The Tower Neighbourhood Renewal plan (aka Mayor's Tower Renewal) is an ambitious initiative with great potential to increase the quality of life of residents across the city through the combination of best practices in building retrofitting and neighbourhood revitalization. Despite recent overtures by the mayor-elect's transition team hinting at its perilous future, the program's momentum continues to slowly gather. Last Monday, the University of Toronto Cities Centre held a symposium to convene academics, architects, planners, engineers, community organizers, artists, students, and politicians to discuss the future of Tower Neighbourhood Renewal and exchange ideas. The symposium attempted to benchmark work done to date, identify gaps that need to be filled to move forward, and re-energize the conversation around the Tower Neighbourhood Renewal plan. At the heart of Tower Neighbourhood Renewal is a combination of actions to renew Toronto’s stock of apartment towers, which include: re-skinning buildings to increase energy efficiency, infilling open space around towers with new community services and housing to meet evolving demands, enabling better walkability and transit service, improving the quality and function of open spaces, introducing community food programs, and engaging the community in this renewal process. With such a large mandate, Tower Neighbourhood Renewal is an exemplary initiative that showcases the cross–disciplinary collaboration needed to achieve a more sustainable Toronto.

My first, and only, experience in one of Toronto’s hybrid taxis was a couple of months ago. I have since been bewildered by the lack of hybrid taxis on the road. There are roughly 40 hybrid taxis in the city, representing less than one percent of Toronto’s 5700 cabs. This is one of the lowest ratios of hybrid taxis in any major Canadian city. Toronto has fallen behind cities like Vancouver, who boasts over 100 hybrid cabs and a policy that all new taxis be hybrid. Toronto has also fallen behind its own 2007 clean air action plan goal of shifting all taxis to low emission or hybrid technologies by 2015. A 2009 study published by the Toronto Atmospheric Fund, TAF, reported Toronto’s taxi fleet CO2 emissions could be cut by 25 percent, up to 19,000 tonnes per year, if all cabs went hybrid. The study compared conventional gas-powered Toyota Camry taxis with hybrid Camry taxis, collecting 750,000 km of fuel consumption data over 18 months, and found that drivers could save roughly a thousand dollars over the seven-year allowable taxi lifespan. While the savings are modest, the emission reduction benefit is substantial. Hybrid taxis emit an average of three tonnes less CO2 per year than conventional cabs. Ownership structure is the primary reason hybrids have been slow to gain popularity. Two-thirds of cabs in Toronto are owned by one party and leased to a driver. This separation between owner and driver creates a split incentive. Taxi owners do not benefit from purchasing costly hybrids; it’s the drivers paying for fuel who see the gains. The remaining third of Toronto’s taxis are owner-operator. This structure enables drivers, who are also the owners, to realize a return on purchasing a hybrid. All the taxis in the TAF study were owner-operator.

Any visitor to Toronto, or first time subway user will know just how difficult it is to navigate the city’s underground. Although there may only be four lines to ride and 69 stations to choose from, the system presents itself as a much more complex challenge than it actually is. The reason behind the confusion is simple: signage. Despite the iconic and clear mid-fifties subway font that Torontonians have grown to love, known unofficially as “Toronto Subway" font, years of renovations and new station additions have eroded the effectiveness of the overall signage strategy into an antiquated mess. Throughout the system, there is a lack of large route maps that identify not only where you are in the system, but also where you are in the city and what amenities are accessible. The few poster-size route maps that do exist at each station are often mounted in inconvenient locations, such as the bottom busy staircases, where it is difficult to stop and get oriented. In some cases, where people have clearly complained about a lack of signage, there are handwritten signs by TTC employees or temporary makeshift signs. Additional confusion exists on the TTC platforms, where there are directional signs that tell you the next station stop, direction of travel, and the final station stop, providing little information for those not familiar with the city. LCD arrival screens, launched by the TTC in 2008, show train arrival time in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. Although the LCD arrival screens are much better than the 8 ½ x 11 time schedules that are still present in some stations, the arrival time is displayed in a font size too small to be read from some parts of the platform or by anyone with vision impairment.

The Toronto City Summit Alliance held a roundtable event last Wednesday to discuss revenue tools that could reliably fund Metrolinx’s The Big Move regional transit plan. Among the 12 sources discussed in the TCSA report were the usual hot-topic revenue sources: road tolls, parking taxes, congestion charges, and regional fuel taxes. But it was Metrolinx CEO Rob Prichard’s opening remarks that posed one of the most interesting questions of the day. He asked: "Should any new tool that increases taxes, require a referendum?" For many Canadians, the word "referendum" conjures up images of a very tense Provincial referendum in the fall of 1995 (as well as the spring of 1980), when Quebec’s sovereignty was being questioned. You may also remember a 2007 electoral reform referendum in Ontario. Referendums are common in the democratic process of many countries around the world, including the U.S., but have fallen out of common use in Canada. During the 2008 U.S. election, 32 referendums were held across the country asking voters to approve new revenue tools for funding transit. There was, however, a time when referendums were commonly used as a tool in Toronto for gauging public support of new infrastructure investment. Now, with large-scale infrastructure projects like Transit City up in the air, and problems in securing funding for The Big Move plan, perhaps it’s worth opening the discussion of whether or not infrastructure referendums could ever make a return to Toronto’s municipal election ballots.

Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) is one of those futuristic modes of transit that has never left the public’s imagination. At its core, PRT  has always been perceived as a way of combining the benefits of rapid public transit with those of private transit. Imagine being able to leave your house, take a short walk to a PRT station, and be whisked away to the closest TTC station or GO terminal along a web of transit lines. While PRT may seem like a futuristic idea from The Jetson's, urban motorists may be jumping into these mini-streetcars in the not-so-distant future. [ EDITOR'S NOTE: also see Spacing's article on PRT from the summer 2006 issue ] A joint venture between the European Union, Stockholm University, and the Royal Institute of Technology will bring PRT one-step closer to becoming a viable transit technology. Pilot Sparbilar is a pilot project that will connect Stockholm University with the Royal Institute of Technology, which are currently separated by a distance of one subway stop. With a completion date of 2015, it will provide ten intermediate stations between the two campuses. The system will be fully integrated with SL, Stockholm’s transit authority, allowing passengers the convenience of using one fare system.

This new, regular feature will offer up an idea for how to improve Toronto's public spaces. Some of the concepts discussed will have implementation examples from elsewhere in the world, and others will be as yet untested. Each post will conclude with a question to lead off what we hope will be a lively discussion in the comments section about the idea. Bike lanes continue to be a controversial topic in Toronto. Mayoral candidate Rocco Rossi has vowed to relegate bike lanes to side streets and back alleys, while fellow candidate George Smitherman is blowing the whistle on the issue and calling for a "time out" on Toronto’s bike lane plans. Jarvis Street has become the proxy war zone for the city’s bike lane battle, where car lovers and bike lovers alike can throw in their two cents about the issue. Not to mention the Paula Fletcher voting debacle at City Council, which cost the city a much-needed dedicated bike lane on University Avenue. But as the battle over bike lanes goes on, it’s time to look for some tangible ways of improving cyclist safety in Toronto. Portland, Oregon installed blue bike lanes at intersections over a decade ago in an effort to improve cyclist safety (see signage above). The coloured bike lanes span intersections where there are conflicts between cyclist and motorist rights-of-way. A 2003 City of Toronto study reported that the majority of bike-car collisions in Toronto occur at intersections where the motorist is performing a turning maneuver. The Portland blue bike lanes project has shown that cyclists feel 50% safer biking on the coloured anes. Further results show there has been a 20% increase in motorists yielding for cyclists due to visibility and awareness. A similar study conducted in Denmark found that coloured bike lanes reduced bike-car collisions by 38% and reduced fatalities and serious injuries by 71%.