Greater Toronto Nodes

[someMidTowner]

Toronto does not have a midtown.
3 minutes walking distance away from the Yonge/Eglinton intersection it is all low rise single family houses. You don't call a busy intersection with a few highrise buildings "midtown". It is a near suburb.

Thanks for a good chuckle

 

[Tewder]

Toronto does not have a midtown.
3 minutes walking distance away from the Yonge/Eglinton intersection it is all low rise single family houses. You don't call a busy intersection with a few highrise buildings "midtown". It is a near suburb.

Though Yonge/Bloor to Yonge/Eglinton, as a whole, might qualify as midtown-ish enough for you?

 

[Hipster Duck]

It's not going to be easy because we are essentially going to have to layer transportation onto an urban armature that is locked into a network of low-rise residential enclaves. Let's put it this way, we are a car-centric region but our nodes aren't even well connected by car. Forget public transit, how do you even get from Downtown Toronto to Mississauga City Centre by car?

This is very true. We have all these official places to grow nodes that aren't even efficiently connected to each other by car! MCC is a good case in point: even though it's designed to be Houstonian, it is on the side of a dogleg-shaped freeway (the 403) that makes it difficult to get to from downtown, from most of Brampton that's west of Bramalea - and, most stupidly - from much of Mississauga itself without traveling down surface roads. Houston, Phoenix and Dallas might be downtown-less sprawlholes where you need a car but at least they can manage to put their suburban nodes at major freeway interchanges so that people can drive there relatively effortlessly from all points in the region.

I think we suffer from having too much grid-based, rather than hub and spoke thinking when it comes to both freeway and rapid transit planning. This would probably be okay if we actually put our major trip centres at the intersecting points of those grids, rather than off them.

 

[balenciaga]

Though Yonge/Bloor to Yonge/Eglinton, as a whole, might qualify as midtown-ish enough for you?

Yonge/Bloor to Yonge/Eglinton is just a section of one street, can you really call a street "midtown"? If you call that midtown, what's the boundary, how far away from Yonge st is part of this midtown?

Retail on only one or two streets really doesn't make a "town". If, someday, Bathurst, Spadina Rd, Avenue Rd, Mt Pleasant, as well as Dupont, Davenport and more smaller streets become busier and not 95% residential like today any more, that will be a great midtown.

A "town" is about its urbanity. And the key criterion is about walkability. You gonna have grocery stores, restaurants, bars, movie theatres, furniture stores, bookstores, small boutique stores and all other small business crisscrossing the area, not just on one or two main avenues.

Honestly I hate Yonge St north of Bloor. It sucks life and vitality out of all other local streets, making all of them equally boringly quiet.

 

[Tewder]

I'm not sure I understand your issue here...

If we consider midtown to be from Bloor to Eglinton, say, well both those east/west arterials have enormous amounts of retail, residential and services... and in the case of the Yonge/Bloor area in particular there are indeed smaller side streets that have the same (Yorkville). Add to this solid retail along the centre spine that is Yonge Street, as well as smaller pockets on Avenue Road north of Bloor, Davenport and Dupont, for example, it is not quite strictly the 'crossroads' junction you suggest.

Most cities have retail nodes (main streets or high streets) surrounded by quieter residential areas, even NYC. Yes, Toronto's nodes tend to be more linear that what you find in some other cities but I can't see why this is necessarily or inherently undesirable. In the end, even Toronto's linear nodes intersect with each other into hubs so I don't see what the issue is.

 

[Transportfan]

Its almost debatable if even NYC has a midtown, as its so huge (Its bigger than New Yorks official downtown, and most of the big-city action happens there, not the Wall St. district.) that the whole southern half of Manhattan is actually a single giant downtown , even though there is a major gap between the two in terms of really major skyscrapers.

 

[TrickyRicky]

You can tell how utterly bizarre the culture of business and organizational incentive is in the GTA when we surround transit stations and hubs with a sea of parking, and malls and resident groups actively try to thwart public transit expansion.

There should be a mall, government services buildings, and high density transit and commercial at every transit hub, and local residents should be demanding this of planners.