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Planned Sprawl in the GTA

MTown said:
Old Oakville/Kerr, central Oshawa, central Pickering, lots of Hamilton....just the ones I can quickly think of.

Port Credit, though, is the only one I have ever seriously considered outside of Toronto (and besides my unfortunate and unplanned stints in Pickering).
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Hah! I'm a resident of central Hamilton but don't consider the city part of the "905" but technically it is, and yes, I live happily without a car.

TOareaFan said:
yet the Star showed a chap doing it from the Steeles and Kennedy area of Brampton?
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I was just pondering and basing it off my own central Toronto/Hamilton naïveté. I have nothing but admiration for the family in Brampton.
 
I lived without a car in Mississauga for about 4 months. My quality of life declined dramatically and I may even have experienced a bout of depression as a result.

During school, I lived in a student house in Chinatown and my commute to school, work, groceries, etc was 7-10 minutes. I lived poor but it was quite nice, because even without money, I could sit in the park and watch the people and the dogs pass by while reading a book, or attend any of the many free events available.

After school, I got an internship at a company located by the Airport. I moved in with my parents, who lived in Port Credit at the time. Since I was making $12/hour, I couldn't immediately afford a car. My daily commute was over 3 hours, I knew nobody, and found no nice or charming places to pass the time anywhere at all. Everything was far, and not quite worth the lengthy and frustrating trip. On the way to and from work, the bus would go through all these loops, often driving kilometers only to pick up 1 person at a lonely, dusty bus stop. I got dropped off at a highway underpass, and the last 10 minutes of walking were through some pretty desolate places. Often, buses left me behind while I was chasing after them. Drivers honked or yelled at me when I was biking, as if those chimps had never quite seen such a marvel. I couldn't even really go out, because GO service would end at 1:30, meaning that wherever downtown I would be, I'd have to leave by 12:45 at the latest, unless I wanted to sleep at Union Station.

I eventually started jogging, for lack of something better to do. At one point I was doing 12kms every day. 'Cause that's what you do in the suburbs, you run by yourself. For those without a car, yes, the 905 is and should be a dirty word.
 
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Interesting article in Streetsblog, at this link.

Outer London’s Huge Bike Plan Could Break the Cycle of Bad Suburban Transit


You may have heard that London has just approved a spectacular crosstown protected bike lane. But another part of its plan has, ironically, gotten little press in the United States.

As London’s regional government begins what may be the biggest municipal bicycling investment in the history of Europe, it’s setting aside $140 million for the suburbs.

“Cycling is, I think the secret weapon of suburban sustainable transport,†says Transport for London Director of Surface Strategy and Planning Ben Plowden. “It is much more like car travel than transit is.â€

It’s almost impossible to build car-lite suburbs with transit alone

In the United Kingdom as in the United States, efforts to reduce car dependence have relied mostly on the biggest tool in the shed: transit.

In London and New York, transit reigns supreme. The cities’ woven grids of bus and rail lines carry the overwhelming share of non-car trips in each city.

But in smaller cities and suburbs, transit needs help. With further to walk to each bus stop, fewer people ride. With fewer riders, buses run empty and it becomes cripplingly expensive for agencies to run them frequently. With infrequent buses, even short transit trips can take hours.

It’s a situation familiar to anyone who’s ridden transit in a U.S. suburb or small city — let alone tried to balance the budget of a suburban transit agency.

“You’re not going to have a $125 an hour bus with 43 seats coming through all these cul-de-sacs,†said David Bragdon, a former New York City sustainability chief who now runs Transit Center, a transit-focused policy nonprofit. “It just doesn’t work.â€

That’s why London, working to stave off congestion as its population keeps climbing, is looking hard for better ways to improve suburban transit. And that’s what led its transport agency to the bicycle.

In many suburbs, bikes already carry 15 percent of transit ridership or more
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The potential for bicycling in the suburbs, says Plowden, is mathematical.

London’s streets already carry 600,000 bike trips a day, he notes, about 20 percent of the entire London Underground.

“This is already a mass transit mode,†said Plowden, speaking last week at a Transit Center-sponsored event in the Portland suburb of Beaverton. “It’s a much cheaper way of getting people around the city than rail transit, certainly, per passenger-kilometer… because they bring their own equipment.â€

Those ratios aren’t unlike those in many U.S. cities, including suburbs. In greater Denver, bikes already carry 22 percent as many commuters as the bus and rail network. In greater Indianapolis, it’s 30 percent; in greater New Orleans, 31 percent; in greater Portland, 36 percent.

Even in Beaverton, an auto-oriented suburb that straddles the Portland region’s most-ridden rail line, bikes carry 24 percent as many commuters as transit.

Plowden’s argument isn’t that transit is a bad investment. Transport for London is proud that 94 percent of metro-area residents now live within 400 meters of a bus stop. Thanks to service improvements, London bus ridership has been rising fast.

Faster, in fact, than every mode except one: the bicycle.

Europe’s lesson: Bikes enable suburban transit ridership
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Among rich countries, the best places for biking — Amsterdam, Denmark, Germany — are also among the best places for transit.

These countries design their suburbs so local trips can be done by foot and bike as well as by car. Trips into the city, meanwhile, often use the train or bus.

The key to the system: Once biking becomes easy in the suburbs, it also becomes easy to make a short bike trip to a train station. That can break the vicious cycle of low suburban transit ridership.

“One of the biggest challenges for conventional transit in this country is first/last mile,†said Bragdon. “You can run this good light rail service every 10 minutes on this trunk line, but people are still low-density. Biking, I think, is a real practical solution to that problem.â€

Plowden agrees. His agency is dedicating 10 percent of its massive $1.4 billion biking improvement budget over the next 10 years on a trio of what it calls “mini-Hollands,†suburbs that will be dramatically redesigned for biking.

“They are spending sums of money that you would never have contemplated spending in an Outer London borough,†Plowden said.

Plowden’s agency calculates that Outer London’s boroughs, the suburban areas developed mostly in the 20th century, contain 60 percent of London’s population and half its potential bike trips: trips of several miles currently taken in cars that people are physically able to bike.

Plowden said that if bikes can be made a viable option for those trips, a century’s worth of suburbs, in the States as well as Brtain, can be freed from their overwhelming dependence on cars.
“It provides the opportunity to meet those more complex suburban journeys,†he said.
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I think that an often-missed point about transit usage is that the built form of a place either lends itself to transit usage or it doesn't. If you live in a cul-de-sac in the suburbs, the entire layout of the street makes walking anywhere difficult because of the indirect route you have to take to get anywhere and because the separation of uses means that stores will be a significant distance away. Transit is at an inherent disadvantage because of the long meandering distances required to pick up a small number of people. Instead of having store fronts reaching the street like in older neighbourhoods, they have legally mandated setbacks and minimum parking requirements, which require pedestrians to cross oceans of parking to reach their store. Wide streets, auto-centric signal timing and mandatory setbacks encourages higher automotive speeds to the detriment of pedestrian safety and convenience. Minimum parking requirements decrease densities, reduce walkability and provide hidden subsidies for auto users. Older built cities tend to be more walkable and have higher transit usage because they predate these zoning bylaw requirements and have forms built around transit corridors (so-called "streetcar suburbs").

Biking sounds like a good way to try to bridge the gap, but it is an uphill battle. Suburbs are designed for one mode of transport only: the car, which makes all other uses impractical.
 
^The article mentions that Queens Park wants to grow the greenbelt to protect more lands, so yes, that appears to be whats happening. Getting the Greenbelt up to Barrie is important, the area around the 400 is going crazy right now.

The Growth Plan and Greenbelt are different articles, yes. The Greenbelt deals with zoning protection for farming land only, while the Growth plan manages growth, where it goes, and how it is constructed.

The Growth plan is really the meat of the anti sprawl legislation, the greenbelt is sort of the back up.
 
It's kind of backwards, actually.
They did the Oak Ridges Moraine Plan and Niagara Escarpment Plans first.
Then the Greenbelt Plan (which establishes an urban boundary around the GTA)
Then passed Places to Grow and then the Growth Plan, which set growth and intensification targets within it.

They're all interconnected and they effectively held off the legislative reviews the earlier Acts required to do them all at once. It's taken awhile and the ORM Act, in particular, is long overdue at this point. Sounds like they have some good people on the job too, so we'll see how it goes.
 
Here’s a recent article that somewhat relates to the points about suburban parkland requirements like those discussed a couple weeks ago. Unlike Markham, which acquiesced to developer’s desires to save money - Richmond Hill put up a good fight to preserve Prov-mandated parkland dedication for future higher density developments. Unfortunately the OMB overruled them. As usual, money talks.

Richmond Hill and OMB face off in a duel over parkland and developers
Town appeals an OMB ruling that tossed aside a bylaw forcing developers to turn over enough cash to ensure lots of green space for condo dwellers.

How much money should developers have to put up for parks and green space if they want to build in Richmond Hill?

That’s the question pitting the town council against the Ontario Municipal Board, which sided with developers in the first round of the fight in January, after they protested the high parkland-dedication rate Richmond Hill enforces on new condo development in the booming municipality.

The town is preparing for round two, as it appeals the decision at the board and at divisional court.

For Richmond Hill, this is no ordinary squabble with the OMB — an unelected board that has become the de facto decision maker in countless planning matters across the province.

The town says the OMB’s decision will fundamentally affect the ability of Richmond Hill to protect and preserve its green space — and if things go the way of developers, it will alter the face of the community for coming generations.

“This is really about a council’s ability and a community’s ability to make policy about the future of its community, versus the board’s ability to make a money decision,†said Ana Bassios, the commissioner of Planning and Regulatory Services for the town.

A few years ago, in the face of growth and calls for intensification, the town began to contemplate a different future. Once known for its subdivisions and single-family homes, Richmond Hill has started to build upward. Since 2010, it has issued building permits for 2,874 apartment units, the majority of those on designated high-density corridors along Yonge St. or Highway 7. The town anticipates that 13,491 units will be built by 2031.

But to ensure green space would be protected, town staff, in conjunction with the community, spent two years developing an extensive parks plan that would guarantee current and future residents would always have park space to enjoy.

“From our point of view, parkland is especially important for residents who live in condos,†said Richmond Hill Mayor Dave Barrow. “If you move and buy a home, you will have a park in your neighbourhood. If you move in and buy a condo, you should have a park in your neighbourhood.â€

But the plan was contingent on getting condo developers to pay for green space through a parkland dedication bylaw — a provision of the provincial Planning Act that requires developers and builders to set aside either land or pay cash-in-lieu.

After determining exactly how much green space would be needed in future, the town passed a bylaw in 2013 that applied the maximum amount permitted in the Planning Act: one hectare of land for every 300 units, or the cash equivalent. As a lesser amount, the town added in the bylaw that developers could pay 1 hectare of land for every 730 people.

Developers weren’t happy.

They took the town to the OMB to complain that the rate — among the highest in the GTA — was a “serious disincentive to both intensification and the provision of affordable housing.â€

They argued that under the town’s rate, the cash-in-lieu equivalent would be $37,600 per unit. (Bassios says the price would vary depending on the value of the land, and whether the developer would be giving up any land as well.)

The board sided with developers, saying the rate being applied by Richmond Hill was too high, and doesn’t conform with practices elsewhere in the GTA, where many municipalities demand much less from developers.

The OMB ruling imposes a cap on how much the town can charge on new development: 25 per cent of the land being developed, or its value in cash.

“No matter how many units there are on the site, they are going to pay the same amount,†said Bassios. “The cap removes any relationship between a density increase and the parkland that they owe,†she said.

She says the cap also limits the amount of actual parkland the town will be able to receive from developers. “It’s much cheaper for them to just give us the money.â€

She anticipates that the OMB policy will shortchange the town’s parks plan by at least $70 million.

“This case is the epitome of OMB overstepping its bounds. We actually have an act that gives us the authority to proceed as we did, and they decided, no, you shouldn’t follow that and we’ll just pick a number for you,†Barrow said.

“This is it. This is the test,†he said. “This is a jurisdiction they (the OMB) have no right to be in.â€
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From here (now a dead link; and a search of "Richmond Hill on TorontoStar turns up nothing): http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/201...f-in-a-duel-over-parkland-and-developers.html
 
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