Northern Light
Superstar
Why does it look good and everyone loves it?
No balconies!
Don't be starting that again, you troublemaker you!
LOL
Toronto 241 Yonge Street | 221.19m | 67s | Angel | Hariri Pontarini
- Thread starter interchange42
- Start date
Don't be starting that again, you troublemaker you!
LOL
nstuch
Active Member
If the John Street revitalization is anything to go by this should be kicking off around 2050!
Regarding the elevator situation here, we've been contacted by the team designing a building...
…for the first time since we began reporting on elevator ratios about two and a half years ago.
Our reporting on elevator ratios was kicked into gear when the 123 Edward proposal by Crown Realty Partners included 3 elevators for 1,110 units, an outrageous ratio of 1 elevator for every 370 units. (A subsequent resubmission for 123 Edward added far more elevator service, now one for every 115 units.)
We had heard that 90 suites per elevator had been an industry rule-of-thumb over the years, Understanding that one building varies from the next in a variety of ways though, we wanted to better understand elevator service planning, so we spoke in the summer of 2022 with Rob Isabelle, a professional engineer and COO at KJA Vertical Transportation Consultants. With widely respected expertise in the field, Isabelle's practice extends across Canada and into the US. We learned from Mr. Isabelle that there are indeed many factors taken into account when recommending elevator service for buildings... but few actual governmental requirements: developers legally only have to provide a single elevator to meet fire code.
The number of factors in play — among them number of storeys, height of the storeys (distance from floor slab to floor slab), number of units, number of total bedrooms, size of the elevator cab*, and maybe the most important: the speed of the motors, measured in feet per minute — determine how long it will take on average for an elevator to respond to a call. The type of building plays a major factor as well; residential towers face more spread out peak travel periods and patterns than do office towers or hotels or hospitals, for example. For our purposes, we are looking at residential elevator service.
*(The size of an elevator cab allows more or fewer people to ride, but it's generally commercial buildings, which have much higher peak-time demand per square foot, where elevator cabs are nearly universally larger to any significant degree.)
The typical Toronto residential tower at the time that the Tall Buildings Guidelines were put in place was around 40 storeys tall, and the 750 m² floor-plate the City was looking for normally provided 10 suites per floor (so about 400 suites per building). Toronto residential buildings have typically provided 10% of their suites in three bedroom configurations, 20% in two bedroom configurations, and the rest in one bedroom or studio configurations. Those floor-plates were typically specced with four elevators, or one elevator for about every 100 suites. We had not heard horror stories of long waits for elevators in those buildings, unless of course elevators were out of service for repair, or placed in move-in/move-out service. There are such buildings, though, with fewer elevators than the typical example above, and their line-ups were always longer, and when elevators were out of service, proportionally worse.
Mr. Isabelle referred to studies that show that 40 seconds is the amount to time that people generally are happy waiting for an elevator to arrive, after which people become increasingly agitated with longer waits, so it is the forty-second mark that he recommends that developers not exceed by much in their proposals. Developers, meanwhile, must contend with not just the costs of building and the returns through sales or rentals, but also with the City's insistence on typical floor-plate sizes. Tower proposals have been getting taller over the years, first to amortize the cost of the land over more units, but now also in response to provincial and municipal mandates to build more densely in response to the housing crisis. Other costs related to materials, labour, and development charges have been increasing as well, so the size of suites have been shrinking, meaning that 11 or 12 suites per floor (and therefore more residents) has become more common. At the same time, the City still wants 750 m² floor-plates in an effort to minimize shadows and allow more light to reach ground level, which discourages developers from adding elevator shafts (and losing revenue generating or returning space). UrbanToronto advocates that developers not be penalized for larger floor-plates that take into account more than four elevator shafts.
.In the case of this building, Angel Developments is proposing 6 elevator shafts to serve 774 suites, or 1 elevator for every 129 suites, a number I characterized as "not great" in the first post in this thread, based on the general numbers we have seen until now…
…but as I said above, for the first time, a developer has responded to our criticism, with something to actually chew on.
Evan Nicol of Angel Developments has been steering the project through its planning process, coordinating the various team members, including talking with Councillor Chris Moise's office. We are told that elevator service is of prime concern for Councillor Moise across his ward (an ever larger, ever-more significant percentage of his constituents live in high-rises), and that for Evan Nicol himself, good elevator service is a particular concern as 241 Yonge is intended as a rental building, and Angel's commitment to the building will not end with handing over the first keys to the residents, but it will continue as they look to maintain customer satisfaction and high rental rates over the years. To that end, Angel engaged Jon Soberman of Soberman Engineers Inc, another highly regarded vertical transportation engineer, to advise them on elevator service for 241 Yonge. Soberman's analysis of the plans is that 6 elevators, travelling at at least 1,000 feet per minute, possibly as high as 1,600, and governed by a Destination Dispatch Control System* (common in new office buildings, but extremely rare in residential buildings) will provide service close to the desired 40-second response time, with times depending on whether the elevators service the underground bicycle storage level (or a separate shuttle elevator is dedicated to that level) or whether the elevators are split across the lower and upper halves of the building, or service the whole building.
More typical speeds for elevators in low-rises are about 100 feet per minute, about 200 fpm in mid-rises, while 500 fpm is consider a minimum for a high-rise, and 700 is typical. 1,000 fpm is considered very good, and above that is rare in Toronto residential buildings. (Even higher speeds are possible: the fastest elevators in the world in the 530m CTF Finance Center in Guangzhou, China travels at 4,127fpm, but that peak speed is reached only in the middle of direct runs from the ground floor to the hotel and observation levels up top.) In any case, higher speed elevators could offer relief for residents of 40 50, 60-storey etc high-rises in Toronto that currently have slow service when the buildings have sufficient funding in their capital reserve funds to replace the motors with faster ones. Destination Dispatch Control Systems, which add cost, could help too. Since Angel is planning for both high-speed and destination dispatch here, then there's no reason for us to object to 129 units per elevator here.
For our part, going forward we will change the way we refer to proposed elevator ratios to reflect that acceptable service will require higher than normal speed motors and possibly destination dispatch.
I may expand this into a front page story in the future (and I'm amending my initial post).
42
*If you've not encountered one yet, Destination Dispatch Control Systems ask riders in input on a touch screen which floor they want to go to before they are in an elevator. The system then individually assigns riders to particular elevators, grouping riders (more so during peak times) by close floors so as to minimize travel times.
…for the first time since we began reporting on elevator ratios about two and a half years ago.
Our reporting on elevator ratios was kicked into gear when the 123 Edward proposal by Crown Realty Partners included 3 elevators for 1,110 units, an outrageous ratio of 1 elevator for every 370 units. (A subsequent resubmission for 123 Edward added far more elevator service, now one for every 115 units.)
We had heard that 90 suites per elevator had been an industry rule-of-thumb over the years, Understanding that one building varies from the next in a variety of ways though, we wanted to better understand elevator service planning, so we spoke in the summer of 2022 with Rob Isabelle, a professional engineer and COO at KJA Vertical Transportation Consultants. With widely respected expertise in the field, Isabelle's practice extends across Canada and into the US. We learned from Mr. Isabelle that there are indeed many factors taken into account when recommending elevator service for buildings... but few actual governmental requirements: developers legally only have to provide a single elevator to meet fire code.
The number of factors in play — among them number of storeys, height of the storeys (distance from floor slab to floor slab), number of units, number of total bedrooms, size of the elevator cab*, and maybe the most important: the speed of the motors, measured in feet per minute — determine how long it will take on average for an elevator to respond to a call. The type of building plays a major factor as well; residential towers face more spread out peak travel periods and patterns than do office towers or hotels or hospitals, for example. For our purposes, we are looking at residential elevator service.
*(The size of an elevator cab allows more or fewer people to ride, but it's generally commercial buildings, which have much higher peak-time demand per square foot, where elevator cabs are nearly universally larger to any significant degree.)
The typical Toronto residential tower at the time that the Tall Buildings Guidelines were put in place was around 40 storeys tall, and the 750 m² floor-plate the City was looking for normally provided 10 suites per floor (so about 400 suites per building). Toronto residential buildings have typically provided 10% of their suites in three bedroom configurations, 20% in two bedroom configurations, and the rest in one bedroom or studio configurations. Those floor-plates were typically specced with four elevators, or one elevator for about every 100 suites. We had not heard horror stories of long waits for elevators in those buildings, unless of course elevators were out of service for repair, or placed in move-in/move-out service. There are such buildings, though, with fewer elevators than the typical example above, and their line-ups were always longer, and when elevators were out of service, proportionally worse.
Mr. Isabelle referred to studies that show that 40 seconds is the amount to time that people generally are happy waiting for an elevator to arrive, after which people become increasingly agitated with longer waits, so it is the forty-second mark that he recommends that developers not exceed by much in their proposals. Developers, meanwhile, must contend with not just the costs of building and the returns through sales or rentals, but also with the City's insistence on typical floor-plate sizes. Tower proposals have been getting taller over the years, first to amortize the cost of the land over more units, but now also in response to provincial and municipal mandates to build more densely in response to the housing crisis. Other costs related to materials, labour, and development charges have been increasing as well, so the size of suites have been shrinking, meaning that 11 or 12 suites per floor (and therefore more residents) has become more common. At the same time, the City still wants 750 m² floor-plates in an effort to minimize shadows and allow more light to reach ground level, which discourages developers from adding elevator shafts (and losing revenue generating or returning space). UrbanToronto advocates that developers not be penalized for larger floor-plates that take into account more than four elevator shafts.
.In the case of this building, Angel Developments is proposing 6 elevator shafts to serve 774 suites, or 1 elevator for every 129 suites, a number I characterized as "not great" in the first post in this thread, based on the general numbers we have seen until now…
…but as I said above, for the first time, a developer has responded to our criticism, with something to actually chew on.
Evan Nicol of Angel Developments has been steering the project through its planning process, coordinating the various team members, including talking with Councillor Chris Moise's office. We are told that elevator service is of prime concern for Councillor Moise across his ward (an ever larger, ever-more significant percentage of his constituents live in high-rises), and that for Evan Nicol himself, good elevator service is a particular concern as 241 Yonge is intended as a rental building, and Angel's commitment to the building will not end with handing over the first keys to the residents, but it will continue as they look to maintain customer satisfaction and high rental rates over the years. To that end, Angel engaged Jon Soberman of Soberman Engineers Inc, another highly regarded vertical transportation engineer, to advise them on elevator service for 241 Yonge. Soberman's analysis of the plans is that 6 elevators, travelling at at least 1,000 feet per minute, possibly as high as 1,600, and governed by a Destination Dispatch Control System* (common in new office buildings, but extremely rare in residential buildings) will provide service close to the desired 40-second response time, with times depending on whether the elevators service the underground bicycle storage level (or a separate shuttle elevator is dedicated to that level) or whether the elevators are split across the lower and upper halves of the building, or service the whole building.
More typical speeds for elevators in low-rises are about 100 feet per minute, about 200 fpm in mid-rises, while 500 fpm is consider a minimum for a high-rise, and 700 is typical. 1,000 fpm is considered very good, and above that is rare in Toronto residential buildings. (Even higher speeds are possible: the fastest elevators in the world in the 530m CTF Finance Center in Guangzhou, China travels at 4,127fpm, but that peak speed is reached only in the middle of direct runs from the ground floor to the hotel and observation levels up top.) In any case, higher speed elevators could offer relief for residents of 40 50, 60-storey etc high-rises in Toronto that currently have slow service when the buildings have sufficient funding in their capital reserve funds to replace the motors with faster ones. Destination Dispatch Control Systems, which add cost, could help too. Since Angel is planning for both high-speed and destination dispatch here, then there's no reason for us to object to 129 units per elevator here.
For our part, going forward we will change the way we refer to proposed elevator ratios to reflect that acceptable service will require higher than normal speed motors and possibly destination dispatch.
I may expand this into a front page story in the future (and I'm amending my initial post).
42
*If you've not encountered one yet, Destination Dispatch Control Systems ask riders in input on a touch screen which floor they want to go to before they are in an elevator. The system then individually assigns riders to particular elevators, grouping riders (more so during peak times) by close floors so as to minimize travel times.
UtakataNoAnnex
Senior Member
It's always a good sign when the proprietors of this site are pushing for positive change.
isaidso
Senior Member
Gorgeous so I'll try to enjoy it before the inevitable de-value engineering happens. At the very least, the colour will get watered down to beige and the bands reduced in width till they have next to no visual impact. The rounded bands? No way those will survive. The probability that Toronto will build something this nice is close to zero.
I'd love to be wrong, of course.
I'd love to be wrong, of course.
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