Toronto CityPlace Puente de Luz Bridge | ?m | ?s | Concord Adex | Francisco Gazitua

400WellingtonGuy said:
This is not true. Concord was actually supposed to build a true road across to Portland, but they talked the pre-Adam Vaughan councillor into providing just a pedestrian bridge. The City got snowed.
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I think a ped bridge is actually a better fix for the accessibility problem than a road. The area already serves cars well enough (in fact it basically serves only cars, what with the transit desert between Bathurst and Spadina).
 
I don't think that the comparison with the Peace Bridge is so useful. I'm not interested in making excuses for the deficiencies of the CityPlace bridge, but it's a different context. The Peace Bridge crosses the most significant natural landmark of downtown Calgary, while this bridge crosses a railway corridor in Toronto. Admittedly, I haven't seen the Peace Bridge in person, but I can't help but feel that I'd still like the Humber Bay Arch Bridge more for its openness and monumentality in crossing a river. Why would I want to cross a scenic river in an enclosed tube bridge? It's not winter for 8 months of the year. The Peace Bridge looks like a box truss on the deck since it's enclosed, which is what many people here vehemently rejected for the CityPlace bridge. Openness encourages people to stop, relax, and socialize on the bridge with views of the scenery--which characterizes the Humber Bay Arch Bridge. By contrast, the Peace Bridge has a strange tiered deck with what appear to be bike lanes in the middle which means by stopping, you're blocking the way.
 
junctionist said:
I don't think that the comparison with the Peace Bridge is so useful. I'm not interested in making excuses for the deficiencies of the CityPlace bridge, but it's a different context.
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True. Concorde should have done this:

800px-GoldenGateBridge-001(1).jpg


Go big or go home. CityPlace deserves a suspension bridge.
 
the lemur said:
I think a ped bridge is actually a better fix for the accessibility problem than a road. The area already serves cars well enough (in fact it basically serves only cars, what with the transit desert between Bathurst and Spadina).
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For people living here, the extension across Portland would have been much appreciated. We get stuck in the commuters trying to get on the Gardiner down Spadina from 4pm to 630pm every work day. So, i would disagree that the road system here serves cars well. Hopefully, the DRL and a better regional transit system will take folks out of their cars eventually.
 
the lemur said:
I think a ped bridge is actually a better fix for the accessibility problem than a road. The area already serves cars well enough (in fact it basically serves only cars, what with the transit desert between Bathurst and Spadina).
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In light of the railway clearance issues, what-iffing about a road bridge is pretty moot. There's simply no way the geometry would have worked.
 
400WellingtonGuy said:
This is not true. Concord was actually supposed to build a true road across to Portland, but they talked the pre-Adam Vaughan councillor into providing just a pedestrian bridge. The City got snowed.
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The previous Councillor to Adam Vaughan is Olivia Chow MP.
 
I don't understand why this bridge is even necessary. If you live at Cityplace and want to go downtown, why wouldn't you just walk over to Spadina? Or if you're heading west, you'd just walk over to Bathurst. Unless you want to visit a building directly across the tracks on Front st, OK, but otherwise, what's the point?
 
It's for the residents of the new CityPlace buildings who really enjoy the grilled cheese sandwiches at the Tequila Bookworm.
 
If you live in the far west end of CityPlace and you want to go to let's say Front and Bathurst, you have to walk all the way east to Spadina and then all the way back West to Bathurst. It will save a lot of time for some people. I live right at Spadina and Fort York so I won't use it but thousands will.

Plus it shuts up the whole CityPlace=Jamestown crowd who bemoan the one entrance to CityPlace (there's actually 2 currently and will be 3 when Fort York connects with Bathurst.)

Also, it gives jumpers one more place to end it.
 
Logan said:
I don't understand why this bridge is even necessary. If you live at Cityplace and want to go downtown, why wouldn't you just walk over to Spadina? Or if you're heading west, you'd just walk over to Bathurst. Unless you want to visit a building directly across the tracks on Front st, OK, but otherwise, what's the point?
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Greater connectivity is always better. The bridge creates shorter blocks and great connectivity. Jane Jacobs covers this. This article might help: "The Need for Small Blocks"

From the article: "Short blocks, Jacobs argues, provide alternatives for travel and encourage mixing and mingling on city streets. They break down the social isolation observed on streets of inordinate length and reinforce economic vitality by permitting a greater cross-section of people to access stores and services. Long blocks, in fact, work against the natural advantage of the city as a ready and potential market for goods and services by restricting greater access."
 
From: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/repo...ion/article2411176/singlepage/#articlecontent

"In Toronto, the Puente de Luz, or Bridge of Light, is set to open this fall. The eye-catching yellow span crosses the busy downtown railway corridor between the new Concord CityPlace condo development and historic Front Street West.

Chilean artist Francisco Gazitua was hired to design it, but the City of Toronto avoided a public outcry over the cost – Concord Adex, the developer of CityPlace, is paying for it.

As City of Toronto planning manager Lynda Macdonald explains, plans for this bridge stretch back to the 1980s. When Canadian National Railway Co. expressed interest in selling the railway land, the city required that any new purchaser agree to a package of community benefits, including bridges and parkland. When Concord Adex bought the land, it inherited the requirement to build a pedestrian bridge (it has already completed the Canoe Landing park at the south end of the bridge).

Ms. Macdonald says development charges are one way to ensure that this kind of project is built in an era of shrinking public infrastructure spending.

To make the Puente de Luz bridge more than a utilitarian object, Concord Adex also used part of the public art spending that is required by the city – one per cent of all hard construction costs must go to public art projects that benefit a development’s neighbourhood.

Gabriel Leung, director of development at Concord Adex, says the bridge will go a long way to benefit the people who live in the CityPlace community.

“There was some talk when CityPlace was being planned out that this could become a very isolated community and not linked with the rest of the city, and that’s precisely why we want to put a lot of effort into the design of this bridge,” he says. “It doesn’t just serve a functional element of connecting people together, but it makes something poetic out of the bridge design, an attraction for the city itself.”

Though Concord Adex declined to release final budget numbers for the bridge, Mr. Leung confirms that it was about “one third” of the cost of the Peace Bridge, which is slightly longer. (The span of Puente de Luz is 125 metres with two end ramps of 60 metres each.) Both cities are planning to build more pedestrian bridges; at Fort York in Toronto and at St. Patrick’s Island in Calgary.

The City of Toronto feels the yellow bridge will unite downtown communities, Ms. Macdonald says, especially getting more north-south connections over the railway corridor. "
 
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