Yesterday (PDF), Toronto’s Design Review Panel looked at the new “InfoToGo” info/ad pillars installed by Astral Media as part of the city’s street furniture contract, which have received a lot of criticism.
Josh Fullan of People Plan Toronto attended the review and gave this report to the Walking Toronto Facebook group, which he has allowed us to share here.
Good news: the Design Review Panel discussed the info pillars today and agreed that the placement and more importantly the design of the pillars was unacceptable sidewalk clutter. The words “atrocious” “awful” and “inexcusable” were all used by professional designers and architects to describe a major piece of street furniture largely in our downtown core.
Bad news: every time the issue of redesign of currently installed pillars came up, the Transportation Services rep from city hemmed and hawed, basically saying there is a contract and Astral is disinclined to consider redesign (no kidding) but will carefully look at future installations.
Next steps: the recourse is to compel PWIC (Public Works and Infrastructure Committee) and council to force Astral into a redesign within existing contracting, location tweaks are not enough, and note that info pillars are a fraction of the total ad space agreement with astral. The Design Review Panel will be writing a letter to this effect to councillors and so should everyone else who cares about this issue. PWIC meets again in March when this will be on agenda and Design Review has also asked to weigh in on pillars once more.
6 comments
These useless pillars have to be redesigned. There’s much too little information on them and too much advertising. Astal is marginalizing the purpose of this piece of street furniture for its own profit. It’s not supposed to exist mainly to show advertising; it’s supposed to help people get around and discover interesting destinations and points of interest in a neighbourhood. If not, it doesn’t belong on our sidewalks because space is limited.
This is about the piece of social infrastructure where I would heartily recommend street graffiti artists to hone their craft upon. C’mon guys/gals, let’s see what you can do!
It’s not even the advertising that bothers me. These pillars are dangerous.
They block sight lines that are important for pedestrians and cars pulling out of parking garages and driveways. They cut the sidewalk in half and make it impassable, and this is often on sidewalks which are already quite narrow.
Astral could replace the ads with maps and information and they would still be traffic accidents waiting to happen.
If they won’t re-design it’s a pretty easy to fix to me and I guarantee Astral will like it less. They went too far and got lucky sneaking it through. If they won’t accept that, the only acceptable locations for these things are turned sideways up against buildings or 180 degrees flush with alley walls where possible. Just get them out of the way and pedestrians will still be just as likely to find the actual infopillar portion so it doesn’t alter anything for the city, just drastically reduces how many eyeballs the adspace is going to.
And in this one case, I put most of the burden on council. Do your fucking job right the first time.
I just want the list of Astral kickbacks to politicians. Mention a street level blight, and Astral’s name has come up over and over in the past few years. Somebody’s padding their nest…
Suggestion:
Make a very public list listing the names of all corporations who advertise on these monstrosities, and have people pledge to never buy a god damned thing from them until they publicly apologise.
If Bell wants us to suffer by paying Astral to ruin our streets, their bottom line should suffer in return. Or at least their public image.