Tag Archives: urban planning
Urban planning: The public domain
Ryan Starr – Yourhome.ca
David Leinster has a clear sense of what ails this fair city.
“Toronto has a really mean public realm,” says the landscape architect, one of six principals in The Planning Partnership (TPP), an urban planning and design firm.
“Planning in the city has been dominated by the car and accommodating it in every respect. There needs to be a shift in how we think about our streets and public spaces.”
For Leinster and his TPP colleagues, that’s the mission: Make the public realm — the environment around buildings that includes streets, sidewalks, alleys, parks, plazas and other open spaces — a primary focus of Toronto’s ongoing development planning.
As the city looks to add density in existing residential areas, TPP hopes to reverse years of automobile-centric urban design and help transform Toronto into a more pedestrian-friendly town.
TPP is currently working on projects such as the John St. cultural promenade, Union Station, the Front St. civic plaza, the West Don Lands and the Sheppard East LRT — initiatives that highlight public space and street life, which The Planning Partnership co-founder Dan Leeming says must be top priorities.
“Toronto is a world class city, but we don’t have a world class public realm,” he says in an interview with his partners at the firm’s Bay Street office.
“We’ve got amazing cultural diversity and good government, but we’ve got a built-form (the relationship buildings have with their surroundings) that’s not meeting that standard.”
TPP hopes to change that.
On John St., the firm has designed plans for a streetscape that will tie together landmarks along that north-south corridor, including the Art Gallery of Ontario and the CN Tower.
“It’s an important route that links a number of attractions,” says TPP partner Harold Madi. “But the public realm, the adhesive between those destinations, is currently an unremarkable street.”
To make the main drag more remarkable, TPP wants to add trees, widen sidewalks, include more squares and plazas, and enhance existing parks and open spaces.
With the influx of people moving into condos in the Entertainment District, Madi says it makes sense to improve public spaces.
“You’re doubling the population there, and the majority of them are walking to work, not using cars.
“They’re the ones who are going to experience this environment, but at the moment there are no trees, not enough greenery, and the sidewalks are too narrow.”
Andrew De Gasperis, a principal with Aspen Ridge Homes — currently developing a two-tower, 750-unit condo project at Richmond and Duncan Sts. — sees the value in offering homebuyers the promise of inviting public spaces.
“The city is transforming quickly, so when we sell to a potential buyer they want to know what an area’s going to look like when they move in,” he says. “If there are improvements being done to an area like John St., that’s what you want to see; you want it close to your development so there’s a benefit for purchasers.”
The Planning Partnership has also been working on a public realm plan for the West Don Lands, the first residential neighbourhood in Waterfront Toronto’s redevelopment of the industrial area.
The neighbourhood ultimately will include 6,000 homes, one million square feet of working space, an elementary school and two childcare centres.
To create a more engaging community vibe, TPP plan calls for plenty of public art and loads of landscaping and parkland.
Construction recently began on Underpass Park, a derelict area under the Richmond/Adelaide Sts. overpasses that’s being transformed into a new 2.5-acre park with recreational space, children’s play areas and community gardens.
The West Don Lands will also showcase a type of street never before seen in Toronto: the woonerf.
“It’s a model imported from the Netherlands,” Leinster says. “It’s a space where pedestrians, cars and bikes all share the same areas. It’s probably more similar to a lane than to any other street we know, except buildings front onto it.”
A woonerf is also curbless and has different surfacing materials than regular streets. “This signals to drivers that you’re entering a different zone, so hopefully you act differently,” TPP partner Rick Merrill says.
Achieving greater motorist-pedestrian harmony is the focus of another project in TPP’s pipeline: a Union Station/Front St. public mall.
The firm’s vision is for a “grand civic plaza from the Royal York to Union Station, building face to building face,” Madi says. “This is the front door to the city and it’s a very important civic building.”
TPP hopes to make the area less treacherous to pedestrians, but Leinster acknowledges it will be impossible to eliminate all vehicle traffic along bustling Front St.
“At Union the cars are moving in one direction and the pedestrians are moving in another, so there’s this inherent conflict,” he says, adding that a woonerf-style approach might work well in this environment.
If calming Union Station traffic sounds like a tall order, TPP should be up to the task; this is the firm that gave car-loving Houston a reason to embrace public transit.
Last year TPP won an award from the American Society of Landscape Architects for its work on plans that are helping transform Houston’s gridlocked urban core into a place that now accommodates a light rail transit system —and pedestrians.
It wasn’t easy.
“We spent a lot of time on cross sections and how to make pedestrian zones work,” Merrill says. “Sometimes we had very narrow right of ways, and when you have a limited right of way, the pedestrian always suffers.
“But that’s actually the most important part of the corridor,” he adds, “because you’re trying to get people to the corridor to use transit.”
Back in Toronto, TPP is incorporating lessons learned from Houston into its plans for revamping the streetscape along the route of the new Sheppard East LRT, a 14-kilometre line that’s part of the Transit City megaproject.
“We’re looking at how people are going to get to the trains — is it accessible and how do we shape the pedestrian environment so that people are comfortable walking there,” Leinster says. “Because God knows you would not want to walk on Sheppard today, it’s miserable.”
In the end, Leeming says, effective public-realm planning — whether in the suburbs or downtown Toronto — comes down to challenging the “dominance of car culture.”
“Car drivers have had the right of the road for 60 years,” he says. “And they have this idea that the car has a God-given right to move at a certain speed, and a certain level of service is expected.
“Well, those rules went out the window 20 years ago. It’s shared space, but we haven’t learned how to share it yet.”
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Contact the Jeffrey Team for more information - 416-388-1960
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Preparing for a plug-in future
Chris Atchison – CTV
When most people drive around a city, their prime concern is dodging traffic. For Brian Denney, it’s a matter of how many questions he’ll have to answer about the Prius he’s driving.
“Every time you’re stuck in heavy traffic, people roll down their window and yell a question looking to know how it works,” Mr. Denney, chief administrative officer of the Toronto Region Conservation Authority, says of the plug-in hybrid that he drives regularly, one of several in the organization’s tiny gas-electric fleet.
“It indicates there’s a lot of interest in the marketplace for electric vehicles.”
Indeed, in recent years models such as Toyota’s Prius and the soon-to-be-released Chevrolet Volt have piqued consumer interest in the prospects of driving a vehicle that runs in whole or in part on electricity.
But perhaps the more pressing consideration for the average Canadian driver is whether existing infrastructure would make owning and operating a fully battery-powered, plug-in car a comfortable proposition.
“It’s no more difficult to get around in this hybrid because [it also has an internal combustion engine], but you do find yourself trolling for a plug,” Mr. Denney says of the conservation authority’s Prius, which can be charged in a standard 110V outlet. “I can usually find a place to plug in, but that’s often in a municipal office or underground parking lot where I happen to find an electrical outlet.”
And what if that car was fully electric, running on battery power alone?
“On a prototype scale like this, it’s no problem at all,” he says, “but if there were 10,000 of them on the road, it would be a real issue.”
It’s clear that significant urban planning changes will be needed for the coming electric-car onslaught as consumers look to charge green cars at home, at work and at public locations such as shopping malls.
Barriers to the widespread embrace of the electric car are complex. Without proper infrastructure, and co-ordination among governments, utilities and building developers, drivers will almost certainly stick to their gas-powered rides.
“We need the transportation guys talking to the condo guys that are building spots in garages,” says Andrew Bowerbank, president of the EC3 Initiative, a Toronto-based renewable energy consultancy. Mr. Bowerbank recently spearheaded a cross-discipline workshop in Toronto to allow key stakeholders to open that dialogue.
“I think electric cars have a very strong potential,” he adds, “especially if you find a way to manage our electric grid and utilize renewable technologies so we put as much on the grid as we take off.”
The issue of power drain is a major concern.
According to some estimates, Ontario’s existing power grid could accommodate as many as 10 million electric vehicles each year, assuming most were charged in off-peak hours and used smart technology that allowed the grid to draw power from plugged-in vehicles at times of peak energy use.
That kind of technology isn’t the stuff of science fiction. Just last week, Ford Motor Co. and Microsoft Corp. debuted Microsoft Hohm, a new online application free to owners of Ford plug-in cars that will help them choose ideal times to charge their vehicles.
Assuming those grid projections are correct, there’s still the as-yet-undetermined issue of standardization. Although vehicle makers including GM, Chrysler, Ford, Toyota, Honda, Nissan and Tesla agreed on a standard electric vehicle connector to charge cars at either 120 or 240 volts earlier this year, faster charging technologies could soon render that plug obsolete.
Despite the logistical challenges, some progress is being made on the legislative front to serve early plug-in adopters.
The City of Vancouver, for example, now requires all new single-family homes – as well as 20% of all parking stalls in new condominiums – to include plug-in outlets, while Ontario is offering up to $10,000 in car rebates to subsidize steep electric-car sticker prices, which can be double the cost of an average car.
Al Cormier, executive director of the Toronto-based electric car advocacy organization Electric Mobility Canada, says jurisdictions across Canada need to work together if electric car adoption is ever going to gain speed.
“We need more building code amendments to require new condos to have parking outlets at least in a percentage of parking spots,” he says. “Then we need to deal with retrofitting older condos. It’s not rocket science to run the wires and the plugs, but it takes will and a bit of money to do it.”
Some developers are already jumping on the electric-car bandwagon.
Vancouver-based Concord Pacific Group Inc. last year announced that its latest Vancouver condo, the 23-storey Cosmo set to open in 2012, will include outlets in about 20% of parking stalls, while Ottawa-based Minto Group Inc. is roughing in wiring for electric outlets for 10% of parking stalls in one of its new Toronto condos. (The builder plans to hardwire a portion of spots in all of its future developments, but is hesitant to install actual outlets until charging standards are fully clarified.)
“We wanted to build in the capacity to ensure that our consumers are protected when they move in,” says Andrew Pride, vice-president of the Minto Group’s Green Team.
Stephen Dupuis, president and CEO of the Toronto-based Building Industry and Land Development Association, argues that greater collaboration between stakeholders such as governments and builders is needed to avoid turning a green solution into a major new cost and logistical issue for home and condo builders. He also questions just how ready the market is for electric cars.
“I suppose it will become more of a higher-level planning issue if market penetration gets to 20 or 30%. At that point it’s a sea change in the transportation industry, but I don’t believe that’s close.”
But as Mr. Cormier explains, one major factor could fuel the thirst for plug-in cars, encourage municipal governments to pass more coherent and consistent infrastructure bylaws, and give builders and retailers an incentive to retrofit public lots to accommodate these green machines: a major spike in the price of gasoline.
“If gas gets to around $1.30 per litre, a lot more people will want hybrids at least, if not electric vehicles,” he says. “There’s no question that people need to accept that electric cars are coming and be ready for them.”
Charging up
500,000 – Number of highway-capable plug-in electric vehicles that Industry Canada estimates will be on Canadian roads by 2018.
$750 – Cost in Canadian dollars of installing a 240V outlet in a home capable of charging a plug-in vehicle, according to the Rocky Mountain Institute, a Snowmass, Colo.-based non-profit organization dedicated to promoting renewable energy solutions.
$3,500 – Cost of installing a public charging unit – although the Rocky Mountain Institute says that could be higher as the estimated costs for charging stations vary greatly depending on where they are installed. Not included is the possible ongoing cost of billing drivers for the electricity, for example, through a credit-card system.
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Contact the Jeffrey Team for more information - 416-388-1960
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Toronto Real Estate — St. Lawrence Market
The land on which the St. Lawrence neighbourhood is built was originally part of the shoreline of Lake Ontario. Immediately to the north of here, above Front Street, was the Town of York, the forerunner to the City of Toronto.
The site of the present day St. Lawrence neighbourhood was created from landfill in the early 1800′s. It was originally intended to serve as a public promenade with a grand Esplanade along the waterfront. However the city turned the land over to the railways, which in turn attracted industry to the St. Lawrence area.
By the early 1900′s, St. Lawrence had become one of Toronto’s most prominent industrial centres. It remained a vital industrial area until the late 1940′s, when Toronto’s industrial base began moving outside of the city.
Consequently, St. Lawrence went into a period of decline which lasted until the 1970′s, when Toronto politicians made the decision to create the present day St. Lawrence neighbourhood.
Planned and developed by the City of Toronto in the 1970′s as a mixed use housing development, the St.Lawrence neighbourhood has been critically acclaimed as a major success story in urban planning. It has become a model for the design and planning of new neighbourhoods across North America.
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Contact the Jeffrey Team for more information – 416-388-1960
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