Event: Populating the New Transit Corridors

photo by sillygwailo from Flickr (cc)

A potentially interesting free event up at York University on February 22 from 5:30 - 7:30pm that looks at the planning of transit corridors in the future, with a focus on Vancouver's experience with the relatively new Canada Line and the Cambie corridor along which it runs. This is even more relevant to Toronto considering yesterday's decisive council decision to redeploy a network of light rails a la Transit City.

From the event info page:

For the Toronto metropolitan region, Metrolinx’s Big Move is an historically ambitious program for the investment of tens of billions of dollars in new transit over the next 25 years. Development along the transit corridors is expected to shape the future of our region, yet public discussion to date has focused almost entirely on transit line locations, technologies and costs. We should not be beguiled by the notion that development will automatically locate to the corridors.

It’s time to steer the discussion towards how future development will be deliberately induced to locate around the new transit corridors. Neglecting to do so is to invite the necessity of enormous long-term subsidies for building, maintaining, and operating new transit lines whose ridership is too low to cover the costs. For a region aspiring to be globally competitive, the stakes are high.

Metrolinx has taken initiatives in land use and design, in particular with its Mobility Hub Guidelines. A public discussion on systematic approaches to populating all of the transit corridors is required to avoid mistakes of the past.

As a living example of big picture planning along transit corridors, Vancouver’s Cambie Corridor Plan has timely relevance. Bailey and Kellett have collaborated on innovative processes and methods of integrating transportation, land use, and energy efficiencies. They will speak to plan outcomes to date, engagement processes, research methods, and diverse types of visualization.

Instagram and the City

Vancouver: Robson Square 

Vancouver: Sea Wall

Vancouver: Sea wall

Vancouver: Rezoning application near GM Place

Vancouver: Olympic Village

Toronto: Pink arrow 

Toronto: View from the 13th floor of Robarts Library

Vancouver: Vancouver Public Library 

Vancouver: North False Creek sea wall

Toronto: or, Oronto!

Video: Mapping Toronto's Streetcars

TTC Streetcars from James Fisher on Vimeo.

Check out this amazing video of Toronto's streetcars moving around the city in all its cosmic awesomeness.

Vancouver's Cathedral Square

 

Cathedral Square in the eastern portion of Vancouver's downtown, right at the edge of Gastown, is one of those spaces that I've walked by a dozen times but never stopped to go inside and explore. Mostly it was because, despite the dramatic design of this public space, there was never any real draw to check it out. The square usually draws a cursory glance as people walk by to other things. It exists as one of those public spaces that were designed with the best intention, and then left to rot, untended.

Cathedral Square consists of a grassy expanse dotted by wooden benches on concrete platforms and a zig-zagged pathway. In the centre is a pool, the colour of the which makes it look less like a reflecting pond than your neighbours over-chlorinated and neglected backyard swimming pool, leafy detritus and cigarette butts magnified from their sunken spot at the bottom. This blue is "complemented" by Expo 86-style steel girders that make an open-air cage propped up on thick, concrete turrets. There is even a 'pier' should someone want to sit out and suntan. 

This cage sits atop a stepped plaza of sorts that is littered with trash, and mostly hidden from the street beside it. The site's architecture is imposing and unfriendly and almost prison-like in the huge concrete barriers and metal cage. Some of the benches are even missing, so all that remains is the concrete block on which they are supposed to sit.

Part of the reason for the site's lack of people, no doubt, is that the space is located in a inconvenient spot. As time passes in Vancouver the city's 'centre' has moved ever westward, from the pioneer days when the hot spot was what is now called the Downtown Eastside to contemporary times where most people are found along the commercialized spine of Robson Street in the West End.


However, it's undeniable that the design of this square is not a welcoming one. I found some pictures from the Vancouver Archives of what the square looked like when it first opened in 1986 to find out if it was as unwelcoming looking back then as it is now. 

Vancouver Archives, CVA 7840-098

In these photos the concrete pillars are fresh and have not yet succumbed to the rusty discolourations from years of rain, and there are flowers and small trees. 

Vancouver Archives, CVA 784-099

The cage overhead is revealed to have once been the frame for a covering that shielded the space from rain, but they obviously found it too difficult to maintain so removed it. You can also see in the below picture how the southern edge of the square is cut off from the adjacent street due to a change in grade, making this part of the space feel closed off and private.

Vancouver Archives, CVA 784-101

It's unfortunate that this space gets so little play. Vancouver's downtown peninsula has a real dearth of public squares and plazas larger than those occupying a ceded corner of real estate on a busy downtown block (the small plaza at the corner of Georgia and Granville outside of the Sears building was such a corner until the city built an oversized entrance to the Vancouver City Centre Canada Line station there). For now Cathedral Square remains mostly discarded.

As it stands, however, Cathedral Square does seem to serve a function of providing shelter and privacy to those who may be living on the street. I came across two people sleeping in separate sections of the plaza behind the giant concrete pillars. So a "rediscovering" of this space by the City would likely result in inequities in terms of who is able to use this space and for what.

Toronto Info Pillars Back to the Drawing Board?

Text of the motion passed at the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee

Two motions put forward, one by Councillor Gord Perks and one by Councillor David Shiner, have effectively halted the installation of Astral Media's "info" pillars around Toronto after being carried at the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee. Councillor Shiner's motion aimed at providing local ward Councillors with more say in the approval of the location and placement of the info pillars, after concerns raised by Councillor Adam Vaughan were raised earlier about how the pillars blocked sidewalks and impeded accessibility and safety.

Councillor Perks' motion aimed more directly at the design-issues of the pillar themselves, specifically the fact that the majority of the space on the pillars are devoted to advertising rather than way-finding, causing many to raise an eyebrow over the moniker "info pillar". The decision goes to council on February 6th. 

In a media release, Toronto Public Space Initiative called the motion a "step in the right direction", saying: 

The pillars have fallen short of their promise by prioritizing advertising instead of providing residents with a strong way-finding platform. In addition, the pillars violate basic tenets of accessibility, traffic and pedestrian safety, and functionality, as well as public consultation standards, many of which are contained in the City’s own Vibrant Streets Guidelines. Plans to install 120 ‘other’ pillars in addition to these, to do what the original pillars were meant to do, raises concerns about cost efficiency.

Perhaps the study will come back with a design that is more in line with what Vancouver has rolled out in their info pillar program. The pillars have minimal impact on visibility and accessibility and contain no advertisements, except for info pillars located on downtown retail streets such as Robson.

Toronto Needs More Bike Parking in Parks

Recently, the City revamped Sally Bird Park, this little parkette on Brunswick near Harbord. They landscaped the park, added bench, and also three strange work-out machines. But what they forgot, and what the City frequently seems to forget in parks, is a place to lock your bike.

There are clear spots for four ring-and-posts in the space where the park's fence is set back from the sidewalk. As usual, when there is no infrastructure provided, people make-do; this time by locking their bikes to the fence. I've seen as many as six bikes locked up here before.

While there is a decent amount of ring-and-posts on commercial streets in Toronto, there is a dearth of bicycle parking along the residential streets in small parks like this one. This means that when people are at a park, or visiting friends on a residential street, they either have to walk awhile to find actual bike parking, or lock up to a fence or pole, which doesn't provide the same amount of security and, I'm sure, is annoying to residents and the City.

Book: The Vancouver Achievement by John Punter

Ah, Vancouver. That gleaming, sparkling, oasis of a planners wet dream. At least, that's what, at first glance, this book appears to say.

But if you look past the cringe-inducing boosterish title of John Punter's book you'll find a great documentation of Vancouver planning history and policies since the 1970s, up until about 2001, when the book was published. Punter, a professor of urban design in the UK at Cardiff University, has exhaustively catalogued the development of the city. While the title may give away just how Punter feels about Vancouver, he doesn't shy away from criticisms of affordability, architectural monotony, and exclusivity.

Particularly interesting was the chapter on Vancouver's single-family neighbourhoods and the infiltration of discretionary zoning and development controls sought by neighbourhood associations (usually wealthy ones) to preserve the "character" of their area. Punter describes how City Council and planners bent to the demands of these neighbourhoods, instituting zoning that restricted intensification and secondary suites. This obviously has had a severe impact on the affordability of Vancouver as a whole, confirming the power of these neighbourhoods in the political and planning process. It's hard not to see that the rhetoric of preserving a neighbourhood's character is often a guise for social exclusion.

There were a few things the book left out. There was no real mention of Metro Vancouver, or regional planning, which I think is a mistake. Many things are decided at the regional level and it would have been interesting to see how these interacted at the city level in Vancouver. Similarly, there was no real discussion of transit planning, except for a few paragraphs near the end. This, too, is an oversight. While SkyTrain is mentioned a few times, I would have liked a discussion of the planning and development around the stations and how it changed the city. Finally, Vancouver's elected Park Board only got a few brief mentions, even though there was much discussion of the provision of park space.

It's difficult to talk about planning in Vancouver without talking about affordability. The obvious question that runs through the book, and one that Punter does address (though not nearly enough, I think) is that, sure, Vancouver is shiny and mostly well-designed, but who gets to enjoy in this when the city is so utterly unaffordable? What does "livability" really mean if you find it hard to live there?