Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1174

When I wrote yesterday’s post about road tolls , it hadn’t been announced that Toronto Mayor John Tory was going  to call for road tolls on both of the highways coming into downtown. That didn’t leak until late in the evening. So I was just writing another post on a topic that I care about.

Today, however, that announcement was made and the proposal is a flat $2 toll on both the Gardiner Expressway and the Don Valley Parkway. It is expected that this could bring in close to $200 million a year in new revenue for the city – all of which would be dedicated towards transit and roads. Good.

First, I want to applaud the mayor for coming out in support of road pricing. I didn’t agree with him on the Gardiner East, but I agree with him on this – mostly. It is a bold move .

The reason I say mostly is because I hope that we don’t simply default to a fixed and blunt road toll. There are more sophisticated options out there, such as variable pricing models that change based on demand/congestion levels.

Here’s a post that explains how that works and why I think it’s a good model.

With this approach, it becomes more of a congestion charge rather than a toll. It also gives commuters the option of driving during off-peak times to save money. And if we implemented something like this, I am sure that we would see employers and office hours adapt. More on this in the above post.

Still, I absolutely believe that it’s a step in the right direction for this great city. So thank you Mayor Tory .

Following the Toronto Transit Commission’s approval of a 10-cent fare hike , Cherise Burda of the Ryerson City Building Institute penned an article titled: It’s time for Toronto to consider road tolls .

I am a big supporter of road pricing and I have written a lot on this topic over the years. There’s even a guest post by Darren Davis on this blog – he is a transport planner with Auckland Transport. 

I don’t have much to add right now, but I did want to help promote Cherise’s post and I did want to link back to all of my previous posts (including Darren’s). Click here for a list of posts tagged with “road pricing.”

There’s a mental model in Toronto, and many other cities, that remains centered around subsidized roads and artificially low residential property taxes. Because, well, that’s the dream.

Nobody wants to pay more for anything – I get it. But I think we can all agree that this region has not solved the traffic/mobility problem. In fact, it’s one of our biggest weaknesses. 

So what are we going to do about it? I reckon the answer is something other than the status quo.

The Spaces has a post up called: 7 carriage houses on the market in New York City . They’re all quite expensive. The house on East 63rd designed by Paul Rudolph is particularly interesting. But that’s not what I want to talk about.

As I was going through the photos – that’s what The Spaces does best – I thought of two things.

First, there’s a segment of the market that is obsessed with living in spaces that were not originally intended to be used as residences. That’s what (hard) lofts are. That’s what carriage houses are. And that’s partially why I would love to live in a laneway house (Toronto vernacular).

Backhouses, as they are also called, were initially designed to hold horse and carriage. But as horses disappeared from New York City, the structures got repurposed.

Here’s one theory for how that went about:

Barry Lewis, an architectural historian, theorizes that rear buildings became residences to accommodate the 19th-century immigrant population that moved into middle-class areas in Lower Manhattan in the 1830’s and into the Village and Brooklyn after the Civil War. “Backhouses seem to belong to the era of houses in Manhattan, not the era of apartments,” Mr. Lewis said. “The property owner probably shoved more immigrant families into the stable or workshed in the back. Other owners may have built a new backhouse just to get the lucrative immigrant rents.

The second thing I thought about is the potential parallel between this story and the one being written right now. It feels like a transportation revolution is upon us and changes in mobility always seem to rewrite the landscape of the city.

Hopefully that will mean more laneway houses in Toronto.