The City of Toronto has an opportunity to transform Leslie Street into a welcoming gateway to the Leslie Street Spit and the eastern waterfront, but is currently on course to ignore this opportunity. Creating attractive new routes to the waterfront is a core element of Waterfront Toronto's plans. In its maps (above), Leslie St. is presented as one of the key routes targeted for such transformation -- the easternmost entrance to the waterfront, and the direct route to one of its jewels, the Leslie Street Spit. Leslie Street becomes all the more significant because the Leslie Street Spit/Tommy Thompson Park is expected to stop being a dumping ground for construction debris, possibly as soon as 2013. While it is currently only open to the public on weekends because of the dumping during the week, once it is no longer a dumping ground it is likely to become a permanent full-time park, used by the public every day. Leslie Street will be a primary route to the park for those on bikes, and those travelling by transit on the Queen streetcar and then walking.

I live-blogged an interesting conference last week at the University of Toronto Law School called "Is there Planning Law or just City Politics?" on municipalities, law, and land use planning . The live blog has a detailed description, but I thought I'd share some of the highlights here. In the first panel, on "prominent city lands," former chief planner of Toronto Paul Bedford answered the conference question by saying "All planning is political - live with it, learn to work it." It was a message that was evident in the examples used in many presentations in the conference. And the politics doesn't just arise from the involvment of politicians -- even within the ranks of professional planners there are competing theories and ideas. At the same time, though, planning isn't just political. It's clear that there's a constant tension between politics on the one hand and planning expertise and ideals on the other — a tension that has the potential to be creative when managed well. Richard Sommers, Dean of the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Toronto, offered the example of his work in the Hell's Kitchen neighbouhood of Manhattan, balancing development pressures with the needs of the existing residents, and Sheldon Levitt of Quadrangle Architects Limited offered the example of his firm's work on a plan for a dense, mixed-use new town centre for Markham.  

This Friday (Jan. 13), the University of Toronto Faculty of Law is hosting an all-day Conference on Municipalities and Land Use Planning, "Is there Planning Law or just City Politics?" The conference will discuss topics such as "Design, politics, and prominent city lands" (read: the waterfront), the Ontario Municipal Board, and "Law, ethics, and municipal government." Speakers will include Richard Sommer, Dean of the U of T Faculty of Architecture, former Toronto Chief Planner Paul Bedford, and a keynote address by former Mayor David Miller. I will be live-blogging this conference for the Faculty of Law (along with the ...

Here's a quote from "Proposals for a New Plan for Toronto", published in 1966 for public discussion at the Toronto Planning Board. A choice must now be made as to how this region will grow. Will it grow haphazardly with a continuously increasing reliance on automobiles, or can a pattern of orderly growth be established, with development focused on mass transit so that reliance on cars is reduced? If houses, shopping and industry are spread out over wide areas more travel will be needed, public transit will be uneconomic and people will be forced to use their cars to get around. Traffic congestion will be severe and life in the city will be under the tyranny of the automobile. This situation would be cause enough to question unlimited sprawl. But there are many other reasons. The greater the spread, the more people are immersed in it, divorced from the countryside and the city center alike. New highways and services have to be built through the existing city to accommodate the sprawling growth. This is difficult, costly and unsatisfactory; inevitably expedient decisions are made in response to urgent needs, resulting in a patch-work of compromises ... This fact is being recognized by the focusing of development around subway stations. In the region the equivalent to the subway would be high speed long distance mass transit train services, such as a commuter train system.  

I've written before about the project by Paul Hess and Jane Farrow to study walkability in Toronto's high-rise neighbourhoods. It's been a great way to broaden the focus of walking beyond the downtown core to areas where walkability is really bad, but also where the biggest improvements can be made. The authors have now released their final report, Walkability in Toronto's High Rise Neighbourhoods. There's an executive summary (PDF) and the full report (PDF). The study found that many residents of these high-rise neighbourhoods do not have cars and have to rely on walking in areas that are quite hostile to getting around on foot -- although there are exceptions, such as well-designed Thorncliffe Park, where residents reported the greatest satisfaction with their walking conditions. Residents of most of these communities are relunctant pedestrians, and would prefer to drive if they could afford it. They also felt little hope that walking conditions would be improved, but they often identified particular locations and characteristics in their communities that enabled them to enjoy walking and socializing.

A statistical study by Global News of pedestrian accidents 2000-2009 has found that the end of November is the most dangerous time of year for pedestians. Eight out of the ten worst days for vehicles hitting pedestrians were between Nov. 21 and Nov. 30. The City of Toronto pedestrian collision study (PDF) showed an increase in pedestrian collisions during the months when the days are getting shorter and are at their shortest -- October to January. It seemed to suggest that increasing darkness -- probably during rush hour -- was a cause of increasing collisions, but the report refused to delve into this question more deeply.

A local resident recently brought my attention to an impending decision by the City of Toronto to not add a sidewalk to Chine Drive, a local road in Scarborough that is the primary route to a school. The road is being rebuilt due to the bad state of the paving, and the City went through an 8-year consultation process to see if other improvements could be done at the same time, but in the end it chose to do nothing more than repave. The resident tells me that, while some parents in the area would like to walk their kids to school but are afraid to do so without a sidewalk, the residents on the Drive itself were adamant about keeping sidewalks out. Despite current concerns about the decline in the number of children walking to school, and about childhood obesity, the City has no systematic policy about improving infrastructure to make it easier and safer for kids to get to school on foot.

In the past couple of weeks, new "information" pillars have been popping up around town. But they don't seem to be much about information -- they are mostly advertising. The only information provided is a narrow strip in the support pole, facing the sidewalk. These strips currently consist of generic contact info, but will apparently be replaced by a map in the near future. The size of these new pillars is reminiscent of the "mega-bins", the garbage can pilot project five years ago that was rejected by the public and replaced by the consolidated street furniture contract now in place. The mega-bins were rejected because they blocked sidewalks and blocked the view of the road, and were designed more around maximizing advertising potential than providing a useful civic function. It turns out that in July, City Council authorized Astral Media, which holds Toronto's street furniture contract, to replace the previous "InfoToGo" model with this new info pillar design. Below is a graphic of the new (left) vs. the old (right) version. The old version conformed to a fairly standard info-pillar model similar to what can be found in many cities, a round shape with advertising on two sides and a wide space for information on the inside. The new one isn't really a pillar at all, but rather a billboard whose primary focus is the ad space, with a much narrower space for information in the support post.

Last week, I went to the open house for the project to transform Front Street at Union Station, in conjunction with the massive renovation of Union Station that is getting underway. From a pedestrian point of view, the plan presented (PDF) is very exciting. Its primary purpose is to not only create a better, more pedestrian-oriented area for the very large number of pedestrians who enter and leave the station each day, but prepare it for an expected doubling of pedestrian activity over the next 10-15 years. The plan takes advantage of the fact that the area needs to be dug up for the Union Station project anyway, so just returning it to its previous, uninspiring state would still cost a lot of money -- better to spend that money on a transformation. The sidwalks will be significantly widened by reducing the vehicle lanes from four to two, and the intersections will become much safer and easier to use. But the most innovative element is at the center of the block, at the main entrance to the station, where the road will be narrowed and made into a "tabletop" flush with the sidewalk,  making it a zone where pedestrian mid-block crossings will be the priority. There will be a flush "median" space marked in the middle where pedestrians can wait, so they can cross one lane at a time (it is also a space cars and bikes can  use in case a lane is blocked).

Last night, I attended a discussion organized by the University of Toronto's Cities Centre about municipal finance, with two people who know more about it than almost anyone: Enid Slack, a professor at the University of Toronto and one of the leading experts on municipal finance in Canada (because, as she joked, she is one of the only ones in Canada), and Shirley Hoy, Toronto's City Manager from 2001 to 2008. Given how much talk there has been about the city's finances recently, I wasn't sure if there would be much new material in the discussion, but there were several interesting issues and ideas that came up. Hoy talked about the structural deficit that has been present in Toronto's budget ever since amalgamation and provincial downloading, which was supposed to be revenue neutral but wasn't, she said, because Toronto has more social housing than other municipalities. (A questioner pointed out that the deficit was exacerbated by three years without a property tax increase under Lastman). Slack also pointed out that there are several kinds of downloading -- for example, when the province improved water standards after Walkerton but did not provide money to municipalities to make those improvements, or when the federal government encourages more immigration but does not provide sufficient services to help immigrants adapt, leaving the city and schools to take up the slack.