Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 311

Let's resume looking at sidewalks and public spaces.

If you look in the City of Toronto's Official Plan for the stretch of Dundas Street West that runs between Dupont Street and Bloor Street West, you'll find a map that looks like this:

Red signifies "Mixed Use." And so if you were to just look at this map, you might naturally assume that, in the real world, this is a continuous main street that connects The Junction neighborhood down to Bloor. But that's not actually the case. Instead, it looks like this:

Because of the rail corridor on the east side, it is a single-sided street. And generally speaking, these don't make for the best retail streets. But it also has narrow sidewalks and a compromised public realm. If you go back to the map I shared yesterday , you get this:

I don't think 30cm is entirely accurate here, but that's beside the point. What matters is that this is just one of many examples in the city of a discontinuous public realm. ( Here's another, undignified example, from Parkside Drive.)

Over the years, there have been a number of design concepts proposed. Below is one by Brown + Storey Architects that was done I don't know how many years ago. Their proposal widened the sidewalks along this stretch, and added bike lanes. They also proposed a roundabout at the intersection of Dundas, Dupont, and Annette, which is another matter that needs addressing.

But none of this has been implemented and I don't know of any plans to do it. When we were going through the rezoning process for Junction House, we were made aware of some transportation studies that had been done for the above intersection. But that's about it. There wasn't an actual ETA.

However, now that my commute consists of walking up and down this part of Dundas, I've been thinking more about how it could be improved.

I think there's no question that the sidewalks need to be widened. It would also be helpful if there were crosswalks to facilitate getting off the south end of this exotic island:

But equally important, I think that something should be done about the single-sided nature of the street. Given that there's limited width, my mind immediately goes to shipping containers, or something similar, to start activating the east side of the street.

This has already been done further south on Dundas (east of Bathurst):

And it could work here too. Already there's a Blondie's Pizza anchoring the south end of this stretch (really fantastic pizza, by the way):

But I would love to hear your ideas, as I'm currently in the market. I also don't think that you necessarily need to be from Toronto in order to comment. Great streets are great streets. So if it were up to you, what would you change, if anything, about this part of Dundas Street West? Let me know in the comment section below.

Dave LeBlanc recently published an article in the Globe and Mail called, " How wide is your sidewalk? " And in it, he links to this sidewalk map of Toronto (pictured above), which uses open data from the city to plot sidewalk widths.

It was originally intended as a map of where social distancing is possible (oh, how far we've come), but today it serves as a really interesting way of looking at the city. What it makes clear to me is that we could use a lot more sidewalk, and that too many areas of the city have a discontinuous public realm.

Sometimes there's very little that can be done until an adjacent property gets redeveloped. And when this does happen, the city will demand pedestrian widenings. But in other cases, there are solutions that could be implemented today, without private participation.

So I sure hope that someone is looking at a map like this and trying to come up with holistic solutions for making Toronto a more walkable and more pedestrian-friendly city.

Note: Sometimes a narrow sidewalk does not necessarily equal an inhospitable street. I mean, look at this example .

A friend of mine sent me this X post today .

It covers two important life questions: (1) How do you define success? (2) Are your actions aligned with that definition? And included in the post is the author's "ideal end state", which is a list that includes things like "control 80% of my schedule", "be top 0.1% fit for my age group", and "thriving marriage with regular 1-on-1 time."

Some of his list has checkmarks, and some of it -- things like "small, beautifully designed home with an epic view" -- is still a work in progress.

After I got the message, I immediately responded with: "This is great. I'm going to do this for myself." I then sent it to my family.

Now, in some ways, I'm already doing this. I like lists and I have a lot of them. Some of them are "disciplines" that tell me to do things like write every day (that's what this blog is), lift weights, and continuously practice my French . And some of them deal with aspirational goals like, build a creative retreat in the mountains because you love snowboarding.

But I think there's a lot of room for me to be even more intentional, and aspirational, about what success means to me. And so that's what I plan to do. Maybe some of you will want to do the same after reading this post.