and facts to the best that I can.
For instance, in the case of bike lanes, I have asked myself: would cities be better off if we had more, or less, people cycling? Simple question. And when I think about this and look at some of the numbers, I see a lot of benefits (this is a non-exhaustive list):
- More people cycling means we’re moving people more efficiently, which you could argue improves urban productivity and overall quality of life.
- More people cycling means we will naturally start prioritizing more compact types of urban form, which in itself has a myriad of socioeconomic benefits.
- More people cycling means we’re actually taking action to try and fight climate change.
- And more people cycling means we’re improving health outcomes. Given that public spending on health care is one of the largest government expenditures in OECD countries, I bet you could find measurable financial savings.
With all of this, I am not naively suggesting that all cars should disappear from our cities and that everyone should only cycle. I think electric vehicles and self-driving vehicles are going to be an important part of the mobility equation in the future. But I am saying that more, not less, cycling strikes me as an obviously positive thing for our cities.
On that note…
Toronto City Council voted today in favor (38-3) of a pilot project that will bring separated bike lanes to Bloor Street. The image at the top of this post is how each Councillor voted. So today, we appear to have not fallen into the divide that my friend was talking about. And that makes me, as well as many others, quite happy.
Im looking forward to riding #bikesonbloor and shopping on Bloor and hanging out there. I might buy a piano. #topoli
— Cherise Burda (@CheriseBurda) May 4, 2016
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I would be curious how all of you feel about this particular issue. And I would also be curious if you find yourself being more issued based rather than aligned across the political spectrum. That’s certainly how I feel these days.
I bet we could have a great discussion on this topic in the comment section below :)
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.
Yesterday City Council voted 34 to 3 in favor of allowing more food trucks on the streets of Toronto (125 of them to be exact).
Food trucks will be allowed to roam and park in pay-and-display spots on city streets as well as in private lots. However, the total number of trucks can’t exceed 125; they’re not allowed to park for more than 3 hours in one spot; and they can’t park within 50 metres of a restaurant.
Most supporters of food trucks in this city are calling it a baby step forward. A lot of the reforms that they had been advocating for were not achieved with this vote. Frankly, I find it surprising how long this discussion has been going on for and how we’re still at the point of baby steps.
But perhaps even more surprising, is the fact that I agree with Rob Ford on this issue:
Mayor Rob Ford advocated for less regulation, arguing that people who make a date to go to a restaurant don’t change their mind and buy a hot dog when they pass a cart. “I think putting all this red tape around people, that’s not very friendly,” he said. “This is free enterprise. This is capitalism. Let them sell what they want and let the customer decide.”
The concern from the other side is that food carts are going to threaten Toronto’s restaurant industry and turn our streets into the wild west of food service–hence the 50m rule. But I actually think the opposite could end up proving to be true. I think food trucks could end up empowering entrepreneurs.
When I used to live in Philadelphia, which is a city with a thriving food truck scene (people publish food truck guides), I practically lived off the things. For breakfast I would go to this couple who barely spoke English and they would make me an egg and cheese sandwich for $2.50. And for lunch, I would go to the guy some people called the “nice little Mexican boy” for a burrito. It was somewhere around $5. And his food truck was so small that I had to duck while ordering food so I didn’t hit my head.
At first I actually found it odd to be consuming egg sandwiches and burritos from trucks that would pack up and leave at the end of the day. I kept thinking I was going to get sick. But I warmed to the idea and learned to love them. As does everybody else.
In fact, we loved our food trucks so much that when Renzo Piano–the Italian Pritzker Prize-winning architect–came to Penn to talk about how he had been retained to redesign the School of Design’s building, somebody stood up and asked: “How are you going to accommodate the food trucks in your design?” Renzo responded perfectly and said something along the lines of: “I’m Italian. Don’t worry, I will provide for the food.”
But my point of all this is to say that instead of looking at food trucks as a threat to our restaurant industry, we should be looking at them as a way to empower more entrepreneurs to take the risk on starting something for themselves–many of which could end up being new Canadians. The “nice little Mexican boy” also barely spoke English and looked young enough to be in high school. But he was a business owner.
Starting a restaurant is a risky proposition. You need to lease space, you need to buy equipment, and so on. And everybody knows the failure rate is high. But what if you could test that killer recipe of yours on a few hundred people at lunch in front of First Canadian Place? That sounds like a much easier proposition to me.
So what I hope happens is that people in Toronto start to see food trucks, not as a threat to our restaurant scene, but as an opportunity to get more entrepreneurs into it and make our city even more vibrant. Because if we do that, I’m positive we’ll end up with an even better restaurant scene than what we have today in our great city.