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Discontinuous streets

Manhattan had about 100 000 residents in 1810 when the 1811 commissioners plan was released (which is what planned out the grid) by 1830 the population had doubled to 200 000. So I'd weigh a bit towards foresight with a bit of having a more or less blank slate with which to plan out the grid for a city that would eventually (as planned) become a major industrial centre.

It's difficult to compare the current Toronto/Mega City to Manhattan as Toronto is a collection of many former towns, in the same way that NYC is a collection of many former towns/boroughs. Manhattan is a closer analogy to the old city of Toronto and there you will see a bit more order and grid in Toronto's road system with just a bit of randomness owing to a few former trade routes/native paths (see Dundas st, Kingston rd, Dupont st, etc). It's not quite as gridded as Manhattan, but then Toronto isn't as restricted as Manhattan was by basically being between the mouths of two rivers which constrained development.

*** EDIT ***
Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx are far less gridded than any part of the Mega City Toronto
 
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Transportfan said:
No it isn't. It's actually the 12th. Read post #46 why it's numbered as 16th.
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As Anna pointed out post #46 is wrong. The concessions are the strips of land between the roads, not the roads themselves. In Markham Township the 1st concession east of Yonge is the land between Yonge and Bayview. The road numbering given may be the township road designations but they have nothing officially to do with concession numbers except that whoever numbered the road chose to number them consistent with concessions they were adjacent to. So Township Road #1 (Yonge) is just east of the 1st Concession EYS, Township Road #2 (Bayview) is between the 1st and 2nd Concession EYS,Township Road #3 (Leslie) is between the 2nd and 3rd Concession EYS and so on. Once they numbered all the concession roads they started to number the sideroads that cut across the concessions.

Regarding the misaligned roads - it is true that most of the roads were laid out when the area was still a thick forest so getting the roads straight and at the right angle was difficult, and that may account for some of the misalignments, but in most cases the misalignments are intentional so that they could keep the size of a standard farm lot at 400 acres. If they didn't have the jogs the farms would get smaller the further north you got.
 
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Grids are boring. That's one of the many reason European cities are way better than American cities. Organic street patterns, FTW.
 
Two things drive me up the wall about central Toronto's streets: east-west minor roads do not line up, thanks to the Park Lots system and each bourgeoisie Family Compact estate dividing and selling their properties at different times on a whim, and the narrow road allowances.

The city fixed some of the old Park Lot disconnections (Carlton joined with College, largely thanks to the Eaton Family, Dundas pieced together from Arthur, St. Patrick, Agnes, Wilton, etc., Harbord linked with Hoskin) but the side streets do not line up. As a cyclist as well as a pedestrian and transit user (and occasional driver), I'd like to have seen wider street allowances and a neat grid as it would allow off-arterial bike boulevards like Vancouver and wider streets with better sidewalks and more opportunities for bike lanes and even streetcar ROWs. St. Clair and Spadina are examples of what can be done with wider-than-typical allowances in this city. Too bad Yonge didn't have an extra 3-5 metres of allowance to play with, never mind Queen or Bloor.

College from Bay to Manning at least has a wide sidewalk and room for both two lanes of traffic and bike lanes. It's a great street. Imagine Dundas having that room or more, or even Yonge. Imagine if Harbord was planned to go straight through to Lansdowne - that'd be an even more amazing bike route, rather than being forced south to Dewson or north to Bloor at Ossington?

At least Manhattan north of Houston Street has a nice grid with generous road allowances to accommodate all road users - not great given NYC's legendary traffic, but they have retrofitted great bikeways into it and have great wide sidewalks!
 
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Manhattan's grid was planned to transform a rural countryside into a densely packed urban area (I don't think they could have imagined the current day density, but it was destined for walk-ups across pretty much the entire island). One of the only original roads that they kept intact was Broadway, which by and large was a path of least resistance road originally used as a native trading route. And contrary to popular belief (and what a previous poster said), Manhattan is actually quite hilly, or at least it was before it was levelled by development. That's part of the reason Broadway snakes the way it does, because it was in between hills instead of overtop of them.

Unlike most grids, the Manhattan grid was unrelenting, except in a few exceptional cases. If your homestead was sitting where a cross street was destined to go based on the grid plan, your house was gone as soon as the road was put in. They didn't bend the road around your house, they flattened your house for the road.

In short, the development was fit to a pre-determined road pattern. In Toronto, and indeed in most other cities, the farm grid was established, but no further grid was laid out on top of that in response to advancing suburban development. Hence the unconnected internal roads.

Even if Toronto and the surrounding boroughs had the foresight to mandate that a new arterial be placed midway between concession roads (Caledonia is a good example of this), then I think getting around suburban Toronto would be a lot easier, both by car and by transit. From my experience, it's a lot easier to travel N-S in Etobicoke and Scarborough precisely for this reason, as the lines are between 800m and 1km apart, as opposed to 2km in Old Toronto.
 
Woodbridge_Heights said:
Manhattan had about 100 000 residents in 1810 when the 1811 commissioners plan was released (which is what planned out the grid) by 1830 the population had doubled to 200 000. So I'd weigh a bit towards foresight with a bit of having a more or less blank slate with which to plan out the grid for a city that would eventually (as planned) become a major industrial centre.

It's difficult to compare the current Toronto/Mega City to Manhattan as Toronto is a collection of many former towns, in the same way that NYC is a collection of many former towns/boroughs. Manhattan is a closer analogy to the old city of Toronto and there you will see a bit more order and grid in Toronto's road system with just a bit of randomness owing to a few former trade routes/native paths (see Dundas st, Kingston rd, Dupont st, etc). It's not quite as gridded as Manhattan, but then Toronto isn't as restricted as Manhattan was by basically being between the mouths of two rivers which constrained development.
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The Museum of the City of New York had a great exhibit a few years back about the creation of the street grid. There wasn't as much topographically to deal with as in Toronto, although some hills were levelled and there is still a legacy of streams running through the basements of buildings. Broadway is the major exception to the grid, being a native path, and in fact it wasn't included in the grid design itself.

Harlem also deviates from the grid quite a bit the more the island narrows.
 
Extending Harbord to Lansdowne would mean Dufferin Mall would have to go.

Manhattan had a few streams and ponds outside of Central Park. For example, there was Collect Pond in Lower Manhattan near Chinatown, Five Points, and the City Hall. It was drained, with Centre Street (yes, it is actually spelled Centre Street in a jurisdiction where "center" is the correct spelling) running through the centre of what was once the pond, hence the name.

Collect Pond was at one point the source of all drinking water in New York City.
 
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Johnny Au said:
Extending Harbord to Lansdowne would mean Dufferin Mall would have to go.
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Though given present-day demographics, I reckon that bisecting Dufferin Grove Park would be more controversial than bisection Dufferin Mall...
 
adma said:
Though given present-day demographics, I reckon that bisecting Dufferin Grove Park would be more controversial than bisection Dufferin Mall...
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Thought I read a long time ago that Harbord was supposed to be pushed through to Dovercourt, but it never came to be.
 
Johnny Au said:
Extending Harbord to Lansdowne would mean Dufferin Mall would have to go.
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I don't think anyone's seriously suggesting that we should ram it through now. It's a shame they didn't do it when they had the chance though - the unusually long blocks (~850m) on St. Clarens and Margueretta are incredibly frustrating for a pedestrian trying to cut between Dufferin and Lansdowne.
 
Found a couple of odd streets tucked under a Pharmacy Ave underpass:

Murray Glen Dr
http://goo.gl/maps/c2ZiD

Trestleside Grove
http://goo.gl/maps/5RtRD

I can't imagine these were anything but a bizarre compromise to avoid having Pharmacy run right in front of some houses (and because there's a rail line there as well). The streets don't seem to appear on aerial maps until the 1980s, I think, and I can't tell if Pharmacy was raised in order to fly over them or if the two streets were planned to squeeze in under that low underpass.
 
the lemur said:
Found a couple of odd streets tucked under a Pharmacy Ave underpass:

Murray Glen Dr
http://goo.gl/maps/c2ZiD

Trestleside Grove
http://goo.gl/maps/5RtRD

I can't imagine these were anything but a bizarre compromise to avoid having Pharmacy run right in front of some houses (and because there's a rail line there as well). The streets don't seem to appear on aerial maps until the 1980s, I think, and I can't tell if Pharmacy was raised in order to fly over them or if the two streets were planned to squeeze in under that low underpass.
Click to expand...

It looks like there used to be a level crossing, and the streets were created to allow access to houses that would otherwise be inaccessible because of the grade required by the bridge.

See here: http://jpeg2000.eloquent-systems.com/toronto.html?image=ser12/s0012_fl1962_it0142.jp2

It seems two houses on the north side of the tracks were demolished to access those previously on Pharmacy, which new road also allows access to some sort of hydro building.
 
I discovered this a couple of years ago on Google Maps and have been intrigued by it ever since. Talk about a unique place to live. You'd think it would be next to impossible to sell one of those properties. Who would choose to live in such an awkward, ugly setting?
 
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