Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1442

Right now the Toronto International Film Festival is going on in the city. It’s actually one of my favorite times in Toronto. There’s so much going on and the city generally does things that it doesn’t normally allow, but that it should do all throughout the year, such as extending last call at bars and closing down streets to cars .

This year, King Street between University Avenue and Peter Street has been made pedestrian-only. It encompasses an area known as the Entertainment District and includes the Bell Lightbox , which is the TIFF HQ. The street was closed last Thursday and will reopen this Monday. So it’s a 4 day thing, that TIFF is calling “ Festival Street .”

Some people – like me – are really excited about this. Here’s s picture I tweeted out on Thursday night. Given the engagement (retweets/favorites), I think there are others who feel the same way I do:

Pedestrian only King Street for #TIFF . Look at this magic! #athiscity pic.twitter.com/KVR7t2Irvs

— Brandon G. Donnelly (@donnelly_b)

September 5, 2014

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But there are others who are furious that their commute was disrupted last week and that we’re inconveniencing locals for the sake of hosting one of the top film festivals in the world. (King Street typically moves about 60,000 people per day on the streetcar and 20,000 vehicles.)

But when I walked the entire 650 meter stretch on Thursday night, it was completely full of people. There were people playing large-scale chess. There were people eating at picnic benches. And there were lots of people just enjoying a wonderful summer stroll in the city.

And all I could think about is that this is an unmet need in the city. King Street is a wonderful place to be right now and we don’t have an equivalent during the other 361 days of the year here in Toronto. So rather than be upset that we’ve closed down 6 blocks of downtown, I’m only upset that we don’t do more of this and make it permanent during the rest of the year. 

I’m not necessarily saying that King Street is the best place to do this. Yonge Street initially strikes me as being a better place  to start. But I am saying that if we have to reconfigure things to make our city more awesome for when guests come over, that maybe we should think about how to make it more awesome all the time.

Lately I’ve been thinking that I don’t talk enough about architecture and about buildings on Architect This City. So today I’m going to step away from transit , driverless cars , and the other topics I’ve been discussing lately, and instead talk about something a bit more technical: mechanical systems and Energy Recovery Ventilation (ERV) units. If you’re thinking about buying or investing in a condo, I think you’ll find it useful.

Buildings work in many ways just like people do. They breathe in fresh air and they exhale out stale air. And just like you and I, once air has been exhausted out, it needs to be replaced, or made up, with more fresh air. In the world of buildings, this replacement air is called “makeup air.”

It’s for this reason that you’ll often see no smoking signs directly outside of buildings. It’s because if you happen to be smoking next to a fresh air intake, you’d actually be distributing cigarette smoke throughout the entire building. The same goes for idling trucks and other pollutants.

The amount of fresh air that needs to be pumped into a building will vary. For some uses – like hospitals and laboratories – the requirement for fresh air can be significantly higher. Sometimes as high as 100%. And that’s because you don’t want a building with toxic smells or lots of sick people to be relying on too much recirculating air.

You might then be wondering why we don’t rely on 100% fresh air in all buildings. And the reason is that it is incredibly expensive to do so. When you take in fresh air from outside, it needs to be conditioned before it can be distributed. And that takes energy. In the winter when it’s -10 degrees outside (hello Toronto), you need to heat up that air. Whereas recirculating air is already conditioned. So you just, well, recirculate it.

In most condo buildings, makeup air is supplied by dumping air into the corridors. To check if your condo functions like this, just look for a big vent outside in your hallway. This air then gets sucked into the individual suites by way of slits or openings around your front door.

So another way to check if your building operates this way is to see if your front door is letting in air from the hallway (or if it’s sealed). There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this approach, but sometimes you might end up pulling in smells from outside of your suite.

This now brings us to Energy Recovery Ventilation (ERV) units.

The way an ERV works is very simple. Let’s use our winter example, where it’s -10 outside (and you’re questioning why you live in a place that’s so cold). In this scenario, you’d be pulling in freezing air and exhausting out warm air from your apartment.

What the ERV does is transfer some of the warmth from the warm exhaust air to the cold intake air. This means the fresh air ends up coming inside your place at a warmer temperature and doesn’t need to be heated up as much. It’s “preconditioned.”

This saves energy. And it saves in utility costs.

But the other benefit of these ERV units is that, instead of pulling fresh air (or makeup air) from the corridor, it pulls it directly from outside of your condo suite. In other words, your front door is sealed and each suite is responsible for its own fresh air demands. The overall result is typically better indoor air quality, better energy efficiency, and lower utility costs.

At both DUKE  and Kingston&Co , which are two condo projects that I’m currently working on a TAS, we’re putting an ERV unit into every suite. We think it make sense. But there are always questions around how much purchasers actually care about measures like this. Things like fancy countertops and appliances are usually what sells. Not some hidden mechanical unit that you’ll never see or even know exists.

But I think details like this matter. What about you?

In today’s post I’d like to focus on the second tweet I embedded in yesterday’s piece about downtown Toronto . Specifically, the fact that almost 75% of downtown residents walk, cycle, or take transit to work, leaving drivers firmly in the minority.

For me, this then makes me question whether or not we’re optimizing well enough for the majority. However, it’s often not that simple. And that’s because the downtown core is clearly regional in its draw, and the further you move out from the downtown core, the more the modal split flips. In the suburbs, driving is obviously the majority.

And herein lies the tension and the reason for all this “war on the car” rhetoric: We have a downtown core with completely different mobility preferences than the rest of the region.

But as Toronto continues to intensify and grow (the population of the Greater Toronto Area is projected to reach almost 9 million by 2036 ), I truthfully don’t know how we could reasonably expect to (efficiently) move that number of people in private cars. I’ve just never seen it done before.

Some people think that if we simply got rid of all those damn streetcars on our city streets, that we’d be doing a lot to eliminate traffic congestion. But it’s not that simple. The Highway 401 here in the city is already 18-lanes and one of the widest in the world. And yet it’s perpetually clogged. No streetcars there.

So I look at this tension as a growing pain. Sooner or later I think we’re going to realize that this war should really be a war on inefficiency. How do we move lots of people around big cities while minimizing waste, maximizing economic output, and enhancing quality of life?

Now that’s a war worth fighting.

Image: Helibacon