News   Apr 25, 2024
GTA 2024 BILD Award Finalists Announced — and You Can Vote!
 361     0 
News   Apr 25, 2024
Brightwater Resubmission Proposes Increased Density and Height in Port Credit
 1.1K     4 
News   Apr 25, 2024
Wyse Meter Solutions Encouraging Sustainability Through Submetering Technology
 1.1K     0 

Greater Toronto's Sprawl

From Vancouver, at this link.

Tsawwassen Mills shoppers trapped for up to 4 hours in parking lot chaos

The parking lot traffic at Tsawwassen Mills was at a complete standstill for much of Saturday, to the extent that drivers were stuck in their cars for up to four hours trying to get out of the shopping centre’s exits.
Click to expand...
Angry shoppers waited for so long that some gave up on following traffic and made their own make-shift exits by driving on the grass and flower beds to get out of the mall. Among the many comments posted on social media, some even claimed that they were running out of gas waiting in the gridlock.

“Fed up mall patrons who were making even less progress than those in my surrounding area began driving over grass medians to travel their desired distance,” Vanessa Obeng, who visited the mall today, told Daily Hive. “The rules of the road meant nothing as frustrated drivers became aggressive with one another.”

“[They were] making dangerous turns and even leaving their vehicles to have verbal altercations. I even witnessed a man illegally park along Highway 17 and run to switch places with a loved one who was trapped in the line just ahead of us.”

The traffic mayhem continued despite the assistance of Delta Police, RCMP, extra traffic controllers at the exits, and parking aids roaming through the parking lot area.

Kelly Kerr told Daily Hive that she drove into the parking lot just after noon after about 20 minutes of waiting, but when she realized it was too busy she decided to stay in her car and leave without stepping through the mall’s doors.

The 6,000-car capacity parking lot was so congested that there was a one-hour period when her vehicle only moved about 10 feet.

By the time she escaped the parking lot, it was approximately 4 pm and there was still a two-kilometre-long line of vehicles on Highway 17 trying to get through one of the shopping centre’s two entrances.

“There were ‘parking aids’ walking around but not doing anything,” said Kerr. “We asked one of them how to get out and they just kind of shrugged and said there are only two exits and that we were pretty much in the middle.”

“There were hundreds of cars from every row trying to merge into the one outgoing lane so no one was moving,” she said.

She said she posted a message on Tsawwassen Mills’ Facebook page alerting others to avoid the mall today, but their social media team allegedly deleted her post.

“I guess they preferred to have people wasting their whole Saturday afternoon stuck in their parking lot,” continued Kerr. “I will never be back.”

Daily Hive Food Editor Lindsay William-Ross said she got into her car shortly before 3 pm and was able to leave mall property at approximately 5 pm.

“People were getting out of their cars to either see what was wrong, smoke, or just plain yell at drivers who they felt should move,” said William-Ross.

“It felt quite dangerous, because clearly no emergency vehicle could get through. It took me 2 hours to exit, and as I neared the exit I couldn’t figure out why we were stuck because it was moving in that area rapidly. This was a planning and execution fail.”

As SkyTrain is nowhere near Tsawwassen Mills and transit bus services are poor, most visitors will likely be driving their own car to get to and from the 1.2-million-square-foot, 200-store destination shopping centre.

The mall is only accessible by public transit via three bus routes that stop outside the mall: the 601 South Delta via Ladner Exchange route from Bridgeport Station, the 620 Tsawwassen Ferry Terminal via Ladner Exchange route Bridgeport Station, and 609 South Delta Exchange from Tsawwassen.

However, there is a mall-operated 42-passenger shuttle, using a school bus, that enables foot traffic ferry passengers at Tsawwassen Ferry Terminal to visit the mall. The free shuttle operates hourly during mall operating hours and is timed with Nanaimo and Swartz Bay ferry sailing times.

Mall operators are also operating an employee-only shuttle to and from SkyTrain’s Scott Road Station after the shopping centre experienced some difficulty with attracting employees due to its far-flung location.

Traffic conditions at Tsawwassen Mills should improve after the mall’s Thanksgiving long weekend opening period. BC Ferries has warned passengers to expect extra traffic as Highway 17 is the only way in and out of Tsawwassen Ferry Terminal and the new mall.

Prior to the mall’s scheduled opening on Wednesday, a span of the highway route leading to Highway 99 was already widened from four to six lanes to accommodate the increase in traffic volumes. Improvements were also made to traffic signals earlier this year.

All upgrades to local road infrastructure were paid for by the mall developer.
Click to expand...
 
Wow. That's brutal. Not sure who is the biggest jackass here: the people who designed the transportation infrastructure for this place, the drivers who drove over grass and flower beds, or the mall's social media team who deleted warnings about the traffic debacle on the Facebook page. Pox on all their houses.

All for a cr*ppy Mills mall.
 
It's sad Vancouver area would allow an atrocity like that mall. I thought they were better than that. Sprawl is a more important issue there than in GTA.
 
Transit access is currently an afterthought in most new malls. They design and build for the car, and put transit stops either far away on the arterial road, or quickly repaint a section of the parking lot (usually, in a little used section).

Just look at how one gets to and from the Yorkdale Subway Station and Yorkdale Mall. Stairs.
 
I doubt transit access was ever thought of in most malls.

Maybe in urban/urban malls, but definitely not in suburban ones.

I think actually in Toronto, even the higher order transit usually came after the malls were built (think Fairview, Scarborough, Yorkdale).
 
doady said:
It's sad Vancouver area would allow an atrocity like that mall. I thought they were better than that. Sprawl is a more important issue there than in GTA.
Click to expand...

The mall is technically not in Vancouver. It's built on Native lands just south of the city.

I wonder how bad traffic will be when the neighbouring plaza with a Walmart opens.
 
Chief Planner Keesmaat posted this on Twitter today:

mP63wgF.png



If I'm reading this correctly, the City of Toronto needed to add 399,270 housing units between 2001 and 2041 to accommodate foretasted population growth. In 2016, we've already completed or approved 314,407, with another 106,135 units submitted for approval. Our growth in completed units, and presumably our population growth, seems to be greatly in excess of predicted numbers. At this rate, we'd exceed our 2041 targets by 30%. Am I reading this correctly?
 
TheTigerMaster said:
Chief Planner Keesmaat posted this on Twitter today:



If I'm reading this correctly, the City of Toronto needed to add 399,270 housing units between 2001 and 2041 to accommodate foretasted population growth. In 2016, we've already completed or approved 314,407, with another 106,135 units submitted for approval. Our growth in completed units, and presumably our population growth, seems to be greatly in excess of predicted numbers. At this rate, we'd exceed our 2041 targets by 30%. Am I reading this correctly?
Click to expand...

Take these figures with a grain of salt, population /= housing demand. For instance, housing has stayed the same but Little Italy's population has dropped by 43% since the 1950s.

I'm wary of figures like this because they reinforce myths like "zoned capacity", and they lead to the idea that housing is a resource meant to be doled out based on projected demand like onions in a Soviet bread line. Demand is a function of price: if housing is "oversupplied" then prices drop and people who might otherwise be living in their parents basement might jump into home ownership.
 
Exceeding the targets by 30% is a great thing, resulting in more affordable housing and reducing sprawl in the 905. I dream of a world where American cities built this much housing.

On Greater Toronto's recent sprawl I must point out as an outsider, it doesn't bother me very much. It's denser than all recent sprawl in every American metro and it's better transit connected, more walkable, and has better greenspace too. Also it seems that probably 60% of new homes are either in duplexes or townhomes. Aside from a few well designed new urbanist communities like Stapleton in Denver, Colorado, you'll almost never find a suburban development in the states with more attached homes than detached.
 
From the Toronto Sun, at this link:

Gridlock, road tolls, inevitable result of Bill Davis’ decision to stop the Spadina Expressway

Toronto’s modern-day traffic nightmare started with former Ontario premier Bill Davis killing the Spadina Expwy. in 1971.

Now, Mayor John Tory will finish it by tolling the Don Valley Pkwy. and Gardiner Expwy.

It’s fitting, since Davis was Tory’s political mentor and Tory was Davis’ principal secretary.

Generations of our politicians have absurdly insisted as they made driving increasingly miserable for the vast majority of commuters who drive personal cars to work, that no “so-called” war on the car has ever existed.

This claim is nonsense.

In fact, Davis’ June 3, 1971 announcement he was killing Spadina highlighted his declaration of war on the car.

As Davis said in his statement to the legislature reproduced in Steve Paikin’s biography of Ontario’s 18th premier:

“(W)e must place our reliance on means and methods other than those which will encourage and proliferate the use of the passenger car as the basic means of transportation ...

“(W)e must make a decision as to whether we are trying to build a transportation system to serve the automobile, or one which will best serve people. “If we are building a transportation system to serve the automobile, the Spadina Expwy. would be a good place to start. But if we are building a transportation system to serve people, the Spadina Expwy. is a good place to stop.”

The rest is history. Davis’ bold but misguided decision earned the new premier the honorific of “North America’s Transit Man of the Year” and applause from the “Stop Spadina” movement spearheaded by downtown urban elites.

But it marked the beginning of the economy-killing gridlock that Toronto suffers from today.

The Spadina Expwy. was supposed to link up to the Gardiner. Instead, it became the truncated William R. Allen Road — the so-called “Davis Ditch” — which ends at Eglinton Ave. W., spilling a ridiculous amount of traffic onto a street never designed for it.

The killing of Spadina turned the Don Valley Pkwy. into the parking lot it is today during every rush hour.

Spadina was supposed to link Toronto’s growing suburbs in the northwest to the city’s downtown core, while the DVP did the same in the northeast.

With Spadina dead, the DVP had to do double duty as the city’s only direct north-south link to the city core.

Davis pledged to devote more resources to public transit, but we all know what happened after that.

While Toronto had one of North America’s best public transit systems in the 1970s, that was also when our governments stopped significant expansion of the city’s subways, leading to today’s public transit mess.

Now, tolling the Gardiner and DVP will increase traffic congestion as drivers invade city streets to avoid them.

Tory is working on public transit improvements such as SmartTrack and his tolls will provide more money for maintaining roads, if he can keep his nutty council from blowing it on non-essential spending.

But they won’t reduce gridlock. The fundamental error on that front was made by his mentor 45 years ago.
Click to expand...

I think Bill Davis was the best Premier of Ontario ever. And Davis was a Progressive Conservative... with emphasis on the "Progressive".
 
Backwards thinking article.

This line got me. "Spadina was supposed to link Toronto’s growing suburbs in the northwest to the city’s downtown core, while the DVP did the same in the northeast." Suburbanites aren't entitled to a fast car commute at the expense of the city.
 
You must log in or register to post here.

Back
Top