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Public transit is, in theory, supposed to connect people with the places that matter in their lives: the homes they live in; the stores they frequent; the schools they attend; the jobs at which they work. A transit network that fails to meet these demands, either because its stops are too far from where journeys start or where they end, is a profoundly troubled one.
That fate, according to Suburbs on Track, a new report from the Ryerson City Building Institute and the Ontario Home Builders' Association, is at risk of befalling the suburbs surrounding the City of Toronto. These areas, where growth is projected to be concentrated over the next 25 years, currently lack the population density around transit stations to support these services. This problem also represents an opportunity: with significant transit expansion set to take place in the City of Hamilton as well as the regions of York, Durham, Peel, and Halton, “Suburbs on Track” suggests that there is still time to design transit-friendly neighbourhoods.
This realization, of course, is also a concession that many neighbourhoods cannot currently be described in that manner. “While not a lot of rapid transit has been built in the inner and outer suburbs in the GTHA,” the report’s authors write, “what has been built has achieved very low densities, too low to support the long-term cost of transit operations.” Only six of the 63 GO stations currently in service have sufficient population density in their immediate surroundings to justify bus service every 15 minutes. In fact, most of these stations do not have sufficient surrounding density to support any transit service. The same dynamic, the report finds, is also in play at the stops along the Toronto-York Spadina subway extension.
Transit stops that have insufficient surrounding density struggle to attract riders, which becomes an economic problem. In the City of Toronto, the TTC subsidizes each ride to the tune of 88 cents. For the Sheppard subway, on the other hand, the report’s authors estimate that riders receive a subsidy of $10 per trip. In the long run, transit stops in areas without the requisite density prove both costly and incapable of supporting surrounding businesses.
Beyond the hard economics, insufficient density around transit stations also represents an urban planning problem. To reach rapid transit stations, commuters rely on other forms of transit—buses, bicycles, pedestrian travel, and cars. If a station is underserved by these feeder modes of transit, it will struggle to attract riders. Such stations are also likely to become further isolated as they are surrounded by vast parking structures and surface lots. This, in short, is what Suburbs on Track report means when it talks about communities that are and are not transit-friendly.
The implicit solution to this problem is to build more transit-friendly suburbs, but that is easier said than done. Suburbs on Track offers both a vision of what such suburbs might look like and how that might be achieved.
The first part of this solution, the report states, is to build suburban transit villages, combining retail, mid-rise developments, townhouses, generous sidewalks, and bike paths. The polarization of construction in the Greater Toronto Area between single-family houses and high-rises is one of the major culprits in Suburbs on Track. That lost middle ground, the report argues, is the void that suburban neighbourhoods near transit stops could fill. These communities would be less hostile to pedestrian and local traffic while supporting businesses that could expand the City’s tax base to fund transit initiatives.
To create these “gentle density” communities, the report’s authors suggest a series of reforms to the planning process. At present, they note that a lengthy planning process and zoning regulations that don’t reflect current local and provincial priorities hamper development along transit corridors. “Municipalities should be encouraged or required to pre-zone their transit corridors and stations,” the report’s authors write. Thus, instead of waiting for new transit lines to be created at great cost before building transit-friendly suburbs, the planning for surrounding areas would start at the same time as the planning for transit lines. This, in political terms, would require the empowerment of municipalities and agencies such as Metrolinx to enforce density requirements as well as additional support from communities.
Transit is ultimately an ecosystem, a combination of infrastructure, policy, and broader design considerations. Suburbs on Track is ambitious in large part because it recognizes that all of these elements need to be addressed at once in order to build economically and environmentally sustainable communities. It is a report about political change as much as it is a report about planning. Viewed in terms of the potential costs savings of not having to aggressively subsidize riders, however, the proposition could very well prove palatable.
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While Suburbs on Track is not yet a political reality, many of the changes to the region's transportation infrastructure that it discusses are already underway. We will keep you updated as the Greater Toronto Area's transit expansion continues. Want to share your thoughts? Leave a comment in the space below this page, or join the conversations in our Transportation and Infrastructure Forum.
