Amid growing concern about traffic deaths, the recent conversation in Toronto has often focused on what the city has done wrong in designing its streets. But a new report from the Ryerson City Building Institute sheds light on what it says Toronto has done right. The report, called Toronto’s Great Streets, highlights five corridors that have been redesigned in the past decade in order to better accommodate pedestrians, cyclists, transit users, and the needs of the local community. With the city’s population set to increase by 35 per cent and double in the downtown core by 2041, Claire Nelischer, lead author of the report, said Toronto needs to get creative about how it allocates road space.“We can’t double the number of cars on our streets,” she said. “We need to figure out a way to make our streets more balanced.”Nelischer said there’s no one standard approach to making a great modern street.Not all corridors can accommodate dedicated space for all types of road users, and “we sometimes have to make really difficult decisions around who and what to prioritize,” she said. She emphasized the need to strike a balance between keeping vehicles moving and creating spaces welcoming enough that people want to stay and linger. Some of the redesigns the report praises have been controversial, particularly the St. Clair Ave. transit right-of-way, and Nelischer acknowledged none of the featured projects are perfect. But she said that with council facing big decisions in the coming years about the future of corridors like King St., Yonge St., and Eglinton Ave., the city needs to “take a minute to reflect back on what works. ” Harbord St.In 2014, the city upgraded the Harbord bike lanes, plugging a gap between Borden St. and Spadina Ave. to create a continuous cycling route from Ossington Ave. to Queen’s Park. Although the city never followed through on a plan to physically separate the bike lanes ...
|
