Going from almost 3 million a year (pre-Covid) to 5 million a year would give you an experience that's no different than Pearson?
That doesn't sound right to me.
They're assuming airport facilities (security, number of gates, etc.) wouldn't keep up. Hard to say, since so little information is out. My main knock is the car traffic near the waterfront since the two LRT extensions are far from being completed, and will likely be done slower than any airport expansion. Lakeshore. Gardiner.
Where that argument falls apart, is that so much of that 18% is in a single park, that isn't close to many, many people. When I walk through Manhattan, what I look and think is how few parks there are compared to Toronto.
If they made Central Park a couple of blocks bigger, it wouldn't change the shortage of parks in most of Manhattan. Adding more park to Toronto Islands doesn't impact any of the areas in Toronto that the city have noted have a deficit of parks.
Your argument is specious and ultimately unsupported by evidence. To be clear, I was comparing all 630 sqkm of Toronto's park land to 59 sqkm of Manhattan.
The numbers don't lie. Without Central Park, Manhattan drops to 12.5% park land compared to 12.8% for all of Toronto. Conversely, only 10.1% of Old Toronto and East York is park land. So without Central Park, highly urbanized Manhattan still has more park land than Old Toronto
and East York together.
And we know most of Toronto's park land is outside of Downtown, e.g. Rouge National Urban Park in the outer reaches of Scarborough.
The way Central Park and many other Manhattan parks were chosen was partly to be close to as many people as possible. Your experience with Manhattan is anecdotal and evidently misses the bigger picture.
To
@rbt 's point above, I assume you are correct that the Toronto ravines are not counted, but the ravines are not easily accessible to most people in Old Toronto in my opinion. How you would define "easily accessible" is what this is contingent on.
Probably true of the Islands as well. We know that visits to the islands are about 1.5 million a year - less than the airport, even after the post-Covid drop.
The true unique users of BB airport are likely between 150 to 400k. 2 million in passenger traffic counts only one way trips, disproportionately used by frequent business travellers.
Again, stymying recreation and densification is not a good direction for the waterfront of any city. There are dozens, if not hundreds of military, later mixed-use airports that were demolished in the downtowns of many Chinese cities to make way for better urban development. Downsview is not a perfect analogy, but close enough.
Also, since when was having regional and private jets downtown a progressive ideal?
"While there is no single official count, East Asia has at least 10–15 major waterfront or coastal city airports, often built on reclaimed land or reclaimed islands to serve major metropolitan areas. Notable examples include Kansai International Airport (KIX) (Osaka),
Hong Kong International (HKG), and Tokyo Haneda (HND), often surrounded by water in coastal hubs like
Shanghai Pudong (PVG) and Macau (MFM). [
1,
2,
3,
4,
5]"
You evidently haven't travelled to those cities and/or lack geographic knowledge on the locations of those airports relative to the CBD(s). Two examples, HKG is famous for moving away from the high rise density near the old Kai Tak, and Pudong was built in a swamp in the middle of nowhere in the southeast corner of Shanghai back in 1997.
Pudong is also not surrounded by water, it's relativey inland compared to say, Shenzhen's airport. Do a bit more research before making claims like implying these airports are somehow analogous to Billy Bishop at all. Reads like LLM generated slop (edit: given that two hyperlinks are for google searches, I am almost certain this is Google Gemini). See
@rbt made a good point, pointing out some nuance that I omitted.
HKG is farther from HK's Union station equivalent, which is near HK's "downtown" area, than Pearson is from Union. (All 3: transit trip time, driving distance, straight-line distance) It would be as if YYZ was 6 km further northwest in Brampton.
Pudong is even more isolated:
www.paxnews.com
