Mississauga One Park Tower | ?m | 38s | Daniels | Kirkor

American suburbs are waaaaay different than Canadian suburbs (at least Toronto's anyways). I've done my fair share of travels around the US and you literally have to drive at least 15-20 minutes to get from one place to another. I got family in Atlanta (Roswell suburb) so I go there once every 2 or 3 months. It's nothing there but cars and SUVs. I did see a couple of empty buses (I assume it was the same one as I saw them on separate days on the same street). And down there, rarely anyone else but blacks ride their MARTA system. Mississauga blows Atlanta's suburbs away in terms of convenience of public transit and pedestrians. Down there, we DROVE from box store to box store. Also it was the first time I had ever been to a 'drive-thru' bank, where you drive up to one of the 4 lanes and do your banking with a teller over the intercom. There were very few people who actually went inside the bank, but the drive-thru lanes were packed! It's very much a car culture down there and the sprawl is much worse than what we have in the GTA (their suburbs stretch much farther than those in Toronto).
 
I haven't been to too many suburbs in the US, but the one thing I did notice is that they don't tend to have mid and highrises amongst the single family homes like Toronto and the GTA does.
 
True, in fact, they like to build their suburban home in huge lots (unlike our comparatively tightly packed subdivisions), which helps their 'burbs sprawl waaay out into the boonies.
 
vistaway said:
And proof that indeed, the MCC has pedestrians:
MCC_2007-06-28022.jpg
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OMG! People WALKING to Square One! :O

Robert Speck and City Centre drive usually has quite a bit of pedestrian activity too.
 
rudeboie said:
American suburbs are waaaaay different than Canadian suburbs (at least Toronto's anyways). I've done my fair share of travels around the US and you literally have to drive at least 15-20 minutes to get from one place to another. I got family in Atlanta (Roswell suburb) so I go there once every 2 or 3 months. It's nothing there but cars and SUVs. I did see a couple of empty buses (I assume it was the same one as I saw them on separate days on the same street). And down there, rarely anyone else but blacks ride their MARTA system. Mississauga blows Atlanta's suburbs away in terms of convenience of public transit and pedestrians. Down there, we DROVE from box store to box store. Also it was the first time I had ever been to a 'drive-thru' bank, where you drive up to one of the 4 lanes and do your banking with a teller over the intercom. There were very few people who actually went inside the bank, but the drive-thru lanes were packed! It's very much a car culture down there and the sprawl is much worse than what we have in the GTA (their suburbs stretch much farther than those in Toronto).
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So, have you ever been to Heartland Town Centre in Mississauga? People DRIVE from box store to box store. And Canadians line up for Tim Horton's drive throughs. In fact, some of these Tim Horton's drive throughs have two lanes, due to the demand, and far more customers in their cars than get out of their cars.
Canadians need to get over their moral superiority in terms of Americans. We pollute as much, are as sedentary, and the GTA's sprawl rivals anywhere in North America.
 
LOL .. of course I have. I driving around touring the GTA when I have nothing else better to do. I've lived in Mississauga (4 different areas including the border with Milton), Markham, North York, Scarb (2 different areas), East York, Riverdale, and gone to school in Brampton. And it still doesn't compare when they literally have entire streets that are scattered with box store centres. We definitely are nowhere close to their sprawl. Try flying out of ATL during the early morning or early evening and see the traffic jams out of their expressways that go waaay out into the pitch darkness (for tens and tens of miles), much longer jams than our 400 series highways (and the QEW). My relatives and friends come up from the States (from Atlanta, Boston, Columbia SC, Greenville SC, Cleveland) and they say that our suburbs are different than theirs. At least we are attempting to limit sprawl by building condos/apts compared to down there which they continue to build detached homes and ranch homes (bungalows) with huuuge yards. BTW, my wife has lived in NYC, Washington DC, and the burbs of Baltimore, Greenville, Columbia, and Atlanta and she says that our burbs (especially Mississauga) are too 'busy' for her liking. I took her one time to Whitby and Oshawa (North) and she felt more at home.
 
The argument isn't whether or not we sprawl, it's just that we are not sprawling at the same level that alot of the US majors and mids are.
 
RJR123 said:
You're using an extreme example there.
Do you really think our suburbs are superior to New Jersey, or Irvine? I'm talking suburbs, not exurbs.
And even if our suburbs were marginally better, what is the point? The GTA sprawl is brutal, and buses run once every 10 minutes in a minute portion of suburbs, and only during rush hour. How can anyone who is a member of "Urban Toronto" even begin to defend this way of life??
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It's not at all an extreme example - Toronto does not have American style exurbs other than a few isolated tracts in York Region. We have subdivisions with 12 homes per acre, served by high frequency buses, going right out to cornfields, and no American city east of the Rockies can claim this. There aren't SUVs sitting in every driveway. Middle class people here choose to take transit. Maybe it'd be nice if we all lived in downtown condos, but this is a pipe dream.

There are members of Urban Toronto who build this imaginary wall somewhere around Bloor and say everything south of there is good and urban and everything north of there is bad and hopeless. Even if this dichotomy wasn't false, they're trying to preach to the choir. What's the point of this forum if we're going to Balkanize the city into 'urban' and 'not urban' and incestuously celebrate only what's already urban, not what's urbanizing? Whether or not you acknowledge it, some suburban areas are no longer suburban - they are urban. Can MCC be called urban just because there's more than zero pedestrians? Of course not, but you simply can't deny it's a step in the right direction.
 
scarberiankhatru said:
What's the point of this forum if we're going to Balkanize the city into 'urban' and 'not urban' and incestuously celebrate only what's already urban, not what's urbanizing? Whether or not you acknowledge it, some suburban areas are no longer suburban - they are urban. Can MCC be called urban just because there's more than zero pedestrians? Of course not, but you simply can't deny it's a step in the right direction.
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Amen to that. Very well put.
 
Here here! Based on NA standards, we are not as bad as some people here make it out to be. And 10 minute intervals in our burbs is nothing to laugh at. The last time I was down in the ATL, during my 5 day stay, I was lucky to have even seen 5 buses the entire time! And the MARTA train/subway, which takes people from the points in the North suburbs (inner) to the airport via downtown (also an east/west line but I've never been on that one) runs on 15 minute intervals during weekday non-peak hrs (10 minutes during peak) and 20 minutes late evenings and weekends. I just checked the bus route that runs close to my in-laws place, and it runs on 30 min intervals all day weekdays and no weekend service. And this is on a major artery as well. No wonder I rarely ever see a bus nor anyone at the bus stops.
 
Rudeboie: Your observations are dead on, based on my experience of suburbs around a number of American cities, although I have never been to Atlanta. We are ahead of most American cities in terms of urban design including more intensive land use, particularly in Mississauga in my (admittedly biased) opinion. Miss. is still a suburb, but it's urbanizing.

There's an interesting interview with Hazel McCallion in today's National Post. Among other things she laments the serious error that was made in earlier years, in that Miss. wasn't designed for transit use. This has now been changed, in terms of new neighbourhoods, but it's difficult or in practical terms impossible to go back and retrofit older residential neighbourhoods with the huge lots and the long loopy crescents.

Mention was also made of drive-throughs earlier in this thread. Hazel reiterates her opposition to drive-throughs, but she has managed to rally little support on this issue and there are many drive-through fast food places in Mississauga. A few of them cause traffic problems in the morning rush.

I'm not aware of too many drive-through banks around here, certainly not as many as in the U.S. There is a big honking new CIBC branch on the Queensway in Etobicoke, which includes drive-through lanes (not sure how many, but more than one). I know of a few others which have one drive-through lane. I hope we don't see too many more of them. They really speak of people who don't want to get out of their cars for even a short walk.
 
Observer Walt said:
There's an interesting interview with Hazel McCallion in today's National Post. Among other things she laments the serious error that was made in earlier years, in that Miss. wasn't designed for transit use. This has now been changed, in terms of new neighbourhoods, but it's difficult or in practical terms impossible to go back and retrofit older residential neighbourhoods with the huge lots and the long loopy crescents.
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In many cases removing loopy crescents wouldn't do anything. There's bus routes on Dundas, Bloor, Burnhamthorpe, Rathburn, etc., and so what if there's crescents and cul-de-sacs in between because there wouldn't be more E/W bus routes in the same area, anyway, and existing routes wouldn't go snaking on and off the arterials. As long as there's walkways out from crescents to main roads, having a massive grid doesn't even result in shorter walking distances to bus stops.

Reducing lot sizes would really boost the viability of local transit service, though.
 
Aside from the level of racial segregation, suburban sprawl and suburban transit are biggest difference between American and Canadian cities. Transit in America doesn't even come close to Canada, and the stats support this.

In a ranking of the US and Canadian metropolitan areas by the % of workers who use transit, the Canadian metros dominate. Not only that, very small Canadian metros beat out very large American metros, even though the largest metros should have the highest rate of transit usage. The Winnipeg metro area, for example, has higher rate of transit usage than the Chicago metro, despite being only 1/15 of its size, population-wise.

Here are the top 25, based on the 2000/01 Censuses that I calculated and compiled a while back:

New York 24.9%
Toronto 22.4
Montreal 21.7
Ottawa-Gatineau 18.5
Winnipeg 14.2

Calgary 13.1
Chicago 11.5
Vancouver 11.5
Halifax 9.9
Quebec 9.8

Victoria 9.7
San Francisco 9.5
Washington-Baltimore 9.4
Boston 9.0
Philadelphia 8.7

Edmonton 8.6
Hamilton 7.9
Oshawa 7.1
Seattle 6.8
Pittsburgh 6.2

London 6.0
Portland 5.7
Los Angeles 4.7
Minneapolis-St. Paul 4.6
Regina 4.4

Also, if you compare the actual ridership counts, they tell the same story. Mississauga Transit has 158,000 boardings per weekday and serves an area of 700,000 people. PACE Bus, which is the only bus service in Chicago's suburbs, only gets 107,600 boardings per weekday (excluding paratransit), despite serving a population of over 5 million people.

So is Mississauga really the same as Naperville? Can one look at all these stats and honestly claim that all suburbanites are the same? And that they will always be same? I personally don't think so.

I think that suburbanites in Canada already have a very different attitude and lifestyle than suburbanites in America. I'm not saying that Canadian suburbs don't need to change; I'm just saying that such change will not have to be as difficult or as drastic as some people here claim.
 
RJR123 said:
You're using an extreme example there.
Do you really think our suburbs are superior to New Jersey, or Irvine? I'm talking suburbs, not exurbs.
And even if our suburbs were marginally better, what is the point? The GTA sprawl is brutal, and buses run once every 10 minutes in a minute portion of suburbs,
Click to expand...


Tomken - 10 min
Dixie - 9
Bloor - 8.5
Hurontario - 4
Yonge - 3
Eglinton - 6
Dundas - 5
Steeles - 7.5 (Brampton only)
Dixie - 7.5 (Brampton)
Kennedy - 7.5 (Brampton)
Main - 10
Highway 7 East - 7
Highway 407 West - 6
Highway 2 - 9
Queen - 10
Steeles West - 3 (Toronto/Vaughan)
Steeles East - ? (Toronto/Markham)
Erin Mills - 10
Burnhamthorpe - 7

A minute portion of the suburbs indeed...

How can anyone who is a member of "Urban Toronto" even begin to defend this way of life??
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There you go again with the stereotyping. Since I defend Mississauga efforts reduce sprawl and car-dependent lifestyle, I must be an SUV-driving and SUV-loving suburbanite right? Whatever you say...
 
under 10 minute waits on so many lines in the burbs, and to think the province is all about increasing transit funding, you guys have it pretty sweet. Im from london and ive waited for more than 30 mins for a bus out of downtown to the burbs, our downtown is the main transit hub. london transit sucks. Looking at thoes stats im suprised vancouver doesnt rank higher, vancouver transit is amazing.
 
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