This has been an interesting week to think about Toronto’s ongoing battle for better transit and for saying “no” to every road-widening and expressway that comes down the pike.  We started with the one day transit strike (covered in a separate post) that got all the attention, but three related events were far more important:

• A proposal for a revamped Union Station District surfaced at the Planning and Transportation Committee (click here).  You can read it for yourself, but one important aspect is that  Front Street between Bay and York would be re-engineered to be friendlier for pedestrians.  We don’t get rid of traffic, but we recognize that the street exists for local demands (drop offs and pick ups from the railway station, service to the Royal York hotel) rather than to get people from downtown west to downtown east.
• The West 8 plan for the Toronto Waterfront was selected unanimously by the design jury as the basis for a major change in the style and structure of the space from the water’s edge up to the Gardiner Expressway.  (Click here for a set of renderings of the plan.)  This is an ambitious plan that, from a traffic engineering point of view, steps on a lot of toes.
• The Gardiner Expressway would be demolished and replaced by a grand Lake Shore Boulevard.
• The lanes now forming the eastbound part of Queen’s Quay would be closed and converted to pedestrian space, while the westbound lanes would become a two-lane road serving local traffic.
• Today (June 3) is the 35th anniversary of the cancellation of the Spadina Expressway.  This was celebrated yesterday at Spadina House at an event hosted by spacing magazine’s Matt Blackett.  Former Premier Davis’ decision to kill the expressway changed forever the city that Toronto became.  Rather than a maze of expressways slicing through shattered communities, we have neighbourhoods that thrive as examples of what Toronto can be.  Today’s Globe & Mail contains an article by John Lorinc about the former Roads Commissioner, Sam Cass, who remains committed to the ideas behind the expressway network.  (Go here for the story.)

I couldn’t help noticing how these events and proposals intertwine, and said as much at a forum last Tuesday on street design with the Star’s Christopher Hume and Robert Allsopp (who was part of the West 8 design team, but didn’t yet know that they had won).  Two proposals may not establish a trend, but both have been well-received and seem to have momentum that they may actually be built.  If so, this could be the beginning of an era when we stop trying to accommodate the car everywhere.

Sadly, the glowing dawn of this era has not yet reached the northern outpost of St. Clair Avenue West where the road engineers are firmly in control of what should be a transit project.  I have yet to see concrete (sorry about that) signs that the concerns about street design for Phase II (from Vaughan west to Keele) will be addressed.  If someone at the TTC, the City or the design team knows better, maybe they will email me because so far it’s a big secret.  The project’s website here contains no information about Phase II.

Back in the early 70s when expressway advocates thought that they still had a chance of seeing their networks built, we heard a lot about balanced transportation systems.  This is code for “you take the bus, I drive” and for an attitude that transit is only for people who are too poor or too stupid to own a car.  Many US cities succumbed to expressway plans, and this happened because the neighbourhoods that were destroyed were run down and politically marginalized.  People living there didn’t count.

New York was saved from the worst excesses of Robert Moses by many citizens, notably Jane Jacobs who later came to Toronto and was part of the Stop Spadina group who ultimately prevailed.  For a look at what Spadina Avenue might have been, go to spacing’s page here.  There is also a bracing set of comments on their main page for the 35-year anniversary here.

The fascinating part about expressway advocates is that they are always trying to get from “A” to “Z” with little regard for “B, C, … X, Y” in between.  Spadina as we know it, including the commercial district in Chinatown and the entertainment district at Queen and King would not exist.  A trench would carry traffic on its headlong journey from North York to Lake Ontario.

David Nowlan, one of the Stop Spadina leaders, onserved that the demand for transportation into the core area has actually gone down over three decades because downtown is now an attractive place to live and many people can walk or take a short TTC trip to work.  The demand reduction is double the capacity of the expressway.  The very neighbourhoods the expressway would have destroyed actually provided more “capacity” for handling core-oriented trips.  As with many trade-offs in planning and environmental issues, what you don’t do can have more impact than grandiose plans.

Down on the waterfront, we have a fascinating contrast in future plans.  The West 8 proposal treats Queen’s Quay as a local road with a wide pedestrian boulevard adjacent to the streetcar tracks.  The East Bayfront scheme now making its way through planning and environmental assessments has a 40-metre wide Queen’s Quay.  Only one of these schemes will survive, and I hope that West 8’s prevails.

Expressways and road widenings are not the answer to Toronto’s transportation woes.  At best they are a stopgap and at worst they destroy the immeasurable value of the city fabric — all those letters from “B” to “Y” I mentioned above.

Toronto’s planners and politicians have bowed to the political weight and supposed technical skill of the road lobby for decades despite Spadina, and despite many small gains sprinkled around town.  On the big issues, the road folks win almost every time.  This must change.

A good place to start would be the official cancellation of the Front Street Extension project.  Right now, it’s moribund due to funding problems, but still enjoy’s Mayor Miller’s support for reasons that pass understanding.  If we are going to turn the plaza in front of Union Station into a local, pedestrian friendly area, the last thing we need is for Front Street to become an extended off-ramp to the Gardiner Expressway.

Next, we need to seriously consider tearing the Gardiner down.  This is an integral part of the West 8 plan, but one I suspect will be dismissed as unworkable.

Our city can be a place where people are or it can be a place they travel through.  These are two competing visions and for too long, the latter has prevailed.

Sam Cass talks about how the growth in GTA travel has been almost exclusively served by the private car and, by extension, transit is not viable.  A typical comment from a road engineer, and one that was used 35 years ago to justify the expressway’s construction.  The GTA has grown as a road-oriented, space-hogging monster precisely because we didn’t built and run good transit service to new areas, and people had no other choice.

With luck, we won’t make the same mistake on the waterfront.