MODEL CITIES: Canada

Toronto And Vancouver Land Use - Transit Success Stories

BY PETER NEWMAN
Professor of City Policy, and Director, Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy, Murdoch University

Introduction
Toronto
Vancouver

Transit-Oriented Sub-centers in Vancouver
Background to the development of the transit sub-centers
A community-based process

Summary
References

Introduction

The ascendancy of the automobile and its reshaping of urban settlement patterns is most closely associated with North America and the cities found there are often thought of as a more or less homogeneous group. However, our data suggested a considerable distance between the automobile dependence of US cities and that of Canadian cities. While US cities like Los Angeles, Detroit and Houston face by far the largest dilemmas in resolving their automobile problems, Canadian cities have had a different history and evolution, despite having similar cultural and economic development in the past 50 years (see Raad and Kenworthy, 1998).

Stories from Toronto (Greater Area population in 1991 of 4,235,756) and Vancouver (Greater Region population in 1991 of 1,602,502) are detailed below showing how they have to varying degrees overcome the dominant paradigm of automobile-based planning. Central to both stories is how the community forced planners to think again about freeway proposals.

Toronto

Toronto's overall strategy for overcoming automobile dependence is summarised in Table 1.

Table 1 Toronto's strategies for overcoming automobile dependence.

Toronto has made a deliberate policy of transit-oriented development for a number of decades. Whilst not always consistently applied, it has been more successful than any other North American city in shaping a significant role for transit. Its success is seen most of all by comparison with its neighbouring city, Detroit. Toronto and Detroit are only about 100 miles apart and are very similar in climate, but they have very different transportation patterns. Greater Toronto had in 1991, 51% of the per capita car use in Detroit and is managing to control its growth in car use better (Greater Toronto grew by 873 kms per capita in annual car use between 1980 and 1990, while Detroit rose by 1,298 kms per capita). Detroit has only 1% of its passenger travel (total motorised passenger kms) by transit, while Metro Toronto (the core of the Toronto region with over half of the population) has 24% of travel on transit and Greater Toronto has 15%. Detroit's metropolitan density is also half that of Greater Toronto.

Photo 1 Toronto has North America's best transit system

Toronto is far less dominated by cars and indeed is the best North American example of transit-oriented development (Kenworthy and Newman, 1994). From 1960 to 1990 there was a large growth of 127% in Metro Toronto's transit use up to 350 trips per capita, which represents European levels of transit ridership, while Detroit's declined by 50% to a paltry 24 trips per capita. Even Greater Toronto, which includes the lower density, more car-oriented suburbs of the region had 210 transit trips per capita in 1990, by far the biggest in North America and some 35% higher than the next best metropolitan region, New York.

The central city area (CBD) of Toronto has continued to grow in population over the past decades, adding some 20,000 new dwellings between 1975 and 1988 (Nowlan and Stewart, 1992), and Metro Toronto's density increased by 13% between 1960 and 1990 (particularly along its transit lines). On the other hand, Detroit's city centre and inner area spiralled downwards very rapidly, with inner area density dropping from 68 persons per ha in 1960 to 29 per ha in 1990 and the overall density of the metropolitan region dropping by 32% over the same 30 year period.

Two cities close in proximity - two very different urban histories. Why?

The Mayor of Toronto from 1980 to 1991 (and Councillor '69 to '80) Art Eggleton tells the story of how it happened (Eggleton, 1992). The city was very influenced by the author Jane Jacobs, whose importance in the ethical underpinnings of sustainability and whose wonderful book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" from 1961, will be discussed further in later chapters. She stressed the need for people to respect the integrity of their organic city, to go back to a more urban character, rediscover their public spaces and protect against auto-based planning. She went to live in Toronto from the United States and was very influential, along with other prominent figures, in a citizen movement there that was designed to stop the building of a major north-south freeway called the Spadina Expressway, which would have carved its way southwards through old suburbs into the central city (see, for example, David and Nadine Nowlan's book from 1970 'The Bad Trip: The Untold Story of the Spadina Expressway'). The community eventually won the fight through a Provincial Cabinet decision which overturned Metro Toronto's decision to build the Spadina Expressway.[5]

Photo 2 In the 1960's the Spadina Expressway was stopped and
this LRT route has now recovered from the planning blight over it.

The Spadina decision was a landmark victory for citizen action in Toronto and marked a fundamental reversal in government transportation policy, consolidating growing pressures from many quarters for a different kind of city.

Once the freeway issue had defined the city's direction, government policy more seriously emphasised transit-oriented development in its planning priorities. They built the Spadina subway line instead of the freeway, and existing subway lines dating back to the 1950s (plus some major extensions such as the advanced LRT line to the Scarborough sub-center), became the sites of very intensive nodal development, especially along the Yonge line.[6]

Photo 3 The key to Toronto's success is its integrated land use

Most station precinct areas have been developed with close cooperation between the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) and land developers so that a mutual benefit has been obtained by the 22 transit-oriented sub-centers that grew up around the subway like pearls on a string. The TTC has a land development arm to its activities devoted to trying to maximise development possibilities around its stations (eg through publication of a booklet showing land development opportunities throughout the system). It tries to ensure that joint development and value capture opportunities occur wherever possible and that there is some direct financial return to the community from the economic advantages reaped by the private sector in locating over and around subway stations (eg air rights and station connection fees).

Toronto changed in less than 30 years from a city that was becoming increasingly car-based, to one that is now substantially based around a transit network, certainly in Metro Toronto with its 2.3 million people. As a result, it has been able to revitalise the downtown area and to develop a density in Metro Toronto (41 persons per ha) that is closer to European levels than American. Even the greater Toronto area has a density of 26 persons per ha, which is almost double the average US and Australian metropolitan densities.

In addition, Toronto has a strong 'Main Street' program aimed at increasing inner city population and revitalising light rail/tram streets by incorporating a large quantity of new shop-top housing and other infill residential development. Infill development and redevelopment is indeed strongly emphasised on all available vacant and underutilised land throughout Metro Toronto, but especially around the subway stations.

Photo 4 The development of the Yonge St Subway mushroomed development around each station.

In most automobile-dependent cities it is found that the car drains a city centre of its life, disperses it and makes conditions very difficult for an effective transit system. Metro Toronto's 22 smaller sub-cities, together with a healthy downtown which has even managed to reduce parking supply per 1000 jobs by 11% between 1980 and 1990, provide the basis for a viable transit system. There are plenty of lower density suburbs around these sub-cities, but they each have a local centre providing many services nearby, and it is only a short distance for residents to a good transit service whenever longer trips are needed. The city centre and the sub-centers are complementary. In many other car-based cities, the city centre has declined and new jobs have become increasingly accommodated in 'salt and pepper' style employment centres across the region, or in larger 'edge cities', almost exclusively accessed by car.

Toronto's new central city housing has reduced the morning peak by 100 cars for every 120 units built (Nowlan and Stewart, 1992). There are families living in the city centre in the European tradition, which of course greatly enhances the vitality and safety of the public spaces. Meanwhile, in Detroit's city centre, as in so many other car-dominated cities, the downward spiral appears to continue, despite the efforts to bring people there to shop with the promise of free and easy car parking.

The overall process of becoming more transit-oriented and 'centred' was something that the Mayor said they were never confident about; they were not sure that they would be able to achieve a city that was moving away from the automobile. But they were surprised by how well it worked. It is now a very vibrant city that, despite some recent problems (see later), is still a model for transit-oriented planning in North America.

The Mayor, Art Eggleton, concluded his story in the following way:

"Good, efficient public transit and scarce, costly parking is a key to being a successful city...The other significant policy in Toronto was bringing people to live in the city centre and sub-centers".

Recent trends in Toronto are threatening to take some of the gloss away from these gains for sustainability as large scale cuts in the transit system have been implemented causing reductions in patronage (Pucher, 1995). Some tragic and bizarre decisions have also recently been taken, such as the filling in of the tunnel for the Eglinton subway extension to the west towards the airport, after several hundred million dollars had been spent building it (the filling in itself cost a large sum of money). This action was taken based on the present Provincial government's belief that the extension was no longer affordable. Indeed, much of the future transit vision established for Toronto in the 1980s under a $5 billion investment programme has not gone ahead.

A significant part of these problems are the many changes in urban governance which are being implemented in Toronto and other Canadian urban regions and which are pushing towards a model of fragmentation in urban government, the politics of local self-interest and harmful competition between municipalities. These changes are tending to favour auto-dependent land use and transportation planning (Raad and Kenworthy, 1998).

However, Toronto is not easily going to give away the gains it has made over the previous 30 years. For example, parallel with some losses, significant transit improvements are still occurring in places, such as the opening in August, 1997 of the Spadina Avenue light rail line which replaced a host of diesel buses, and the continued construction of the east-west Sheppard subway line around which further integration of high density development might occur.

Vancouver

The City of Vancouver, the core of the Vancouver region with a population of some 460,000 people still does not have an urban freeway. The vibrant downtown and the extensive inner suburbs with their relatively high densities (over 40 persons per ha) and intensively mixed land uses are not marred by the alienated swathes of freeway land characteristic of US inner cities, which sever neighbourhoods, decimate the potential for walking and cycling and create a whole host of local environmental as well as social problems.

Instead, the main traffic arteries in the City of Vancouver are mostly dense, mixed use strip developments, with wide sidewalks, pedestrian crossing points every few hundreds meters, and filled with thousands of pedestrians who help to keep the public realm vital, safe and interesting. Travel speeds are relatively slow, but this is compensated for by greater ease of accessibility to many activities over a small area. In a continent dominated by the automobile, Vancouver has thus retained significant resistance to the excesses of automobile dependence characteristic of so many other Auto Cities. How Vancouver has achieved this outcome is the subject of this case study and a summary of Vancouver's overall strategy for attempting to overcome automobile dependence is set out in Table 2.

Table 2 Vancouver's strategy for overcoming automobile dependence.

As in all North American cities, Vancouver had its grand transportation studies from the 1950s and 60s where prominent transportation consulting firms recommended generous networks of freeways throughout the inner city, focussed particularly on the CBD. And just like in Toronto, the fight to keep freeways out of central and inner Vancouver was a community-based movement and occurred roughly around the same time.

Photo 5 The interstate Freeway in this picture was stopped dead and no more were built in Vancouver.

The watershed was the defeat of Vancouver's Strathcona Freeway and the election of an activist city council in the early 1970s to replace the previously pro-freeway one. This fight was centred in the Chinatown area of the City of Vancouver, where the Chinese community hired a young lawyer, Mike Harcourt, to argue their case. Harcourt went on to be part of a city council which fundamentally reorientated the vision for the future of Vancouver towards one based on transit and pedestrian- friendly neighbourhoods. It actively facilitated high density redevelopment, got the False Creek/Granville Island redevelopment off the ground (seeurban villages), and was instrumental in making the West End of the city what it is today (see later discussion). Harcourt went on to become a Premier of British Columbia.

The absence of large freeways and auto-dominated environments is one claim which Vancouver can now justifiably suggest is a sign of progress - towards sustainability. Indeed, compared to most American cities, the transportation patterns and land use characteristics of the whole Vancouver region are consistent with this claim of significantly greater sustainability. For example, Greater Vancouver enjoys quite high levels of transit use (117 trips per person in 1991, compared to the average for 13 large US cities of 63 trips per person in 1990), and its car use and road infrastructure provision are both 25% below the US city average.

Vancouver has achieved:

• intensification of housing in the inner area through small to medium scale compact, infill projects near to good transit services (mostly electric trolley buses);
• development of large scale urban villages close to the city centre with a good transit service and opportunities for walking or riding safely on segregated cycle systems to many destinations, and;
• very rapid integration of new residential and mixed use development in strong nodes around stations on its driverless, elevated train service known as Skytrain which opened in 1986.

The City of Vancouver (inner Vancouver) population rose by 40,000 people between 1986 and 1991 due to its strong commitment to reurbanisation. But not only is the quantity of the reurbanisation impressive, so is the quality of the development, as shown in the West End example here and the False Creek example in section 4.3.3.

The historic West End around English Bay is an extremely dense, high rise neighbourhood (second only to Manhattan in North America) which continues to intensify and retain a strong transit orientation through a good trolley bus service which links into both a ferry service to North Vancouver (sea bus) and the Skytrain. It is also strong in walking and cycling due to the intense mixture of land uses along the main street (Robson Street) and the attractive public environment with its wide sidewalks, and also including the magnificent Stanley Park at the foot of the West End.

The West End retains an endearing human quality reflected in the people strolling along the beautifully landscaped, tree-lined residential streets off Robson Street and other main roads, or simply walking, cycling or using their electric carts to get to the shops or restaurants within a short walk of apartments. There are also small pocket parks formed by numerous, short street closures where seats and gardens are provided and older people in particular congregate to talk. These parks have been effective in enhancing the pedestrian quality of the West End through the traffic calming of its regular grid of streets where previously drivers used to speed.

Transit-Oriented Sub-centers in Vancouver

In section 4.3.3 a few examples were provided of urban villages which have sprung up around stations on Vancouver's Skytrain.

These new sub-centers such as at Metrotown and New Westminster and smaller developments at other stations such as Joyce and Edmonds are all good examples of the kind of dense, mixed use transit-oriented development which form the basis of the Future City concept in this chapter. It is thus important to understand these in more detail than that provided earlier in this chapter, and to appreciate some of the processes which have led to these developments. In some sense, Vancouver provides a living laboratory for understanding how one city has begun to actively reshape itself into a more transit-oriented urban form.

The pace of redevelopment around many Skytrain stations has been extraordinary and the process is continuing, particularly near the central city. The provincial government, in providing funds to help build the Skytrain, also set down directions to the local authorities such as the City of Vancouver, Burnaby and New Westminster about the need to actively support the investment in transit through appropriate rezoning of station precinct land to higher density, mixed uses. However, other important factors have been at work, as described below.

Background to the development of the transit sub-centers

Past population trends in Vancouver were contributing to a number of problems, including increasing distances which Vancouver residents were required to travel between home and work. Automobile dependence and urban sprawl were growing and air quality and some of the regions valuable open spaces were under pressure (City of Vancouver, 1987b).

Given these problems, the Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD) in close collaboration with all the local municipalities, developed a 'Liveable Region Strategy', which has contributed significantly to the current positive situation regarding land use intensification within rail station precincts. Plans were formulated for a number of factors in Vancouver, including the conservation of land resources (Greater Vancouver Regional District, 1990). In Vancouver, it has been recognised that the region is limited, especially by topography, in the quantity of land resources available for urban growth and hence 'green zones' have been established in an 'Urban Containment Policy'. Under this policy, land beyond designated boundaries has been made unavailable for urban development (Greater Vancouver Regional District, 1990). The process of developing the 'green zones' has been achieved in conjunction with each local authority in the region in order to develop strong ownership and commitment to the plan (Greater Vancouver Regional District, 1995).

Accompanying this was the realisation that it was not sustainable in the long term to create residential areas which were primarily served by cars, and hence appropriate transportation policies accompanied the urban containment policy. Most importantly, this included the encouragement of development at regional centres, based on Skytrain, which allow for walking and cycling within station precincts and easy access to fast, frequent rail travel for longer trips (Greater Vancouver Regional District, 1990).

Skytrain has had a significant effect on the development of station sites in Vancouver for a number of reasons:

1. The notion of regional town centres has been promoted since the first Liveable Region Strategy in the 1970's. The community prepared for change for a decade before Skytrain was built. This meant that regional development policy for the integration of development with Skytrain was basic common sense;
2. There has been a successful partnership between BC Transit and private developers, where the location and development of stations in the first stage of the system was a joint exercise, including joint financing of station costs;
3. Land at strategic sites near Skytrain was in public ownership;
4. The land with the highest densities was rezoned from industrial land uses (both privately and publicly owned), which meant that surrounding neighbourhoods were either accustomed to other uses or were buffered from them. It was unusual in Vancouver for single family neighbourhoods to rise up in opposition to a conversion from industrial to residential land uses, even if they had become accustomed to the industrial or derelict sites;
5. BC Transit, despite severe criticism, consciously decided not to provide any park-and-ride facilities north of the Fraser River, i.e. along that major part of the system between the downtown and New Westminster. This prevented any negative effects of these facilities on patronage, and avoided the loss of development potential around the stations in the already established communities;
6. > The sprawling suburbs in Vancouver have not had the freeway infrastructure to support them. In the thirty years since the Trans-Canada freeway opened up the Fraser Valley, the only increase in road capacity was the six lane Alex Fraser Bridge. Over the same period, the regional population in the 19 suburbs outside the City of Vancouver boundaries, rose from 400,000 to 1.3 million people;
7. One of the most important factors in achieving a development form based partly around transit in Vancouver is the scarcity of land in the region. With high land prices, the development industry intensifies development, as there is a market acceptance of higher density living.

It is realised that zoning does not, by itself, create development unless the market perceives opportunity. BC Municipalities intensify sites for higher zonings in there official community plan by-laws and joint development is actively sought in Vancouver through a pro-active government. In the case of the Joyce station area, development was preceded by an extensive station area planning process that dates back to the first announcement of Skytrain in 1981. A strategic industrial site in this area was provided by the City of Vancouver. This site constituted approximately 10% of the land that was used for the redevelopment and was an important 'jump start' to the process (personal communication, Joe Stott, 1996, Greater Vancouver Region District).

Photo 6 The new development at Westminster clusters around the Sky Train.

A community-based process

Generally, the zoning in Vancouver has resulted from a planning process which has a long tradition of community involvement. Redevelopment is a sensitive issue anywhere in the world and particular efforts have been made by local authorities in Vancouver to consult with the mostly single-family housing areas to be affected by the changes.

For example, in the City of Vancouver, local area strategies were designed for residents and businesses located within a ten minute or 800m walk of stations. This was done through public meetings and the establishment of local advisory committees (City of Vancouver, 1987b).

The plans for intensifying development were pursued with the following specific aims and were supported by a series of specific strategies. The aims were to:

• Provide new housing within station precincts without compromising the quality of life for existing residents;
• Create sub-centers with diversity and character;
• Encourage medium density residential development;
• Encourage commercial, mixed use development;
• Increase train patronage;
• Reduce the impacts of rail generated traffic and parking problems (eg through enhancing the pedestrian environment);
• Update facilities required to house future population increases such as parks and libraries;

(City of Vancouver, 1987a; City of Vancouver, 1987b; City of Vancouver, 1987c).

An important aspect of these local area strategies was that general, widespread redevelopment within the station precincts was not undertaken. Rather, development was concentrated on publicly owned vacant sites, land severely impacted by the rail system and under-utilised or derelict land (City of Vancouver, 1987a). Construction on only these land types helped to reduce community fears that the development was out of character for the local area and that re-development within the station precincts would compromise existing lifestyles.

Summary

The long range planning in Vancouver is focussed on strengthening its land use-transportation connection and containing urban sprawl through protecting the established green zone, building 'complete' communities, concentrating development and increasing transportation choice by enhancing transit supply and service, controlling automobile use and providing pedestrian and cyclist priority. Plans call for further rail development in the form of a surface light rail system and commuter rail to improve transit and to provide more opportunities for compact development.

The Livable Region Strategic Plan and Transportation 2021 enshrine these directions, though they have no legal backing to implement them. And, as in Toronto, many factors are presently at work which would undermine this direction such as transit cutbacks, difficulties in securing funds for transit expansion and tensions between suburban municipalities and the City of Vancouver (Raad and Kenworthy, 1998).

The continued absence of freeways in many parts of the Vancouver region however, will be an ongoing factor in improving the attractiveness of the inner city and precincts around existing and future transit stations as sites for residential and commercial development.

It will take a lot of bad decisions over a long period to completely undo the positive moves towards enhanced sustainability which Vancouver has made over the last 30 years. However, as in Toronto, vigilance and commitment will be required to ensure that sustainability objectives based around reduced automobile dependence and increased transit orientation, and enshrined in formal planning documents, continue to be honoured in implementation.

References

City of Vancouver (1987a) Broadway Station area plan: Summary. City of Vancouver Planning Department, Vancouver.

City of Vancouver (1987b) Joyce Station area plan: Summary. City of Vancouver Planning Department, Vancouver.

City of Vancouver (1987c) Nanaimo/29th Avenue Station areas Plan: Summary. City of Vancouver Planning Department, Vancouver.

Greater Vancouver Regional District (1990) Creating our future: Steps to a more liveable urban region. GVRD, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.

Greater Vancouver Regional District (1995) Liveable region strategy plan. GVRD, Strategic Planning, January.

Kenworthy, J. and Newman, P. (1994) Toronto - Paradigm regained. Australian Planner, 31(3), 137-147.

Nowlan, D. M. and Stewart, G. (1992) The effect of downtown population growth on commuting trips: some recent Toronto experience. Journal of the American Planning Association, 57(2), 165-182.

Pucher, J. and LefÀ vere, C. (1995) The urban transport crisis in Europe and North America. MacMillan, London.

Raad, T. and Kenworthy, J. (1998) The US and us. Alternatives Journal, 24 (1), 14-22.

[6]It should be noted however that a few kilometres of the northern end of the Spadina, known today as the Allen Expressway, was constructed and causes a number of problems for transit operation.

[7]The location of the northern end of the Spadina subway line in the middle of the Allen Expressway has, however, inhibited the strong nodal development characterisitc of other parts of the subway system which are clearly visible from the air as clusters of high rise development punctuating many subway stations.