Avenues or Arterials: The Struggle to Change Street Building Practices in Toronto, Canada

Abstract

This paper explores why Toronto's policies for improving pedestrian conditions are not better reflected in the design of arterial streets as the city tries to refashion them into pedestrian-oriented ‘Avenues’. Professional frameworks shaping street design date from the first half of the 20th century and reflect a consensus between the fields of planning and engineering. Recently, this consensus has broken down in terms of the design of arterial streets. The role of engineering standards in this story has been told, but this study also examines how other institutionalized practices continue to operate making design changes difficult. Understanding why this occurs has lessons beyond Toronto and is intended to help cities to better match street-making practices to new visions of pedestrian-oriented streets.

Acknowledgements

This paper is partly based on a research project funded by the Centre for Urban Health Initiatives, University of Toronto, and carried out collaboratively with Professor Beth Moore Milroy of Ryerson University. Beth also kindly and helpfully commented on a draft of this paper. Her contribution to the project was invaluable but the author is responsible for the contents of the paper.

Notes

 1. However, it is worth noting that planning and other bureaucratic units within the urban bureaucracy such as fire departments often make competing or even contradictory safety claims. Pedestrian planners, for example, argue that narrow streets will reduce traffic speeds and the severity of pedestrian collisions, while fire department planners argue they will slow critical response times to fire or medical emergencies. These competing claims on safety are usually unable to be settled based on empirical evidence.

 2. The number of municipalities within the Metro government diminished over time as smaller towns and villages were absorbed by larger cities. When Metro was dissolved at the end of 1997, the lower-tier municipalities were Toronto, York, East York, North York, Scarborough and Etobicoke.

 3. The EU and Australia have prior charters, but they operate at the national and supra-national scales and are, therefore, not directly connected to the municipal level of government most responsible for urban streets. The Toronto Pedestrian Charter has since served as a model for other cities, particularly in south-central Ontario.

 4. The TAC manual emphasizes that judgement and experience of the designer are important and avoids using the term ‘standards’ to specify required features of a design. Instead, the manual refers to the ‘design domain’, a range of acceptable geometric configurations and dimensions that the designer should choose from. However, as a previous version of the manual states, the manual represents “customary practice that is generally recognized by the profession to be sound” and many of the geometric dimensions provided are very narrowly if not precisely defined.

 5. Expressways are included as a third project type with potential improvements focused on reducing their role as ‘barriers to local movement in the city’ with bridges, new trails, and tunnels for pedestrians and cycles.

 6. Several staff made remarks along the lines of “if there was political will, we could do this”, pointing to council level politics and what does and does not get funded. This is a very important part of the story that was beyond the scope of the research.

 7. This point partly speaks to professional culture as well as legal reality. For instance, Ewing's (2001) research on tort liability undertaken for the New Jersey Department of Transportation showed that fear of legal proceedings was a poor reason to design streets for worst-case scenario traffic. He found that the main legal requirement for reasonable care was that a street design should be recommended by a reputable source, not necessarily a transportation-focused or engineering-based association, and be approved by a city council.

 8. This actually serves to discourage ‘traffic infiltration’ as much as it does to improve the pedestrian environment. Therefore, it can be seen as further implementing conventional engineering distinctions between classes of roads and their functions.

 9. In 2005 alone, proposals for developments including almost 40 000 housing units were reviewed by the city (Toronto, 2006).

10. An earlier attempt to separate an existing streetcar line from general travel lanes on one of the city's old arterials raises some doubts on this matter. Planning was handled through the environmental assessment process and despite ‘transit first’ policies in the OP, the principle that traffic capacity would not be compromised was established early in the redesign process, and, in some places, the redesign even narrowed sidewalks. In addition, although there appears to have been broad, general support for the project, it was bitterly fought by a local citizen's group and the city only won the right to proceed in court.