Yonge Street divides Toronto between east and west. It's an iconic street (though it has its ups and downs). Since 2018, the City has been studying ways to redesign and improve the stretch that cuts through the middle of downtown.
It is a story that we have seen in many other cities around the world, perhaps most famously in NYC. Here is a street where pedestrians outnumber vehicles and yet we allocate more space to the latter (within a fixed ROW). This study hopes to fix that.
They've narrowed things down to four Alternative Designs (downloadable, here). All of them prioritize pedestrians, but in different ways. As of right now the preferred option is Alternative #4. It looks like this:
The section around Dundas Square (from Dundas Sq up to Edward Street) is fully pedestrianized with only emergency vehicles having access during the day. This segment has the highest pedestrian volumes. The other blocks allow for a combination of one-way and two-way vehicular traffic.
Vehicular access is obviously still important for things like loading, but it's pretty clear that the future of Yonge Street is pedestrian priority. We should probably be doing this right now. If you'd like to voice your own opinion, you can do that here until Friday, December 6, 2019.
