{"id":45103,"date":"2013-07-23T10:40:00","date_gmt":"2013-07-23T14:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/?p=45103"},"modified":"2015-05-11T16:13:29","modified_gmt":"2015-05-11T20:13:29","slug":"toronto-is-not-a-grid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2013\/07\/23\/toronto-is-not-a-grid\/","title":{"rendered":"REID: Toronto is not a grid"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

We usually think of Toronto \u2014 at least the older part of it \u2014 as being based on a grid of streets<\/a>. One of the city’s free weekly newspapers even calls itself The Grid<\/em>.<\/p>\n

But Toronto’s streets are not in fact laid out in a true grid, and that has some significant implications for how we manage cycling routes and traffic.<\/p>\n

Cities like Vancouver<\/a> and New York<\/a> have close to true grid layouts \u2014 that is, all of the streets, even the lesser ones, are continuous and parallel to each other.<\/p>\n

What Toronto has, instead, is a series of mini-grids stitched together within a skeleton grid of arterial streets (the old concession roads<\/a>). These mini-grids within concession blocks often don’t align with each other.<\/p>\n

All over the older part of Toronto, if you are travelling on a side street, when you get to an arterial you’ll often find that the continuation of your street on the other side is off-set a little, or a lot, from the one you’re on.<\/p>\n

As historian Richard White wrote in the Summer 2010 issue of Spacing<\/em>, these off-set streets are the result of early landowners developing their land grants each in their own way. Once the car started to become dominant, the City embarked on a “jog elimination” program to stitch some of these streets together more continuously \u2014 a process that gave us, for example, the length of Dundas St., extended eastwards by stitching together many older east-west streets. But only a relatively small number of jog eliminations were ever completed (examples cyclists may be familiar with are the connections between Beverly and St. George, or Hoskin and Harbord).<\/p>\n

When you add to these off-set streets railway lines, ravines, parks and other interventions, the result is that few side-streets in even the older parts of Toronto extend for more than a few kilometers. (And once you get to the post-war suburbs, all street continuity is deliberately lost for side-streets).<\/p>\n

This irregularity has implications for Toronto’s cycling network. Politicians and others occasionally claim that Toronto’s cycling network should avoid arterials and be based on side streets \u2014 a solution common, for example, in Vancouver. But, unlike Vancouver, Toronto does not have side streets that continuously parallel its main streets. Where there are reasonably extended side-streets, they are indeed used by cyclists (for example, Shaw or Logan). But for the most part, to travel any great distance in a reasonably straight line, the only solution for cyclists in Toronto, as for cars and surface transit, is to travel along main streets. That’s why we need to focus on a complete streets policy to enable all modes to use these main streets together.<\/p>\n

Incidentally, the lack of a true grid also explains why it’s more difficult to create a network of\u00a0one-way main streets in Toronto similar to that in Manhattan. There simply are not a lot of situations where there are parallel, adjacent main streets of similar size for any great distance \u2014 the only examples are restricted to the city’s core.<\/p>\n

Image from City of Toronto Archives<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We usually think of Toronto \u2014 at least the older part of it \u2014 as being based on a grid of streets. One of the city’s free weekly newspapers even calls itself The Grid. 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