Planned Sprawl in the GTA

[jje1000]

I find it interesting that Springdale, AR is having a New Urbanist neighbourhood.

Arkansas (excluding Little Rock, which has an operating heritage streetcar system) is a state not exactly known for socially progressive urban planning, despite being home to Bill Clinton.

New Urbanism is quite 'conservative' in some manners, harkening back to older neighbourhood models, and are often filled with 'traditional' housing designs. Ironically, that also makes it progressive in other ways in rejecting some of the orthodoxy in the modernist planning (though still it often still embraces a top-down approach).

Another somewhat New Urbanist area that actually comes to mind is Lubbock's North Overton, which is actually the redevelopment of an older neighbourhood filled with single-family homes (compare to South Overton).

 

[Northern Light]

Province tweaked its growth plan.

Notable:

- Removed proposal to expand areas for aggregate extraction (quarries)

- Also moved to make it easier to change Employment lands to residential if located close to rapid transit.

From John Michael McGrath of TVO

Can the Tories’ new Growth Plan pull Ontario out of its COVID-19 recession? | TVO.org

ANALYSIS: The Tories released amendments to the Growth Plan on Friday. While they’ve backed down on some controversial suggestions, the changes are almost certain to spark criticism.

www.tvo.org

Also the adopted the numbers from Hemson into the growth plan setting a target for Toronto of 2M jobs (+300000), and 3.6M people (+700000) by 2051.

I feel the numbers are likely low.

 

[innsertnamehere]

The Growth plan has way under-forecast Toronto's population for a while now. Similarly, they are over-forecasting a lot of the inner 905 municipalities which have seen growth slow significantly.

Basically Toronto and Brampton are above projections along with a few outer ring municipalities like Bradford, and everywhere else is below expectations. The total population growth is about right, it's just going to different places than expected.

I think a lot of this has to do with the trend of the vast majority of employment growth in the GTA occurring downtown over the last 5 years.

 

[W. K. Lis]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1343594931479343107

 

[Midtown Urbanist]

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/urban-boundary-map-rural-properties-1.5874871

Ottawa rather than GTA but I think still relevant for this thread.

 

[afransen]

This madness of people being able to make massive windfall profits from changes in zoning is a recipe for corruption and development that is not in the public interest. In an ideal world, we could use something like a land value tax that charged based on the highest and best use of the land.

 

[Memph]

Any thoughts on Johnson Square as an alternate model of suburban growth?

Johnson Square

Johnson Square was born on the idea that great neighborhoods create healthy places for people to thrive, prosper and be happy.

www.johnsonsquare.com

Johnson Square — Michael Watkins Architect, LLC

www.michaelwatkinsarchitect.com

Unfortunately still remotely situated, but I can see this community able to sustain a bus stop along Johnson Mills Bvld.

5309 Carley Rd, Springdale, AR 72762 | Zillow

Zestimate® Home Value: $112,700. 5309 Carley Rd, Springdale, AR is a vacant land home that contains 1,050 sq ft and was built in 1922. It contains 0 bedroom and 0 bathroom. The Rent Zestimate for this home is $1,200/mo, which has increased by $1,200/mo in the last 30 days.

www.zillow.com

If you're able to do pedestrian friendly suburban development, then by all means. I suspect that the amount of commercial space in that neighbourhood is significantly more than what the residential population can support though (just based on the amount of land dedicated to each use and the presumed density), so the businesses will likely have to rely significantly on pulling in customers from other neighbourhoods (perhaps the reason why their map showed traffic volumes on the nearby arterials/highways?), and it wouldn't be realistic to build every neighbourhood at that low density with so much retail within walking distance.

 

[afransen]

That looks like standard sprawl to me.

 

[Divas S.]

It looks like the same or even more auto dominant that what is currently being built in new suburbs

 

[SunriseChampion]

I've said this here before but as it's getting built out it's becoming more and more jarring in its reality: Seaton is a joke of sprawl and having the various "nodes" and sections seperate just adds to the sprawl.

It's quite the disaster in north Pickering.

 

[W. K. Lis]

Study: Yes, More Parking Does Put More Cars on the Road​

A new study finds something transportation reformers have long suspected, but never proven.

From link.

Do cities create greener lifestyles? Or do they just enable them?

It’s very, very, very clear that people who live closer to other people drive less. But how much of this is due to the fact that people who were already predisposed to driving less—those of us who don’t particularly enjoy driving, for example—are deliberately living where parking is scarce and buses are frequent?

A forthcoming academic paper finally begins to answer this crucial question. Its “breakthrough” conclusion: Bigger parking lots make us drive more.

Even if we ignore the breathtaking economic costs of dedicating scarce urban space to car storage, mandatory parking isn’t an “all of the above” strategy that simply lets people choose their favorite mode of transportation. Instead, as UCLA professor Donald Shoup put it in 1997, parking spaces are “a fertility drug for cars.”

Our buildings shape our behavior

Speaking scientifically, the key to proving a cause-and-effect relationship is finding a randomized sample of human behavior.

And in their new paper, “What Do Residential Lotteries Show Us About Transportation Choices?”, four Californian academics found such a sample: the free, site-specific lotteries that San Francisco uses to select who gets to live in the price-regulated homes of new apartment and condo buildings. (Because this is San Francisco, a two-person household “generally can qualify while earning up to $118,200, equivalent to 120 percent of city median income.” So these findings don’t apply only to people who would struggle to afford a car.)

“It’s so hard to do this kind of research,” wrote Jessica Roberts, a principal at Portland-based Alta Planning + Design and one of the country’s leading experts on the science of transportation behavior. “Their elegant experimental design is a huge breakthrough.”

After surveying the auto ownership and basic transportation habits of the residents of 2,654 homes in 197 projects built since 2002, the authors (Adam Millard-Ball, Jeremy West, Nazanin Rezaei, and Garima Desai) found that projects with more on-site parking induce more auto ownership:

“Buildings with at least one parking space per unit (as required by zoning codes in most U.S. cities, and in San Francisco until circa 2010) have more than twice the car ownership rate of buildings that have no parking,” the authors write.

Do buildings with less parking and car ownership limit the job prospects of their occupants? Apparently not. The team found no correlation between parking supply and employment status at the time of their 2019 survey.

They also found that more parking led to more driving, less transit use, and less walking. And they checked the locations of the 197 projects and found that non-automotive transportation choices seem to be induced by higher AllTransit scores (a measure of nearby mass transit quality by street address), higher WalkScores (a measure of the diversity of destinations within walking distance, inspired in part by an old Sightline blog post), and higher BikeScores (a measure of the quality of nearby bike networks).

It’s not just that people who enjoy walking to the store will choose to live near stores. It’s that living near stores makes us more inclined to walk, and less inclined to drive.

“We shape our buildings,” Winston Churchill said. “And afterward, our buildings shape us.”

This addresses one of the most important questions in urban environmentalism

This paper doesn’t close the book on the questions of how much our buildings shape us, and in which ways, and which of us they shape more or differently. It’s one study in one city from one year.

But it is a big new confirmation of one of the central hypotheses of the modern pro-housing movement.

We’ve known that Amsterdam, built mostly before the automobile was invented, has much lower energy use per person than Seattle, despite their comparable population and wealth. We’ve known that this pattern holds within countries, too. When you’re measuring greenhouse emissions per person within a country, density is all but destiny. We’ve known that if everyone on the world could consume energy like Netherlanders rather than like Cascadians, it would be far easier to find our way to a planet that can remain both prosperous and habitable for human life.

But at least in the United States, there hasn’t actually been much solid evidence that building cities differently will actually change our behavior enough.

This new study strongly suggests that it’s possible, all these centuries later, to build new Amsterdams.

 

[W. K. Lis]

Doug Ford’s planned superhighway is a ‘slam dunk’ for developers — but some say it will be an economic disaster​

See link.

As post-COVID economic stimulus ideas for Ontario go, Doug Ford’s GTA West superhighway plan is certainly epic in scale.

At an estimated $10-billion construction cost, the new 400-series freeway will run through 55 kilometres of prime farmland, conservation lands and protected areas across the GTA’s northern perimeter in Halton, Caledon, and Vaughan townships, generating thousands of well-paid road construction jobs over the project’s multi-year span.

But according to real estate and construction experts, the government’s plan is much more than just a highway proposal. It’s also a bonanza for land speculators and builders.
“This is a slam dunk for us,” says Bill Argeropoulos, head of research at Avison Young, a Toronto-based commercial real estate advisory and brokerage with 100 offices in 10 countries. “The new transportation corridor will open a lot of available land, and it’ll provide a release valve for the industrial land market, which is extremely tight. Right now there’s huge demand for land for retail distribution centres.”

The economic case for the project, says Natasha Tremblay, spokesperson for the Ontario Ministry of Transport, is obvious.

With the population of the Greater Golden Horseshoe projected to double to almost 15 million over the next 30 years, the creation of new housing, workplaces, schools, hospitals and university campuses in Toronto’s near north — all fed by the new superhighway — represents a wave of new economic activity akin in scale to the creation of Mississauga in recent decades.

“In addition to serving over 300,000 auto vehicle trips a day in 2031 and relieving traffic on local roads and parallel highways,” Tremblay explained in an email, the GTAW will benefit the economy by “reducing travel times for commuters and goods, providing greater connectivity between urban growth centres,” and “providing better connections to residential and employment lands.” It will also provide “greater economic vitality,” she says.
But like a lot of other epic-scale Canadian economic megaproject plans, the economic pushback against the new superhighway is starting to look rather epic in scale, too.

Farmers, alongside key business leaders at the helm of Ontario’s massive agri-biz industry, which employs almost a million people, are leading the charge.

And they’re gaining momentum fast.

On Thursday, Ontario’s Liberals joined the Green Party and the NDP in vowing to kill Highway 413 — as the GTA West is informally known — and invest the cash instead in mass transit projects.

On the same day, Peel Regional Council — one of the premier’s key political assets in pushing the new highway forward — moved to question the government’s 413 implementation strategy.

An last week, Environmental Defence, an advocacy group, asked the federal government to review the project’s legality under federal environmental laws. Ottawa now says it’s thinking about whether or not to do so. But this isn’t just an environmental fight, says Sarah Buchanan, who heads the group’s campaign. “This project is a huge economic mistake as well,” she says.

“The real estate and construction industries have monopolized the discussion about this project long enough,” Buchanan says. “The agriculture, food, tourism and recreational industries deserve to be heard too. This project puts tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of economic activity in those sectors at risk.”...

 

[SunriseChampion]

^^^ More nonsense.

A disgusting waste of time, money, and resources.

 

[SunriseChampion]

It's going to cost $10 billion!!! Governments should be forced to resign on such gross mismanagement of funds.

On the other hand, one person's mismanagement of funds is another's proper allocation of funds.

Let's just say that stupid highway schemes like this aren't the only reason I'm working towards getting out of paying income taxes.

 

[W. K. Lis]

Since we're not the corporate elite, Doug Ford may not listen to us. Here's the link to the Office of the Premier contact website: https://correspondence.premier.gov.on.ca/EN/feedback/default.aspx