Great conversation, everyone.
In my piece, I’m making several linked assumptions. Let me spell those out:
- It’s desirable to change the arrangement of buildings and streets on the site, breaking up the podiums into a larger number of smaller buildings
This is reasonable enough; I'd even say I would prefer it; but, absent other changes results in a reduction in density.
, placed irregularly, including towers with no “podiums”
Towers w/o podiums or setbacks generally create extremely high and unpleasant winds at street level. There are some mitigation options, but you need wind going down the face of a building to deflect/dissipate.
- The urban design ideas that every building should address a street, and that the ROW should be as wide as the building is tall, are arbitrary and should be challenged
For clarity, there are no ROWs the size of 40s towers, the relationship of height to ROW is the height of the podium, or streetwall.
- The neighbourhood should be designed to determine transportation patterns, effectively forcing more active transportation and transit use by making it more difficult to drive and limiting parking. Across the city, 37% of commuters did not drive to work as of 2021. That number Is a majority downtown and it could be much higher here if the neighbourhood is shaped appropriately.
I'm fine w/the desired objective; but you can't simply use 'the stick' to get people on to transit or walking, you need the option to be desirable based on anticipated commuting patterns. The key to a high level of walking downtown is the number of people who work in offices a few blocks from their residence. The level of employment here is much lower and would not support that choice.
The key to higher transit modal share in the core is 2 or more subway lines within a short distance of most residences, along with the City's commuter rail hub.
The challenge here is that the higher-order transit (GO/Subway) will be no closer than East Harbour, or way over at the Corktown Station.
The distance to said transit would be ~700M at Broadview Extension and Commissioners and 1.7km at New Cherry Street and Commissioners.
Corktown Station would be ~1.4km to 2.2km away (assuming you made use of the proposed Keating Channel pedestrian bridge.
The WELRT is not an adequate substitute; the Broadview LRT could be quite a bit more helpful, provided it has an adequate service plan
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For clarity, I would love a high transit modal share here, but the same or higher than downtown is not achievable based on the proposed employment and the proposed transit.
We could revisit this, but it would virtually scrap everything that's been done to date, delays aside, I'm not sure what a good solution on the transit side would look like, a one-station subway connection to the Ontario Line with transfer?
If this site was privately owned, and the right consultants were running it, they might be making many of these arguments and they would absolutely be getting more density. Many of these deep assumptions are fuzzy and, IMO, what we have seen in the existing Waterfront neighbourhoods suggests that a different approach is needed.
Again, Alex, this is just not true.
A density of over 50,000 per km2 is insanely high as it is...............You can re-do my math it won't get any different, this is much denser than St. James Town, which you have repeatedly said is too dense.
I think you're conflating this with the 'look' of density based on the ROWs of the roads; but the heights here pack enormous numbers of people in to these buildings.
While I don't think it's at all appropriate to include the river valley in the density calculation, even if you did, at 33 ha of land, the density here is proposed at 38,000 per km2.
* numbers above based on a very conservative 1.4 people per unit
Why would we want it to be even that high?
You regularly criticize crowding everyone into too few places in the City and yet you're advocating for exactly that here.
