Street Scene will appear each week showcasing the illustrations of local artist
Jerry Waese.

The post STREET SCENE: Dog Crossing Too appeared first on Spacing Toronto.

Sitting like a mirage in the desert, Masdar City might just be on the frontier of a new – environmental friendly – urban life.

The city is an $18 billion  project in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates and is scheduled to be completed by 2015. It will be home to 40,000 residents within a two square mile radius, where cars are simply not allowed. Each building in the city being toted as carbon-neutral and residents are transported about via PRTs (Personal Rapid Transit) pods.

A 148-foot tower draws cool air down to create a perpetual breeze in the courtyard of the Masdar Institute.

Via Popsci

Urban Planet is a roundup of blogs from around the world dealing specifically with urban environments. For more stories from around the planet, check out Spacing on Facebook and Twitter.

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• Rob Ford in ‘crack cocaine’ video scandal [Toronto Star]
• Rob Ford crack scandal: Mayor must respond, councillor says [Toronto Star]
• Several crowd-funding campaigns spring up to purchase video allegedly showing Rob Ford smoking crack pipe [National Post]
• U.S. website Gawker claims to have seen video of Rob Ford using crack cocaine pipe [National Post]
• Can Rob Ford respond to crack allegations by suing media outlets for libel? [Torontoist]
• Toronto Mayor Rob Ford denies drug video allegations [Globe & Mail]

CASINO

• Toronto would get $53.7-million to host casino; Mayor says deal ‘dead’ unless it’s $100-million [Globe & Mail]
• Toronto casino was always a long shot [Globe & Mail]
• Toronto Mayor Rob Ford cancels casino debate [National Post]

OTHER NEWS

• Toronto spits at province over transit debacle: James [Toronto Star]
• Giant pandas from China make invitation-only debut at Toronto Zoo [Globe & Mail]

The post Toronto’s Urbanism Headlines: Friday appeared first on Spacing Toronto.

• Mayor Ford being investigated by city after putting magnets on cars [Globe & Mail]
• Rob Ford has checked out [The Grid]

FOOD TRUCKS

• Toronto food cart fight: Guerrilla fruit stand challenges restrictive bylaws [Toronto Star]
• Group wants city to approve more diverse food carts [CBC]
• Advocacy group hands out fruit in front of City Hall to protest limits on Toronto food trucks [National Post]

URBAN PLANNING

• SmartCentres hopes there is life after Walmart — Hume [Toronto Star]
• Humbertown Showdown [The Grid]
• Toronto eyes co-ordinated signals to help move traffic [CBC]

OTHER NEWS

• More Great Lakes research needed, report says [Toronto Star]
• Clear garbage bag policy sparks uproar in Dufferin County [Toronto Star]
• Toronto police crack down on scooters parked on sidewalks [Toronto Star]
• Ontario liquor store strike looms for midnight [CBC]
• Scarborough councillor joins group opposing casino in downtown Toronto [Globe & Mail]

The post Toronto’s Urbanism Headlines: Thursday appeared first on Spacing Toronto.

Believe it or not there’s a ton of fat in the sewers of London, England and it’s a real problem. In what might just be the worst job ever, city workers have to manually unclog sewers and remove the excess fat.

A new power plant – to be built by 2015 – looks to take all this excess fat, oil and grease (FOG) and use it to generate enough electricity for 39,000 homes. Used greased from restaurant deep-fryers will also be used.

London sewers have 80,000 blockages annually. More than 30,000 tonnes of fat will be delivered to the new plant everyday.

Via Treehugger.

Urban Planet is a roundup of blogs from around the world dealing specifically with urban environments. For more stories from around the planet, check out Spacing on Facebook and Twitter.

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How do you get around your city? Do you cycle? Would you like to cycle? What influences your decision?

There have been numerous attempts to encourage a shift towards active transportation and cycling. The most high profile of these have focused on the construction of physical infrastructure such as separated bicycle lanes, bike parking and destination amenities such as change-rooms and showering facilities. Due to tight city budgets and the slow pace of infrastructure development, cities like Toronto have lagged behind other urban centres which have fast-tracked their cycling infrastructure. In spite of this, Toronto has greatly increased its cycling population. A recent Toronto study estimates the increase in the number of cyclists, from 2001 to 2006, to be as much as 30%. While this increase shows positive signs, there is still significant room to grow.

Researchers from the Toronto Cycling Think & Do Tank have been working on the development of A Toolkit to Accelerate the Adoption of Cycling for Transportation. This toolkit takes an original approach: linking behaviour change theory and cycling promotion. The toolkit is based on a thorough review of existing scholarly literature and builds on the practical components of successful cycling programs from around the world. The result is an evidence-based, adaptable model, providing a guideline for a cycling promotion program design.

The Toronto Cycling Think & Do Tank will be using this toolkit in a pilot project in 2013. The idea is to move beyond “traditional” cycling campaigns – which often strive to raise awareness, promote the benefits of cycling and provide information. While these initiatives do play a role, many studies have concluded that knowledge and information campaigns alone do not lead to actual behaviour change. The Toolkit to Accelerate the Adoption of Cycling for Transportation recommends a more supported, targeted and “give it a try” approach to cycling encouragement, including these general steps:

1> Segment Target Population

2> Identify & Remove Barriers

3> Implement Commitment Strategies

4> Sustain Behaviour Change

+ Ongoing social support through modeling, local hubs & periodic events

An important additional factor, and one that must be ongoing, is the use of various techniques to draw people in and inspire widespread participation. Techniques such as pledges, small incentives to encourage initial involvement, the creation of social support networks or local cycling hubs, the presence of an enthusiastic cycling “champion” to model the desired behaviour, and periodic, large-scale community events to keep new, as well as experienced, cyclists motivated are some examples of engagement tools. These elements involve the target audience, instill a sense of ownership in the program and help sustain the behaviour change.

The first step, in the process, is to identify and understand the target audience. This could be a particular demographic group: school children, female non-cyclists or senior occasional cyclists, as examples. Ideally the group is one that will, for a variety of reasons, be amenable to cycling. We know, for example, that populations making big changes in their lives are often open to additional new behaviours. Once the group is identified, a more individualized, targeted intervention can be developed and applied.

While education, awareness and information can affect and shape attitudes and intention; barriers ultimately mediate whether they are expressed through behaviour. Common barriers to cycling include fear, perception of safety, perceived lack of comfort, distance, negative stereotypes related to the “image” of a cyclist and the power of habit as a determinant of travel behaviour. Ultimately, it is when barriers, both internally and externally, are low that behaviour change programs are effective.

It is fascinating to see the success of countless cycle encouragement programs in Toronto and around the world. Many incorporate one or more of the steps and tactics presented in the toolkit. Our research suggests the combination of these steps will be more powerful than single interventions. The wheel does not need to be developed from scratch – rather the programs that already exist can be supplemented and looped into a larger framework, in partnership with local community groups. Our work is about expanding, enhancing and connecting communities and activities that support cycling.

For more information, please visit www.torontocycling.org

Or email info@torontocycling.org

Emma Cohlmeyer recently completed her Masters in Urban Planning at the University of Toronto. She has always been intrigued by urban life, cities and the built environment. She is fascinated by the dynamic and diverse ways that people are able to shape and influence their city, while at the same time how urban form is able to shape its population.

Photo by Daniel Gueorguiev

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• Fords vow to help residents in fight against Humbertown redevelopment [Globe & Mail]
• Humbertown condo proposal: Community council votes against plan [Toronto Star]
• Councillors shoot down Humbertown development [Toronto Sun]

TRANSPORTATION

• Bixi bikes: Residents support city takeover, poll finds [Toronto Star]
• Karen Stintz releases statement on transit vote [NOW]
• TTC chief executive Andy Byford seeks political consensus on transit funding [National Post]

ELECTORAL REFORM

• Electoral reform on city ‘radar’ [Globe & Mail]
• A better way to vote? [NOW]

OTHER NEWS

• Garbage outsourcing generates fewer complaints than municipal collectors [Toronto Star]
• Yorkville Plaza construction site becomes a place for artists to shine [Globe & Mail]
• Competition Bureau to appeal tribunal decision on housing data [Globe & Mail]
• The City could start selling decommissioned street signs this summer [Torontoist]
• Vaughan spearheads push to designate University of Toronto grass heritage landscape [Toronto Sun]

The post Toronto’s Urbanism Headlines: Wednesday appeared first on Spacing Toronto.

From First Nations to forestry, the Humber River has a history of anchoring central Etobicoke. The trees are towering, roads are wide and graceful, street names are exceptionally post-war idyllic, and families mostly fall under the professional and managerial tier of middle class Canadians. This may be the most middle part of Middle Canada.

Humbertown, along Royal York Road north of Dundas Street West, was a neighbourhood master-planned in the 1940s and built-out over the next three decades. Stately Tudors and Brady Bunch back-splits offer glimpses into evolving architectural tastes over the decades. This area features recreational and social facilities, a school, a park, and the Humbertown Shopping Centre. Humbertown is also home to 500 three-storey walk-up apartments that, while market-rate, are still affordable in Toronto’s inflated rental market. In a sense, Humbertown was a rare attempt at a “complete community,” long before this was the planning norm.

Built in 1956, Humbertown Shopping Centre still largely resembles its original, revolutionary design of a one-stop shopping hub with covered arcades and free parking. It expanded slightly in the ’90s, creating an enclosed, temperature-controlled environment on one side of the plaza. Most of the area homes have been substantially rebuilt since Humbertown’s inception, and a subway station arrived 1.5 kilometres away. While the vast majority of the plaza is still tenanted, there are conspicuous pockmarks — a handful of vacant storefronts. Though well maintained and regularly visited by locals, this centre no longer represents a go-to retail destination.

Humbertown is a typical inner-suburb story: the population here is aging and shrinking, overall density is declining, and smaller families are living in existing, large houses. The saving grace of this decline has been The James Club, an innovative infill development that repurposed large, irregular lots originally intended for single homes into 200 units.

However, the neighbourhood population only went up by 70 people, when you factor in those who have also moved out. When overall population growth is less than half the rate of the number of new dwellings, it is apparent that a major shift in demographics is occurring.

In 2006, First Capital Realty purchased the aging shopping centre with the intention to redevelop it. The proposal they presented in early 2012 has gone through numerous iterations, from a single point tower and low-rise residential, to five buildings of varying heights, to a current plan that consists of a high-rise tower, two mid-rise buildings, a base of two-storey retail, and a series of green spaces.

This plan, unfortunately, has been met with fierce opposition from residents. The Humber Valley Village Residents Association (HVVRA) became vocal opponents at community meetings, maintaining that this development strays from the current character of the community. Again and again, residents conveyed the family-centric nature of the area — forgetting about the hundreds of apartment buildings which surround, and which make up one-third of households in the community. The opponents’ assertions are at odds with statistics that reveal single and two-person households are the vast majority in the area.

At community meetings, HVVRA supporters flung insults at the development team and City planners, accusing them of being “drunk” and generally ignorant. They distributed flyers with images that had the green roofs removed from the proposed buildings, insisting green roofs would only benefit birds. The local councillor, Gloria Lindsay Luby, took a direct stand against the proposal, which provided additional fodder for residents. Both the councillor and the ratepayers’ director likened this plan to a direct assault on their suburban style of living. Incessant heckling and shouting meant that no proper dialogue ensued.

An involved community is important, and Toronto residents have rallied and successfully preserved many elements of the city we love. Yet the question remains: is Humbertown Shopping Centre really worth saving? The conversation has evolved from “No,” to “Maybe,” as the HVVRA is working on an alternate plan [editor's note: this article was first published in Dec. 2012; the HVVRA alternative plan was recently unveiled]. But their design consultation meetings are only open to those who pay membership fees into the association.

Humbertown is not a unique case in this city. It is finally playing catch-up to infrastructure investments from decades ago. The TTC subway arrived in the late ’60s, and an Eglinton LRT is proposed, but both of these are moot without adding density.

A healthy community would have never let Humbertown dwindle to its current state. Even low-rise and wealthy Forest Hill Village has more than double the density of Humbertown. Hundreds of thousands of people are predicted to move to Toronto over the next few decades, and not all will move into the downtown core. The flow of population traffic is simply beyond control of the local residents. Neighbourhoods are not islands. Change will come, welcome or not.

photo form City of Toronto Archives

The post Fear and loathing of mid-rises in Etobicoke appeared first on Spacing Toronto.

Written by James L. Sipes—a landscape architect and environmental planner—and Mathew L. Sipes—a civil engineer—the book benefits from both authors professional experience as it brings together the disciplines of architecture, planning and engineering—all of which are indispensible when creating roadways—and presents them as a single integrated perspective. This approach makes the book more accessible without skimping on technical details.

The post Book Review – Creating Green Roadways: Integrating, Cultural Natural and Visual Resources into Transportation appeared first on Spacing National.

As it stands, the Miami Beach Convention Center is nowhere near being the standard for green sustainable architecture, but that’s about to change.

Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) has unveiled plans to transform the 52-acre site, creating the Miami Beach Square, a pedestrian-friendly space in front of the center. The renovations of the existing building will include an ambitious green roof which will also support art exhibitions.

The entire project is meant to revitalize the area: the new Miami Beach Square will act as a front door to the Convention Center.

Via Inhabitat

Urban Planet is a roundup of blogs from around the world dealing specifically with urban environments. For more stories from around the planet, check out Spacing on Facebook and Twitter.

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Street Scene will appear each week showcasing the illustrations of local artist
Jerry Waese.

The post STREET SCENE: Spring Bikes appeared first on Spacing Toronto.

The report is a response to a Global news story from 2011 that looked at the 100 most dangerous intersections for pedestrians by looking not at the pure volume of collisions, but at the proportion of pedestrians who were hit by vehicles. That way, it identified locations where something about the intersection design itself was causing problems, rather than just places where there were lots of pedestrians.

The City chose to use a blended methodology that takes both volume and proportion into consideration, and ended up with a different list. Some of the basic findings are similar, however — most of the intersections are in suburban areas, and many of them are places where most or all cars are turning rather than going straight.

In fact, 47% of pedestrian collisions in the worst 10 intersections were vehicles turning left into pedestrians crossing with the right-of-way (compared to 39% for all intersections). Overall, at least 70% of the pedestrians hit were crossing with the right-of-way.

The report looks closely only at the worst 10 intersections, where it proposes implementing some quick-win solutions that don’t need expensive reconstruction. These include better road markings and zebra stripes, better signage, and giving pedestrians more time to cross.

Two ideas stand out as potential improvements to city policies:

• Making the pedestrian signal always change along with the green light. Some of the worst intersections have what is called “Semi-Actuated “Type 2” (SA2)” signals, which means that the light can turn green but the pedestrian signal stays red unless you’ve pushed the button. This causes confusion and often means pedestrians hesitate, then cross when they don’t have enough time. The City uses these far too much – they should only be used on rare occasions.
• Wider use of “Leading Pedestrian Intervals” (LPI), where the pedestrian signal changes to “walk” a few seconds before the traffic light turns green. This gives pedestrians time to get out into the crosswalk, becoming more visible to cars and also clearing the intersection faster. It’s particularly valuable in reducing left-turn conflicts, which as we’ve seen are the biggest problem. LPIs are not useful everywhere, but they make a difference specifically at T-junctions — where all vehicles are turning  — which both reports found were disproportionately represented in the worst intersections.

The report proposes to extend the findings from the worst 10 intersections to provide simple improvements for the next 90. It also proposes to integrate a pedestrian safety audit into all intersection reconstructions, which could make a big difference over time to pedestrian safety. As always with the City of Toronto, the question will be whether these good intentions are in fact implemented over time.

We often focus on people’s behaviour (as drivers and pedestrians) as a cause of collisions, but the report shows that the underlying infrastructure can also have an impact. People respond to the cues from their environment, and a badly designed intersection creates more accidents. It took a news media report to prompt them, but it’s good to see the City take a look at how to improve the most dangerous intersections for pedestrians.

The post Doing something about city’s most dangerous intersections for pedestrians appeared first on Spacing Toronto.

Toronto was just a tiny little frontier town when its first road tolls were introduced. That was back in 1820; York wasn’t even 30 years old yet. There were still only about a thousand people living in a few blocks nestled between the lake and the ancient forest that had stood on this land for thousands of years. Even the major roads were only rough, muddy paths back then. Building them and keeping them passable was a big, expensive job. And so, road tolls were introduced as a way to help pay for them.

The first tollhouse was built at the corner of Yonge and King. The intersection, now at the bottom of a canyon of skyscrapers, wasn’t much more than a crossroads in the countryside, a few blocks west of the heart of the town. Soon, tollhouses could be found all over Toronto. The one in the painting above was at Dundas and Bloor.

The tolls made plenty of Torontonians angry. Many people tried to avoid paying them altogether. It was a common practice back then — and not just in Toronto. Cornelius Krieghoff, one of the most famous early Canadian artists, has a whole series of paintings that feature people whipping their horses up to full speed, blowing past tollhouses without paying. On the other side of the Atlantic, in Wales, people rioted; men dressed up as women to destroy tollgates under the cover of darkness. They called themselves Rebeccaites after Genesis 24:60: “And they blessed Rebekah and said unto her… let thy seed posses the gate of those which hate them.”

In Toronto, things could get violent too. On Queen Street, there was a particularly controversial tollhouse at the intersection of what’s now Ossington. It was the end of Dundas back then, the major road stretching west all the way to London. To the south of the tollgate was Fort York, so if you wanted to sell something to the British army, you had to stop and pay a toll every time you made a delivery.

One lumber dealer got fed up. His men frequently got into fights with the toll collectors – sometimes the disagreements descended into violence. Eventually, the lumber dealer came up with a plan. He bought the plot of land directly to the east of the tollhouse and built his own path through the woods. That way, his men could bypass the tollgate altogether. He called his new road Rebecca Street, in honour of those Welsh rebels. And it’s still there today, branching off Ossington a block north of Queen.

Still, there would be tollhouses in Toronto for nearly a hundred years. They helped to fuel our growth from that tiny town of a thousand into a thriving metropolis of a quarter of a million. It wasn’t until the end of the 1800s that the last of the tollhouses was closed. It was shuttered as part of an agreement allowing people from outside the city to sell their goods at the St. Lawrence Market without having to pay any fees. Most of the tollhouses were demolished. Today, one of them still survives: the “tollkeeper’s cottage” on the north-west corner of Davenport and Bathurst. A few years ago, it was restored and opened to the public as a museum.

More than fifty years after the last tollhouse closed, the idea of road tolls was revisited. In the 1950s, some politicians — including the mayor — suggested the Gardiner Expressway should be built as a toll highway. Many others opposed the plan and it never did happen. It wasn’t until the 1990s that Bob Rae’s provincial government built the 407 just beyond the edge of the city as a way to raise public funds. (The Mike Harris Conservatives then leased it off to a private consortium.) The 407 became the first toll road in the world without gates, operating electronically instead.

Now, nearly two hundred years after they first sparked controversy in Toronto, road tolls are back in the news as a potential source for transit funding. And with City Council refusing to endorse any revenue tools during last week’s dysfunctional mess, it looks like the final decision will once again be in hands of the provincial government.

A version of this post originally appeared on The Toronto Dreams Project Historical Ephemera Blog.

Image: Tollgate at Dundas and Bloor by Owen Staples (via the Toronto Public Library website)

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