Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1353

Yesterday Lloyd Alter of Treehugger wrote a great rebuttal to my post about homes for families . His argument was that I missed a whole world of building typologies between single family homes and apartments. (Something that architect and urban planner Daniel Parolek calls “ The Missing Middle ”.)

Now he’s absolutely right. I didn’t mention it – other than provide an option in the survey for townhomes. And he’s right that it’s a tremendous opportunity for cities looking to increase housing supply and improve affordability.

But the reason I didn’t mention it in my survey is because, here in Toronto, we’re not very good at that middle scale.

I previously wrote a post talking about Toronto’s 3 stages of intensification . It went from high-rise to mid-rise, and then to low-rise intensification. And my argument was that we’re still in and figuring out the mid-rise scale. (There are challenges at this scale, but that deserves a separate post.)

Eventually though, I think we will get to low-rise intensification. And that will cover off many of the building typologies that Lloyd is talking about: duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, and, my personal favorite, laneway houses.

This, of course, isn’t the case in every city. Many cities, such as Montreal, have a strong history of neighborhood-scaled apartments. Lloyd points that out in his article. But that’s not the case here in Toronto.

In fact, Toronto’s Official Plan explicitly designates these low-rise “Neighborhoods” as areas that are stable and should not see much intensification. And it was a great selling point for the Places to Grow Act : intensification here, but not there.

But I think this will change. Not because I’m a real estate developer and I think it should change, but because our current arrangement is causing a dramatic erosion of affordability at the low-rise/ground-related housing scale.

If it were up to me, and it most certainly is not, I would start with laneway housing. It’s a great way to intensify low-rise neighbourhoods without altering the character of the streets.

If you live in a single family neighborhood, I would especially love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. 

Today on Architect This City, we have a guest post by Darren Davis , who is a transport planner in Auckland, New Zealand. He’s a regular commenter on this blog, and I know he’s been following the Gardiner East debate quite closely – as many urbanists around the world are. I appreciate him offering and taking the time to write this piece. Thank you.

——————————–

The decision this month on whether to demolish the Gardiner East Expressway and replace it with a surface boulevard or to rebuild it with a similar elevated structure will be a watershed moment for Toronto, akin to the decision not to have freeways in the urban core of Vancouver in the late 1970s.

There are numerous good reasons why removing the Gardiner East elevated structure is the right move for Toronto, covered previously by The Globe and Mail  and in the Council for Canadian Urbanism’s open letter to Toronto City Council . If you aren’t aware of these, I strongly recommend reading them. 

Also of note are two things:

1. Just 3% of Downtown commuters drive on the Gardiner Expressway East, a tiny fraction of the 68% who arrive Downtown on public transit.

2. The “remove” option does not reduce traffic capacity over the “hybrid” option but could reduce travel speeds in uncongested conditions (read on for why I don’t think that this will happen in real life).

However, one element of this debate that has not got much airtime is the transportation modelling that claims an additional two to three minutes travel time with the “remove” option over the “hybrid” option which retains the elevated expressway in a slightly modified form. 

Toronto Mayor John Tory has stated that "I didn’t get elected to make traffic worse. And let’s be clear, removing that piece of the Gardiner will almost certainly make traffic worse.” But is it in fact true that demolishing the Gardiner Expressway East will make traffic worse as the transportation modelling claims?

The key thing to understand is that transportation modelling, which tries to predict future travel times, is the product of a bunch of assumptions which may not in fact be borne out in real life. 

For example, the effect of induced traffic, where additional traffic capacity leads to additional traffic being attracted to the route, is reasonably well known but generally not factored into transportation modelling. Induced traffic happens because increased travel speeds attracts traffic that would have otherwise avoided the route at congested times; attracts people to drive where they previously used other modes and encourages trips that would not otherwise have taken place. The effect of induced traffic is to quickly nullify the benefits of adding traffic capacity.

However, what is less well known is that the reverse happens where there is either a reduction in traffic capacity ( not  the case in Toronto as the “remove” option retains the same traffic capacity) or speed.

This is because in this situation, four things happen:

1. Some travel re-routes. The “remove” option with a widened Lakeshore Boulevard as part of the street grid simply gives more ability for traffic to re-route away from congestion over an elevated expressway structure where drivers are literally trapped until they reach their exit.

2. Some travel re-times. Some people will retime trips to avoid congested travel times, such as starting and/or finishing work at less congested times.

3. Some travel changes mode. Some people will be encouraged to change mode by the perceived worsening in traffic conditions.

4. Some travel is avoided entirely . Some people will choose not to travel at all in the peak of the peak. For example, this could take the form of working from home or shopping on the internet instead of by car.

Transportation models only take into account the first item but not the others. The modelling is also sensitive to traffic growth assumptions and assumed mode split and trip distribution. Often transportation models assume continued growth in car travel even though per capita kilometres travelled peaked about a decade ago.

While this may all sound well and good theory, does this actually happen in practice?

In Auckland city centre, we have extensive experience with the reallocation of road space away from general traffic. Many busy key city centre approach routes have had general vehicle lanes reduced to make way for bus lanes (which generally carry around 65-70% of the people moving capacity of the street). 

This has involved up to a 50% reduction in private vehicle capacity (whereas in Toronto, the “remove” option retains the same traffic capacity but may slow throughput). Auckland has done two of these in the past twelve months – both involved converting a general traffic lane to a bus lane. 

Don’t get me wrong: There is sometimes pain at implementation with about a three week period of congestion as car drivers adapt to the new reality - and most likely negative media coverage will accompany this. But after about a month, equilibrium will be restored and life will continue much as it did prior to the change. 

Part of this is that there will be various “optimisations” during this introductory period where signal timings are adjusted and other tweaks made – the sort of tweaks that can only be fine-tuned in a real world situation. But a bigger part of this is that the four factors above - re–routing, re-timing, mode change and avoided travel - come into play.

I cannot overemphasise enough that life will return to normal surprisingly soon if the Gardiner East Expressway is demolished and replaced by a widened Lakeshore Boulevard.

My advice

When people talk about two to three minutes of extra travel time, take the foregoing into account and take those claims with the very big grains of salt that they deserve. If Toronto makes the right choice and chooses the “remove” option, my bet is that the biggest surprise of all will be how little difference it makes to peak travel times for the 3% of Downtown commuters who used to use the Gardiner Expressway East.

Disclaimer

The author of the above post is an employee of Auckland Transport, however, the views, or opinions expressed in this post are personal to the author and do not necessarily represent the views of Auckland Transport, its management or employees. Auckland Transport is not responsible for, and disclaims any and all liability for the content of the article.

Untitled by Lynne Meng on 500px

https://500px.com/embed.js

Yesterday I ran a quick 3-4 question survey on ATC called homes for families . The objective was to get a sense of people’s preferences for apartment vs. ground-related housing (house or townhouse) when it comes time to raise a family.

The results are public so anybody can take a look at the data. At the time of writing this post there were already 70 responses. That’s not a huge data set, but the data is more or less what I expected to see. 

Here’s what I found (if the data set was larger, I would have made charts):

The vast majority of respondents were from Toronto. No surprise there. That reflects the readership of this blog, which itself can be quite Toronto-centric at times. (I’ve been trying to branch out more, I swear.) That said, I was thrilled to also see respondents from cities like Seattle, Denver, Chicago, Porto, and Sydney.

Of the people who specified that they have kids, 11% live in an apartment. 17% live in a townhouse. And 72% live in a house. If you add houses and townhouses together, you get 89% of people with kids living in some kind of ground-related dwelling.

Of the people who specified that they don’t have kids, 61% live in an apartment. 6% live in a townhouse. And 33% live in a house. This is the kind of split that I generally expected to see for Toronto.

For the people who specified that they don’t have kids, they were then asked where they plan to move if/when they do have kids. 13% plan to move to another apartment. 8% plan to move to a townhouse. 33% plan to move to a house. 23% don’t plan to move (i.e. they are planning to stay put). And 23% don’t plan to have a family.

Interestingly enough, 100% of the people who said that they were not planning to move, were already living in a ground-related housing unit (a house in almost all of the cases). So in reality – and if you exclude the people who don’t plan to have kids – about 83% of respondents expect to raise their kids in a house or townhouse.

Again, this isn’t a big sample size, but the trend appears more or less flat. 89% of respondents who already have kids are already living in a ground-related unit. And when people were asked to project where they would like to be living once they have kids, 83% said they want a house or townhouse.

Do you think these numbers accurately reflect consumer preferences in your city?