Most people don’t give much thought to the differences between streets, roads, drives, boulevards and avenues. But the differences are pretty distinct and can even affect public health and the way you live your life.
Streets in Toronto are mostly main thoroughfares like Yonge Street, Bloor Street, Queen Street and King Street.
Streets are wider, busier and have lots of offshoots to neighbouring roads. A drive tends to be a quieter road than a street, but still a relatively busy neighbourhood artery. An avenue in Toronto is often a tree-lined neighbourhood road with lots of houses on it. A boulevard has a segment of grass between the main road and sidewalk and is usually tree-lined.
There are exceptions, of course. Nobody thinks that Lawrence Avenue looks much like a residential street. Similarly, Lakeshore Boulevard resembles more a highway than a lovely path. History has changed streets more than once: Widening has turned boulevards into avenues, but the original name sticks because it’s easier that way.
But, by and large, the naming conventions work. You can see how the entire city is organized by road types in the interactive here. Note the differences between old parts of the city and new, the newer planned neighbourhoods and the older mixed zoning neighbourhoods.
Fredericton, another old city in Canada, organizes itself similarly.
And Vancouver is in a similar boat, as this interactive by the Vancouver Sun’s Chad Skelton outlines.
But that’s not necessarily the best way to go about it. As many North American cities deal with rising congestion on roads that can’t get any wider, city planners are struggling to introduce master plans that make most errands possible by walking or cycling, eliminating more vehicles from the road. The other half is making neighbourhoods dense enough that rapid transit is economically viable.
For examples of seeing this done well, look at London, New York and Paris: Plenty of low rise buildings in mixed-zoning plans with lots of rapid transit. Car ownership in these cities plummets as they become less useful, partly driven by rising congestion from the suburbs, and the personalities of neighbourhoods rise as people spend more time in them, partly driven by the exorbitant cost of driving and parking.
But while city cores are densifying and improving access to transit and active transportation, suburbs are often left out of the loop.
The proliferation of crescents in the less dense areas of the city work against that goal of creating neighbourhoods and merely create subdivisions. As several studies have pointed out, windy roads make it harder to get to anywhere from where you are. They extend travel times and therefore promote car use instead of active transportation. They also make it more difficult to integrate public transit into neighbourhoods and more difficult to develop the land into mixed-zone usage where commercial enterprise can exist alongside residential buildings.
A study in Atlanta found the extensions of these windy streets into the subdivisions outside of the old city core was creating a predictably fatter community as people spent more than an hour commuting out of their subdivisions to get to work.
It’s no surprise the Romans built their cities in grids, and so did most of North America leading up to the 20th century. Grids are easy to organize. They put people in close proximity to each other and the services they need. They’re easy to serve with public transit and easy to densify with predictable lot sizes.
Toronto is now figuring that out.
Jennifer Keesmaat is the city’s chief planner and has been pushing for densification and better public transit or active transport infrastructure since she took the job. Densification basically means the death of the cul-de-sac, the death of the Circle, the Court and the rise of mid-rise structures that bring more people within walking or cycling range of their work, errands and play. Contrary to popular mythology, though, more people closer together actually means less congestion.
If we truly want to reduce congestion, and if we truly care about becoming a more sustainable city, increasing housing choice and affordable housing near the places where people work should be at the top of our city-building agenda. -Jennifer Keesmaat
Look at the map above and select “Crescent.” See where they are. They are the home of wide property spaces, lots of parks, community centres and plenty of green space. They are also the home of large parking lots, strip malls and poor access to public transit.
But as the downtown continues to densify and the push of rising property values expands outward, how will these areas be renovated to accommodate more demands on their space? It’s a running question urban planners and community advocates have been trying to figure out for years.
Across North America, old suburbs are dying out and city planners are figuring out new ways to use that space.
“It’s also not really enough to just create pockets of walkability. You want to also try to get more systemic transformation. We need to also retrofit the corridors themselves,” said Ellen Dunham-Jones in her TED talk on retrofitting suburbia.
“I think we have three challenges for the future,” she said. “The first is to plan retrofitting much more systemically at the metropolitan scale. We need to be able to target which areas really should be re-greened. Where should we be redeveloping? And where should we be encouraging re-inhabitation?”
Whether Toronto’s circular communities want that drastic a transformation remains to be seen. But the suburbification of Toronto came at the cost of public health and the availability of services. It gave rise to the calls of “subways subways subways” as an election platform even when population densities don’t merit that kind of project.
But as Toronto is projected to add millions of people to the city within the next few decades, it’s not just about figuring out how the city can deal with existing suburbs. It’s increasingly about dealing with the enormous influx of people still arriving at our doorsteps.
According to a report from The Neptis Foundation, a non-profit in Toronto that examines urban design problems, Toronto is no longer expanding outward nearly as quickly as it once was and trying to keep people closer to the core. Instead, the suburbs are growing denser, accommodating more people in smaller spaces, and holding the city into a smaller space than in the past.
The Toronto region has grown in population by about 18% per decade between 1991 and 2011. But while the city expanded its land use by 24% in the first decade, it plummeted to only 7% in the second.
Although Canadian cities have already been shown to develop more densely than their American counterparts, they continue to face challenges associated with single-use, auto-dependent subdivisions. This is one reason why the Toronto region continues to suffer from ever-worsening traffic congestion. -Neptis Report
The report questions whether regional plans are designating more land for urban development than is necessary, and if that might be contributing to the sprawl problem. Meanwhile, residents in these areas don’t act like they live in a dense city.
“As some suburbs grow denser, they continue to function like lower-density areas in terms of traffic congestion and low levels of transit use,” the report finds.
There are more of us than ever before, and everyone around Canadian cities wants to live in a neighbourhood, have amenities like convenience stores, grocery and transit nearby and to be healthy. But the way Toronto was built out in recent decades doesn’t allow for enough of us to have that.
Toronto was built in phases: From initial founding and grid-pattern establishment to suburbanization and sprawl. Now we have to figure out how to tie those cities together.
“Culturally, we tend to think that downtowns should be dynamic, and we expect that. But we seem to have an expectation that the suburbs should forever remain frozen in whatever adolescent form they were first given birth to. It’s time to let them grow up,” Dunham-Jones said.
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