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Planned Sprawl in the GTA

Queensville and Sharon is just getting started, I was working on the Queensville site briefly over the summer. Really, really hilly up there. They are just doing grading right now and beginning utility installation, however.

The yellow is what is planned to be built in East Gwillimbury, Sharon will essentially become part of Newmarket with Queensville being an entirely new city built to the north of it.

E8wjBwI.jpg


I'm in Newmarket quite often as well, and Leslie is never that busy from my experience. Yonge street between Davis and Green lane arguably needs 6 lanes, and is really where the VivaWay should have gone, not Davis (Mind you both of them are complete wastes of money no matter what). Newmarket always seems unusually busy for the size of it, but that is because its the retail centre of northern York region. You get a lot of people coming from Brantford, Aurora, Uxbridge, Keswick, etc. to go shopping.
 
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innsertnamehere said:
Queensville and Sharon is just getting started, I was working on the Queensville site briefly over the summer. Really, really hilly up there. They are just doing grading right now and beginning utility installation, however.

The yellow is what is planned to be built in East Gwillimbury, Sharon will essentially become part of Newmarket with Queensville being an entirely new city built to the north of it.

E8wjBwI.jpg


I'm in Newmarket quite often as well, and Leslie is never that busy from my experience. Yonge street between Davis and Green lane arguably needs 6 lanes, and is really where the VivaWay should have gone, not Davis (Mind you both of them are complete wastes of money no matter what). Newmarket always seems unusually busy for the size of it, but that is because its the retail centre of northern York region. You get a lot of people coming from Brantford, Aurora, Uxbridge, Keswick, etc. to go shopping.
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You meant Bradford. Brantford is quite far to the southwest from northern York Region.
 
innsertnamehere said:
Queensville and Sharon is just getting started, I was working on the Queensville site briefly over the summer. Really, really hilly up there. They are just doing grading right now and beginning utility installation, however.

The yellow is what is planned to be built in East Gwillimbury, Sharon will essentially become part of Newmarket with Queensville being an entirely new city built to the north of it. I never realized that the Queensville development was planned to be so large.

I'm in Newmarket quite often as well, and Leslie is never that busy from my experience. Yonge street between Davis and Green lane arguably needs 6 lanes, and is really where the VivaWay should have gone, not Davis (Mind you both of them are complete wastes of money no matter what). Newmarket always seems unusually busy for the size of it, but that is because its the retail centre of northern York region. You get a lot of people coming from Brantford, Aurora, Uxbridge, Keswick, etc. to go shopping.
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Didn't know that the new Queensville / Sharon developments had already started. Thanks! I never realized that the Queensville developments covered such a large area. Wow.

And yeah, I've noticed that especially since all those new western Bradford subdivisions were built in the last few years, traffic along Yonge in Newmarket has substantially increased. It was always busy with Bradford shoppers, but now even moreso. Like you said, Newmarket is the commercial center of Northern York Region and Southern Simcoe.
 
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http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/201...m_to_force_developer_to_fulfill_promises.html


Cathedraltown residents want Markham to force developer to fulfill promises

There was nothing Mayrose Gregorios could do to change her husband’s mind. When Deo Gregorios saw the towering Cathedral of Transfiguration as he drove along Highway 404 and Major Mackenzie in Markham, he was transfixed.

“My husband was fixated on the cathedral,” said Gregorios, who moved into a home near the cathedral in 2009. “He was in awe. He wanted a piece of property in the area and to join the congregation,” she said.

At the time, a 1,200-home subdivision called Cathedraltown was taking shape in the shadow of the onion-domed cathedral. The subdivision was marketed as a European-inspired community in humdrum suburbia. In addition to homes, artist renderings depicted a large lake in which “the cathedral’s domes would reflect,” belvederes, and a pedestrian-oriented open-air “piazza” reminiscent of an Italian city.

Media heralded the arrival of this unique self-contained community in a region known for cookie-cutter homes and urban sprawl.
So the Gregorioses bought in. But years later, Gregorios says the vision her family were sold has yet to be fulfilled.


The promised lake is nothing more than an overgrown storm-water pond. The piazza is unfinished and many of the storefronts are still vacant. But perhaps most disappointing is that the cathedral, the heart of the community, has been closed to the public for nearly a decade. The last service took place in 2006.
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ghost_town.jpg.size.xxlarge.letterbox.jpg




Originally proposed development image:

cathedraltown(1).jpg
 
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The Cathedral is gorgeous but the rest of the town is sterile looking. There is no street life of any sort. It's just a denser looking subdivision. European village it is not.
 
there aren't any 6 lane roads.. or even 4 lane roads for that matter beyond the Woodbine Bypass on the edge of the community.
 
Interesting article on city sprawl, at this link. The following is just a few paragraphs from that article.

In the early 1920s, auto sales suffered because of urban traffic congestion and bad public relations related to the death toll from automobiles running over pedestrians. The auto industry and related groups such as road-builders and tire companies (or as Norton calls these groups, “motordom”) responded in three ways.

First, motordom hijacked the safety issue by blaming the victim. Car companies claimed that pedestrian deaths were the result of something called “jaywalking” (i.e., pedestrians using the streets as they had always used them, rather than waiting for automobile traffic to take its turn). In addition to financing a public relations campaign against jaywalking, motordom encouraged cities to enact anti-jaywalking ordinances.

Second, motordom lobbied government to reconstruct American streets in ways that favored fast car traffic, and even created its own "experts" to lobby city officials. A Los Angeles auto club hired Miller McClintock, a Harvard graduate student, as a consultant. Before being hired by the car lobby, McClintock wrote that widening streets would merely attract more traffic. After going on the motordom payroll, McClintock endorsed wider streets and fining jaywalkers. Car companies then hired McClintock to establish a foundation that taught engineers how to design cities for cars. The motordom-subsidized engineers then went to work in cities throughout the country, creating the sort of streets that infest cities today: wide streets where traffic flows at speeds fatal to pedestrians.

Of course, motordom needed a source of money to build these wider streets—so they urged government to enact gasoline taxes, and to devote gas tax money to widening streets and building new highways.

These motordom-favored streets shut out competing forms of transportation. Wider streets made walking unpleasant and dangerous, and thus discouraged not only walking, but also public transit (since most transit trips usually involve some walking).

New highways opened up new suburbs for development, thus shifting housing beyond the reach of existing streetcars, trains, and buses and forcing then-private transit providers to choose between two unpleasant options: losing revenue as its urban service area lost population, or spending money trying to extend service into suburbia. Today, motordom’s supporters claim that public transit is inefficient—but this inefficiency is largely the result of the motordom-endorsed policies discussed above.
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TheTigerMaster said:
How many lanes is this road (including parking):

ghost_town.jpg.size.xxlarge.letterbox.jpg


I'm counting six, but I suppose the driving lanes could be much wider than I'm used to.
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its a 2 lane road with a parking curb cut on the sides to allow for parking for the businesses in the buildings. The lanes do seem a bit wide though, well over 4 meters. A regular 3.5 meter lane would have done fine. Might be because there is space for bike lanes, however. In total its around 15 meters wide, which is about average for a downtown road. Streets like College can be much wider, at 20 meters.
 
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lead82 said:
The Cathedral is gorgeous but the rest of the town is sterile looking. There is no street life of any sort. It's just a denser looking subdivision. European village it is not.
Click to expand...

A lot of these new urbanist suburbs (technically, Cathedraltown does count as one) have trouble attracting retail to fill these main street slots. Most of the new subdivisions in Brampton ringing the outer edges will be built as such style of suburban development, but I wonder if the restriction on the type of retail factors in (I doubt the retail is zoned, for say, restaurants because they smell).

Lack of life also from no amenities. Cornell has a hospital and a new library/rec centre (which absolutely gorgeous inside, BTW), but it's only busy in that section...which is far from the "main street". Cathedraltown has a church as an amenity...which is great for a certain demographic.

Mt. Pleasant in Brampton seems A LOT more lively than any of the Markham NU subdivisions, I think because of the school/library combo dead centre, an outdoor skating rink, a higher order transit hub, and the retail all together. It makes me wonder how successful the other Brampton NU subdivisions without a power combo of amenities will be (probably not very).
 
Cornells original zoning had retail lining the entirety of Bur Oak avenue, but that has since been dropped to high density towns except for immediately south of 16th. If Cornell centre down by highway 7 turns out fine, it might not be too bad. Right now the subdivision is functionally very similar to any old subdivision. Mount Pleasant is the only new urbanist community that has really worked so far. The new 6 floor wood building will likely help with this now too, as all the little 4 floor apartment buildings going up in these developments can switch to 6 floor apartment buildings that will significantly add density to the main areas.
 
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