Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1352

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.

Toronto’s Director of Urban Design, Harold Madi , recently did a 20 tweet series on boulevards. And since today is Gardiner East day , it seems appropriate to share it with you all. Thanks to Shawn Micallef for using Storify to put it all together neatly. If you can’t see all the tweets below, click here .

//storify.com/shawnmicallef/grand-boulevard-vs-freeway/embed?border=false //storify.com/shawnmicallef/grand-boulevard-vs-freeway.js?border=false [ View the story “Grand Boulevard vs Freeway — the details matter” on Storify ]

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.