Canadian Urbanism Uncovered
Read more articles by Julie Yamin
• Car campaign Ts off councillors [ Toronto Star ]
• Wobbly bike posts a gift for thieves [ Toronto Star ]
• Green bins in condos: A city how-to [ Toronto Star ]
• Sprawl is our ‘Inconvenient Truth’ [ Globe and Mail ]
• King street reopens to traffic [ Globe and Mail ]
• Inspections keep King off limits [ Globe and Mail ]
• Major pier to jut into the lake at Yonge [ National Post ]
With the final council session of the year now in the rear-view mirror, Mayor Olivia Chow is spending part of this week powering through year-end...
By John Lorinc
EDITOR: Landscape architect and urban designer Walter Kehm worked on the CNE master plans in the late 1960s and recently found these images that included...
By Walter Kehm
Spacing’s senior editor and co-founder Shawn Micallef has expanded and updated his 2010 book Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto. The...
By Spacing
6 comments
I searched for “sprawl” at globeandmail.com and got a free-article link to the same story as the 3rd item above (which links to the pay wall).
Thanks Matt.
It was a very interesting article. It just failed to address office sprawl into the suburbs. It seem like it’s becoming standard for businesses in the GTA to locate their offices in sprawled campuses far from transit and far from places where workers can go for a bite or a coffee. Makes you wonder what kind of urban planers we have in the GTA… Businesses are doing this because of lower taxes, but they are just shifting their costs to the environment and onto their employees.
We can agree on that. Office sprawl is pretty common in cities across North America, but local factors (differences in business tax rates, lack of regional planning) aren’t helping. And the park & ride model that’s been successful for GO Transit doesn’t work in reverse. If you live downtown, getting to Union Station is easy, but how do you get from a suburban GO station to your workplace if the area isn’t dense enough to be walkable or well-served by local transit?
GO Transit has been resistant to reverse-commute travel, I almost think they see themselves as a parking lot operator more than a transit operator (a bit harsh, but that’s the feeling I get sometimes).
Some transit agencies have bus routes that attempt to provide this reverse commute (York Region has one or two in Markham), but they don’t work if you need to work late or early. At least downtown Toronto’s getting some new office towers that will help maintain the balance, if nothing else.
I think GO has a cash cow in their hands and they don’t know it. If GO developed the land around its stations it could become a big office landlord with an advantage the other developers don’t possess; a train right to the door of its offices. The potential profits could go straight into transit. It probably wouldn’t work because like most agencies in the GTA GO does not have the vision to do things correctly. To be fair with GO it must be stated that the train tracks belong to CN and CP, they do not have a lot of decisions making when it comes to the trains’ schedules, the priority in those lines is for freight hauling, not transit.
Every time you post another image of the audi logo you’re just giving them more free advertising.