In a city that loves to make, but not execute, plans and then overthink, but not solve, problems, there’s surely no better illustration of this twin-set of frustrating civic habits than the recently released 25-year Toronto Island Master Plan, which has done an absolutely masterful job of missing the proverbial forest for the trees.
The two-volume plan took four years to gestate, clocks in at 228 pages and has over 100 recommendations. It comes with numerous sidebars outlining engagement strategies, a “framework” document and a web of links to no fewer than nine other City strategies. The second volume concludes with a two-page appendix outlining all the various “ongoing studies,” “new studies” and “updates to existing studies” that will need to be completed in order to get all of us to the point when…we’ll need a new master plan.
You can spend several hours, like I did, trying to dog-paddle through all of it, seeking an answer to a question that no other grown-up city would force its residents to confront, which is this: will there ever be easier and less expensive — or even free, perish the thought! — ways to get to what is arguably Toronto’s pre-eminent public park?
All I can advise is, don’t wait up.
It is certainly important to acknowledge that Toronto Island is a complicated precinct, what with the Indigenous history, the Ward’s island community, a bunch of infrastructure, a superannuated amusement park, sandy beaches, flooding issues, erosion issues, etc., etc. There’s also a collection of constituencies that assert various claims to the Island’s spaces, some of which are premised on the maintenance of a degree of spatial exclusivity barely acknowledged in the Master Plan.
Mainly, it’s a large park in a rapidly expanding city where a growing proportion of residents don’t have backyards and cottages — a metropolis, what’s more, that fumbled the ball on building a major new public space (Rail Deck Park) and has lost access to another one (the bulk of Ontario Place) for, well, who knows how long.
The Master Plan, to be fair, does acknowledge that the Island has access issues, but the subtext all the way through this bewilderingly unfocused document is that the City doesn’t want to meaningfully expand the number of visitors. As the authors put it, the Island’s well-being demands “a light touch.”
The exact opposite is true of the visitor experience. The report notes that for the typical group travelling to the island, the cost to get there — $46 on average, for ferry tickets or water taxi, plus transit — is the single largest outlay they’ll make. There are no other cities which charge residents fees to visit major parks. It’s just not a thing.
The authors also conducted a largish online survey and found, unsurprisingly, that most visitors go there to get away from the city, socialize with friends and family or spend time outdoors. Yet a non-trivial proportion of those who took the survey also said it was difficult to get there or too expensive (44% in total).
The vast majority of the people who filled out the survey were already regular visitors to the Island — a self-selected minority. I suspect if the City had bothered to cast the net more broadly, it would have found that many more Torontonians never go because it’s just too complicated. This is an omission worth stressing: the City has no idea how many residents simply never visit. A lot, I’d bet.
The document, of course, repeats the now tread-worn promise about the imminent delivery of two larger, electric replacement ferries. (Two of the five ferries in the current fleet pre-date World War Two; one pre-dates World War One.) According to the latest staff report, which landed this week at the Infrastructure and Environment Committee, council has earmarked $83.4 million in its 10-year capital budget for these vessels, with the dollars coming over the next three years from a confection of debt, reserves and a ferry replacement fund that currently contains $8.6 million. According to the city, the ship-building contract will be tendered at some point this summer.
Yet there’s a distinctly Waiting-for-Godot like quality to the replacement ferry drama, which has been put-putting along for over a decade. The ten-year-capital budgets are subject to endless fidgeting, and a placeholder number that may appear in the latest cycle may well be gone next year or the year after. What is certain is the projected cost of the ferries only rises — from $11 million in 2015 to $63 million in 2022 to $83 million in 2024.
The ship delivery, what’s more, will require significant overhauls to the docks both at the foot of Bay Street and on the island, especially the Centre Island landing, and so we arrive at the fearsomely complicated riddle of carrying out major structural upgrades to the berths while attempting to maintain some vestige of service to and from the Island. The Master Plan is silent on this staging nightmare, made worse by the bottleneck that has long existed city-side. The City claims the project, which includes electric charging infrastructure, will take two years.
Parks, Forestry and Recreation has spent a bit of pocket change on the Jack Layton Ferry Terminal — there are efforts to improve the ticketing, for instance. The piece that’s gone completely AWOL, however, is the plan to completely redesign the notoriously utilitarian ferry terminal — an idea that became the subject of a high-minded design competition hosted a decade ago by Waterfront Toronto and which has since vanished into the ether. [Update: A Waterfront Toronto spokesperson says that “should full project funding be identified, the master plan concept selected through the previous design competition would be a starting point for revisiting the design.”]
Setting aside aesthetics, you’d think that the custodians of the Toronto Island might be contemplating contingency plans for maintaining access during the period when the dockside infrastructure is being re-built, but you’d be wrong.
Besides tacitly discouraging more visitors, the Master Plan’s few sentences devoted to the prospect of a pedestrian/cyclist-only fixed link — tunnel or bridge — across the Eastern Gap implies that such a “generational” undertaking is comparable in complexity to a moon shot. As a sidenote: at council last week, a member’s motion tabled by Don Valley East councillor Jon Burnside asks staff to report on the feasibility of such a connection, which many have advocated, most recently city council candidate April Engelberg.
There’s nothing especially complicated about this idea from an engineering or political point of view. After all, when Porter founder Robert Deluce wanted to connect Billy Bishop to the foot of Bathurst, he found ways to cajole the powers that be to build a tunnel under the Western Gap at a pace virtually unheard of in this city.
A permanent link at the east end makes abundantly good sense from a planning perspective, given all the population growth anticipated in coming years for the Port Lands, East Bayfront and the Lever Brothers site. Despite all that, the City’s parks mandarins — and the “stakeholder” groups that whisper in their ears — have prevailed with a schemata that prioritizes Toronto’s unkillable Toryism over the very real and specific needs of the contemporary city.
In the Master Plan, that priggish controlling impulse comes dressed up as environmental and Indigenous concern, wayfinding, programming, and all the other subtle ways that the City communicates its deep seated mistrust of Torontonians when they have the temerity to avail themselves of the city’s public spaces.
Next thing you know, they’ll even want to have fun.
