On March 22, I attended a great workshop on sustainable transportation put together by local organization Moving the Economy. I am going to post some of the interesting information and lessons gleaned from this fascinating workshop. As well, look for some inspiring insights from the workshop in the upcoming issue of NOW magazine.
Two of the speakers were transportation specialists dealing with issues in small university towns – Kingston, Ontario and Syracuse, New York. In both cases, a review of the city’s downtown transportation system began because the big institutions (universities, hospitals) went to the city and asked it to “solve our parking problems.” What they meant, of course, was “how do we squeeze in more parking,” but in each case the experts gradually persuaded them that the real problem was sustainable transportation — not where to put cars, but reducing the reliance on cars in the first place.
It’s a good reminder that the problem with the automobile goes beyond pollution. Even if cars were emissions-free, their sheer size means they would still be an inefficient way to transport a single individual on a simple trip — even in a small town.
The presentation about Kingston was given by Malcolm Morris, Director of Transportation for the city. Kingston’s downtown is successful, full of employment and entertainment destinations, and almost entirely built up — there’s not much room for expanding parking. So in its 2003 transportation master plan, the city decided to focus on changing the direction of its transportation planning away from a car culture and towards walking, cycling and transit.
It was interesting, after continuous immersion in Toronto’s big-city transportation issues, to hear the perspective of a small city. They have some additional challenges — for example, transit is usually poorly used in small cities, so Kingston’s goal is to increase transit’s share of total trips from just 4% to 11%. On the other hand, in a small city it is much easier to pay attention to the details, to make small gestures that have a significant impact, and to make some transformations quickly.
So, for example, already every single bus in Kingston is outfitted with a bike-carrying rack, only a few years after the plan was prepared, and they are heavily used. And the city has also decided to no longer be constrained by its road rebuilding schedule when adding bike lanes — they will be added when and where they are needed to create a coherent network, not just when it’s convenient. Finally, the city is establishing bike-parking standards, so that a certain amount is mandated in various situations. It’s quite a contrast with the ad hoc nature of Toronto’s bike infrastructure implementation.
In terms of transit, the city has arranged with the university that students can board buses for free with a student card (the cost is incorporated into student fees). And the city has integrated the VIA station (apparently Canada’s 6th busiest train station) with local transit, so that it’s now easy to get off the train and quickly arrive downtown.
The city is also creating park-and-rides north of the city to intercept commuters coming in from outlying areas and get them onto buses. A significant problem, however, is that downtown parking passes are currently cheaper than transit passes. One of the key parts of the strategy, and most difficult politically, will be to gradually make it more expensive to buy monthly parking passes downtown than it is to buy a transit pass, so that transit becomes economically competitive.
The city government is trying to lead by example. It is gradually removing the provision of free parking passes to its staff — a difficult task, as parking passes are seen by staff as an important job perk. To take their place, it is providing subsidies for transit passes for staff, and it has developed a daytime transit pass system for staff who need to travel for work-related reasons such as meetings. It is also considering buying a number of hybrid vehicles to be shared among staff as needed. The city has also relocated 125 staff from more inaccessible locations to its downtown offices, where it provides bike lockers and shower facilities.
Finally, recognizing that placemaking is an important part of transportation planning (a key message of the workshop), the city took a dead space behind city hall and removed a bunch of parking spaces to build renovate a farmer’s market, with an outdoor skating rink in the winter. It also instituted traffic-calming measures such as narrowing the road and adding brick pavers. The result has been that car traffic has gone down, and a lively new civic space has been created.
This final example provoked a revealing question from the only representative of the TTC to attend the workshop. With reference to the difficulties the TTC experienced with the St. Clair transit right-of-way, he asked how Kingston persuaded local merchants to accept the loss of local parking. Morris answered that they accepted it because the city was offering something to the area in return — a market that would attract more people, and therefore customers, and would make the area an attractive place to linger and shop. Basically, rather than seeing locals as an obstacle to their engineering plans — an attitude that was evident in the TTC person’s question — Kingston saw the local merchants as partners who needed to be shown some kind of benefit from the proposed changes.
Queen’s U library photo by Udo Schuklenk
12 comments
Kingston is a great city.
The public square that they’ve laid on the grounds of the old parking lot behind Kingston’s City Hall is one of the great public space success stories in Canada. The materials are top-notch and the features (like black traffic lights and poles, andgranite paving stones for lane markers) blend in seamlessly with the historic architecture. Also, they have not whored out the surrounding landscape to ads or other visceral distractions. This is the closest that any Ontario city has ever come to building a European piazza. Nothing like this exists anywhere else in the province.
I don’t know about “anywhere in ontario” – have you been to London? I was recently, looked pretty nice from the driver’s seat, unfortunately didn’t have time to walk through it.
London ON is a hole. Great music scene, but most of southwestern Ontario is a write-off.
Um… that so-called “dead space” has formed the lively center of Kingston for, well, pretty much forever. I shopped at that farmers’ market in the 1970s. Yes, it also had parking spots, used when the market closed (nobody runs an outdoor market all the time). Yes, a skating rink makes for a better use of the space than car parking, and yes, while Kingston has always had a bike-friendly policy and has never really catered to the car, I applaud their moves in this direction.
But if you didn’t notice that Kingston already had a vibrant culture, a sense of civic space that frankly puts Toronto in the shade, and an utterly beautiful environment (both natural and built), then shame on you.
There is no doubt that Kingston is doing some great things to revitalize its downtown, however there are a few inaccuracies in your article. The farmer’s market behind city hall is not new; there has been a market on that site since 1802! In recent years, the market has operated only three days a week (in season) and the space was paved with asphalt and used for parking on the off days. The new stone pavers and the skating rink in winter undoubtedly add value to the space, but it was not dead before.
Additionally, while the bus service is steadily improving, Kingston Transit’s resistance to adopting a grid-based network of routes results in inefficient use of buses, long headways and unnecessarily long trips to destinations outside the downtown core. The main bus route serving the VIA station runs only every 30 minutes, while two other routes pass close to the station, but too far to be truly convenient. The lack of a decent east-west route (along e.g. John Counter Blvd.) that does not also go downtown means that people living in the northeast or west suburbs have a very long ride downtown in order to ride back out to their actual destination.
Look at the maps at http://www.cityofkingston.ca/residents/transportation/transit/schedule.asp to see the spaghetti bowl that Kingston’s bus network is in 2007.
I think Kingston is more similar to what Kitchener-Waterloo has done recently. Since the region took over the bus system, there have been substantial, but incremental improvements, and most buses have bike racks. U of Waterloo is getting the bus pass, and Laurier may follow suit. There are even some bike lanes, and some good changes to Kitchener’s depressed downtown (like a new market, loft developments and streetscape changes). The city hall is great. Waterloo has redeveloped the old Seagram lands nicely, and redeveloped its terrible Uptown mall into something much more urban.
London has done a nice job with the most recent additions to its downtown core, but it had a lot to work with. The struggling downtown mall lost both the Eaton’s and Bay stores (thanks to London council approving too many suburban malls and subdivisions), but the city turned the Bay into a nice new central library. I was there the week it opened.
The city also built a new Covent Garden Market (cough, rip-off) where the old farmer’s market was the bottom of a parking garage. The new market and square are a big public space improvement. They also decided to build its OHL arena downtown, and moved it in from an ugly suburban barn.
But London has Fantino-cams all around the downtown core (The Sun’s favourite cop was chief of London’s force during the dark Dianne Haskett days) and some areas are still sketchy. But the street lights are old classic style, there’s some new condos and businesses.
Andrew,
That’s the problem. I looked at Kingston’s transportation master plan, and it looks great. But you are right, in order to serve every minor street, the routes, except the 1 and 2, are horrible for circuitous routing. It also surprises me that Kingston doesn’t think anyone has anywhere to go after 6PM on a Saturday, or after 10PM on a weekday, and that 4 buses running every 60 minutes for a city of 120,000 constitutes Sunday service. But I remember when only one route ran to the VIA station, now at least three do.
Guelph is about the same size as Kingston, but it runs a great bus service in comparison. All the buses (which basically run in all directions from the downtown, loop in a residential or industrial area, then return) leave downtown at :15 and :45 7 days a week, so at least they all connect, and run until midnight 6 days a week (until 6:15 on Sunday). There’s more buses to the university when it is in session. The VIA and bus stations are a 5 minute walk from the bus meeting point. When Guelph outgrew that, they didn’t junk the radial-pulse system, they added a loop route to make trips (especially to U of G) more direct.
Meanwhile, Brampton suddenly went from a suburban (and Kingston) type system quickly to a grid-type system in 2005. They screwed it up with bad transfers and little improvements to frequency, but slowly fixed most of those problems, so at least it is adequate, and a lot faster than the shopping mall to shopping mall routings, but still far from TTC standards.
Hey folks – thanks for the corrections. This post was reporting on the presentation I heard and saw, rather than on first-hand experience, so it seems some background information got lost in translation.
> John Spragge – I did say “Kingston’s downtown is successful, full of employment and entertainment destinations, …” — I don’t think anything in my post suggested otherwise, it’s really about transportation policy.
The problem with Kingston Transit is that they insist on creating bus routes which are no more than a certain distance (500m or so) from any residence, even if it means taking a very circuitous, indirect and inconvenient route. One of the worst examples is the #6 (Downtown-Queens-St Lawrence-Reddendale-Gardiners TC-Cataraqui-VIA), which takes a sensible route until it gets to Taylor Kidd & Bayridge, which is a short walk from Cataraqui Town Centre (a major mall). Then it takes a long detour through a residential neighbourhood and by Wal-Mart before reaching the mall. (This is not obvious from the map). Once, I actually got off at Taylor Kidd & Bayridge and walked to the mall – I got to the mall just as the bus I was on arrived. If they were sensible, the route would go to Cataraqui Town Centre first, then take the long detour after going to the mall.
Hey Andrew, I’ll see your #6 and raise you the #1 Princess/Bath Bus, which would be a pretty decent route if it dropped a few of its ludicrous detours. At one point, it runs a few blocks down a dead end street (Weller Ave. near Division) only to turn around at the end and run back the way it came! To save one or two people a walk of a few blocks, everyone else on the bus has an extra 5 minutes or more added to their trip. Madness.
I guess Rideau Heights folks don’t deserve a speedy bus trip.
-Another Andrew
I agree the #1 sucks, it took me an hour to get back downtown from the Via Station and Kingston has some buses which have seen better days. Ktown is a great city for walking and cycling but only around the downtown/univeristy neighbourhoods where everything was built before cars. This place has a long way to go before its transit system can be called anything near effective, but I would agree that the attitude towards the future is good.