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Two recent books argue that people need the time outdoors, physical effort, and quiet those weekends provide on a regular basis, and that modern comfort makes all of it easy to go without. Michael Easter’s The Comfort Crisis (2021) and Arthur C. Brooks’s The Meaning of Your Life (2026) are not about cities, but much of what they recommend can be done in Toronto, starting this week.

Brooks, a Harvard social scientist, defines meaning as coherence, purpose, and significance: a sense that what happens to you is not random, a clear direction for your life, and the sense that you make a positive difference for others. He argues that since roughly 2008, more of life has moved online, pushing people toward analytical, task-focused thinking and weakening the experiences that produce meaning. His remedies include limiting phone use, investing in close relationships, looking for a calling in your work, spending time with beauty, and transcendence, which he describes as moving yourself out of focus through service, awe, spiritual practice, or volunteering.

Easter, a journalist and professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, argues that easy access to comfort has removed challenges our ancestors benefited from, such as exercising to earn food, enduring hunger, and spending time in nature alone with their thoughts. As those challenges disappear, our tolerance for discomfort drops and rising comfort leaves us less content. He cites figures showing that Americans spend about 93 percent of their time indoors, and that the share of jobs requiring heavy manual labour has fallen from around 85 percent to about 10 percent. He also links high population density and noise to chronic mental health problems, and his nature prescription is written for city dwellers: 20 minutes in green space three times a week, five hours a month in semi-wild areas, and three days a year off-grid.

Together, the books point to four needs: time in nature and quiet, physical effort, close relationships, and a commitment to something larger than yourself. In a city, it is easy to go without each of them.

The ravine system covers 11,000 hectares, or 17 percent of the city’s land area, and about 30 percent of residents live within 500 metres of a ravine. Access closer to home varies. The 3-30-300 rule, proposed by urban forester Cecil Konijnendijk, sets a neighbourhood standard: at least three trees in view from every home, school, and workplace, at least 30 percent tree canopy in every neighbourhood, and no more than 300 metres to the nearest public green space. Toronto’s 2018 Tree Canopy Study put citywide canopy at 28.4 to 31 percent, but earlier City work found tree cover unevenly distributed across wards. A 2024 study of 2.5 million buildings in eight cities, including New York and Amsterdam, found most buildings fail the rule because of inadequate canopy.

Physical effort depends on how a neighbourhood was built. In older, walkable areas, daily life includes walking to the subway and carrying groceries home. In much of the inner suburbs, the car is the practical choice for almost every trip.

Connection and civic life have both declined. In the Toronto Foundation’s 2023 Vital Signs report, 37 percent of Torontonians said they felt lonely at least three or four days in the previous week, and the share with six or more close friends fell from 37 percent in 2018 to 28 percent in 2022. Toronto’s volunteer rate fell from 37 percent to 25 percent between 2018 and 2022.

Density itself does not explain these results. The same survey found Montreal, also a large and dense city, lowest among major metropolitan areas at 17 percent. Many of the solutions, including transit to green space, public programming, and local groups, depend on having enough people nearby.

Time in nature and quiet. Spend 20 minutes in a park or ravine at least three times a week. Check your own street against 3-30-300: count the trees you can see from your window and find the nearest park or ravine entrance. Once a month, spend a few hours somewhere wilder, such as Rouge National Urban Park, the Toronto Islands, or the Humber and Don valleys, all reachable by transit or ferry. Leave your earbuds at home on some of those walks; Easter argues that boredom and silence give the mind room to wander and recover. Keep your phone out of the bedroom and off for the last hour before sleep, as Brooks recommends. If you want structure, ask your doctor or nurse practitioner about PaRx, Canada’s nature prescription program, led by family physician Dr. Melissa Lem. Any licensed health care professional in Ontario can prescribe it, and it recommends at least two hours a week in nature, in blocks of at least 20 minutes.

Physical effort. Walk or cycle one leg of a trip you make every week. Carry your groceries home instead of driving to the store, and take the stairs at the station. Easter recommends carrying weight, so add a loaded backpack to some of your walks. Once a year, pick one challenge that feels slightly out of reach, such as walking a long stretch of the ravine trails in a single day.

Connection. Join one activity that meets weekly with the same people, such as a choir, a league, a running group, or a class. Seeing the same faces regularly is how acquaintances become friends. Learn the names of a few neighbours. Brooks argues that close relationships are the main source of significance, so put regular time with close friends and family on your calendar instead of waiting for it to happen.

Meaning. Brooks suggests asking yourself three questions: why things happen the way they do in your life, where you are heading, and why your life matters. Whichever answer feels weakest points to where to start. Volunteering is the most direct route to significance, and residents associations, parent councils, faith communities, community gardens, and local charities all need help. Easter recommends brief daily reminders of your own mortality, and cites research finding that people asked to think about death became more willing to give money, time, and blood.

Neighbourhood groups and institutions can run the same events every year, such as a street party, a park cleanup, or a seasonal festival, so residents know when to show up. Libraries, schools, and places of worship can open space for these uses. Health care providers can expand nature and social prescribing; Ontario’s Rx: Community pilot tested social prescribing at eleven community health centres, including Rexdale Community Health Centre in Toronto, from 2018 to 2019.

The City can adopt 3-30-300 as a neighbourhood benchmark alongside its existing canopy targets and direct planting and park investment to the areas that fall short. The researchers behind the eight-city study recommend better planting conditions so trees grow to full size, and fewer premature removals. Clear ravine entrances and wayfinding, simple and inexpensive permits for street parties and small park events, and permissions for shops and services within walking distance of home would make the individual steps above easier. The Bentway’s Rx for Social Connection report, prepared with Gehl and the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, treats public space as part of the city’s health system.

The province funds primary care, and the Rx: Community evaluation found that investment in primary care and social supports helps social prescribing work. Housing supply, which Vital Signs links to the financial strain behind poor mental health in Toronto, is largely a provincial responsibility. Weekend transit to conservation areas and provincial parks would help residents without a car get the monthly time in wilder places that Easter recommends.

Most of what the two books recommend is within your control: regular walks in a park or ravine, limits on your phone, more physical effort in ordinary trips, a weekly commitment with the same people, and time given to something beyond yourself. The collective steps take longer. They include measuring neighbourhoods against 3-30-300 and investing where they fall short, making walking practical in the inner suburbs, supporting the local groups that give people a place to contribute, and provincial support for primary care, housing, and transit.

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One of the largest of those decisions is now under review. In December 2021, Toronto removed most of its minimum parking requirements for new buildings. In May, City Council asked staff to study whether the requirements should return in Scarborough, and whether new condominium, townhouse and multiplex buildings could be kept out of the residential permit program. The worry behind the request applies wherever new housing goes up: if new buildings include little parking, residents’ cars will end up on neighbourhood streets.

The research of Donald Shoup, the legendary academic and economist who died in February 2025, explains both where that worry comes from and how to address it. Shoup proposed three reforms designed to work together. Toronto adopted the first in 2021, has taken partial steps toward the second, and has not tried the third. Shoup’s work predicts spillover onto residential streets when a city removes parking requirements but leaves curb parking nearly free. Toronto should finish the reform rather than reverse it.

Shoup’s three reforms

Shoup’s 2005 book, The High Cost of Free Parking, argued that free parking is never free. Its cost is built into rents, home prices, store prices and property taxes, and everyone pays it whether or not they drive. In 2025, his former student Daniel Baldwin Hess edited The Shoup Doctrine, a collection in which 37 planners, economists, journalists and parking professionals assess how his ideas have worked in practice. The book organizes his work into three reforms: remove off-street parking requirements, charge the right price for curb parking, and spend the meter revenue on the blocks that generate it.

The first reform starts with how parking requirements were set. Planners copied ratios from other cities or from surveys of peak demand at sites where parking was free, then required every new building to supply that amount. The cost of each required space is folded into the price of the building, so households without cars pay for parking they do not use. In Toronto the cost is large: a construction industry group told the city’s planning committee in 2020 that an underground space downtown can cost as much as $100,000 to build. Ending requirements lets builders supply only the parking that buyers will pay for, which keeps that cost out of homes for households that do not need it.

The second reform sets a simple target for curb parking: the lowest price that leaves one or two open spaces on each block. Prices vary by block and time of day, and the city adjusts them based on measured occupancy rather than through the budget. San Francisco tested the idea at scale through SFpark, which aimed for 60 to 80 percent occupancy. Researchers who evaluated the program estimated that it moved blocks toward that range and cut the time drivers spent searching for parking by about half. Less time searching means fewer cars circling the busiest streets.

The third reform returns the money to the street. Shoup’s best-known example is Old Pasadena, which had no parking meters until 1993. Merchants opposed meters until the city agreed to spend all the revenue on public improvements in the district. The city borrowed $5 million to rebuild sidewalks and alleys, repaid the debt from the meters, and paid for added public services on the metered blocks. Shoup credited the arrangement, which he called a parking benefit district, with a major part of the district’s revival.

The three reforms depend on each other. Shoup argued that cities impose parking requirements mainly because curb parking is underpriced: without requirements, new residents and customers would crowd onto free streets. Correct prices at the curb remove that reason. Returning the revenue to the neighbourhood gives residents and merchants a reason to accept the prices.

What Toronto has already done

In December 2021, City Council removed most minimum parking requirements for new development and introduced maximums in their place. The new car parking rules took effect in February 2022. Requirements for visitor parking and accessible parking stayed. The province later went further around transit: a 2024 change to Ontario’s Planning Act prohibits municipalities from requiring parking in major transit station areas, and that prohibition took effect in the 120 Toronto station areas the province approved in August 2025.

The city’s own parking monitoring program shows the 2021 decision mostly confirmed what was already happening. Average resident parking in new development fell from 1.08 spaces per unit in 2016 to 0.36 in 2021, before the bylaw changed. Of projects in the 2019 development pipeline, 46 percent had been approved with less parking than the old bylaw required, through variances and rezonings. Since the change, the average has held at about 0.32 spaces per unit. Staff found that the projects proposing little or no parking are mostly in walkable areas well served by transit, and that visitor parking has declined less in the inner suburbs. Developers still build parking where buyers want it. Toronto’s condominium market has also long sold parking spaces separately from units, a practice Shoup recommended, so buyers who do not need a space do not pay for one.

On the second reform, Toronto has moved in Shoup’s direction. The Toronto Parking Authority manages more than 20,000 on-street spaces, and in 2026 it raised most rates again. Most spaces went up 25 cents an hour, with larger increases on high-demand blocks downtown, in North York Centre, in Yorkville and near the University of Toronto. The authority’s report describes the goal as pricing to encourage turnover, and its review considered utilization and price elasticity. That reasoning is close to Shoup’s. The method differs: rates are set through a periodic citywide review tied to the budget, rather than adjusted block by block to hit an occupancy target.

On the third reform, Toronto has not started. Meter revenue supports the city’s budget as a whole, and none of it is set aside for the blocks where it is collected.

Why less parking does not mean more congestion

The most common objection to removing parking requirements sounds like common sense. People will still own cars, the new building has nowhere to put them, so the cars end up circling neighbourhood streets and adding to congestion. Shoup’s research answers the objection in four parts.

First, requirements do not decide whether people own cars. They decide who pays for the parking. When a space comes bundled with every unit, a household has already paid for it, so owning a car costs less at the margin and owning a second one looks reasonable. When parking is optional and priced separately, households without cars stop paying for it and households considering another car see its full cost. Over time, required parking produces more car ownership than optional parking.

Second, congestion comes from trips, and parking at the destination shapes how many trips are made by car. When every office, store and apartment is required to offer abundant parking at no visible cost, driving becomes the easiest way to make almost every trip.

Third, searching for cheap curb parking creates traffic of its own. Shoup compiled studies of congested downtowns from 1927 to 2001 and found that, on average, about 30 percent of cars in the traffic flow were cruising for a space, and the search took about eight minutes. That figure is often misquoted. The studies measured the worst streets at the worst times, and more recent research for the US Federal Highway Administration found that between 5 and 7 percent of trips in Ann Arbor and Seattle included excess searching. The same research found that in San Francisco, cruising rose sharply in some metered areas as soon as the meters switched off for the day. Free curb parking draws drivers to search for it.

Fourth, spillover onto residential streets is a curb pricing problem. In Toronto’s permit areas, a resident with no parking on their property pays $24.23 a month plus HST for an on-street permit, or about 80 cents a day. A space in an underground garage costs tens of thousands of dollars to build. When the street costs almost nothing and the garage costs a great deal, households use the street. Reinstating garage requirements would raise the price of new homes without changing that calculation for anyone who parks on the street now.

Neighbourhoods far from rapid transit, many of them in the inner suburbs, face a harder version of the problem. Where buses are slow and infrequent, many households need a car, and pricing the curb raises costs for people with few alternatives. Shoup’s reforms reduce car use at the margin. They do not build transit. Parking requirements do not build transit either, and a building approved today with a large garage will shape how its residents travel for decades, long after new transit lines open.

Pricing the curb

Toronto’s next step on meters is to set prices by measured occupancy. The Parking Authority already collects payment data through its pay stations and the Green P app. A program on the SFpark model would publish a target, such as one or two open spaces per block, measure occupancy by block and time of day, and adjust prices on a fixed schedule. Prices would rise where blocks are full and fall where spaces sit empty. Seattle already adjusts its meter rates each year, up or down, to meet occupancy targets.

The same logic applies to residential permits. Toronto already prices permits in tiers: $24.23 a month for a resident’s first vehicle with no parking on the property, $70.35 for a second vehicle, and $97.97 for a resident who has a driveway or garage and wants the street for convenience. Some permit streets also have wait lists. In Shoup’s terms, a wait list signals a price below what the space is worth. Where streets are consistently full, the city could raise the price of second-vehicle and convenience permits first, then move the base price toward the value of the space in that location.

Permit rules also vary from street to street. The same city page notes that one district alone has more than 70 combinations of permit parking hours, each developed over time with local councillors and residents in response to specific concerns. A consistent citywide method, with prices set by measured demand, would simplify that patchwork.

Council has already asked staff to study one related tool: keeping new condominium, townhouse and multiplex buildings out of the permit program. Exclusion manages the curb directly, and buyers would know before they purchase that the street is not available to them. Pricing has one advantage over exclusion: a household that values the space more than its price can still use it. Both approaches address spillover more precisely than a garage requirement, and both cost new homebuyers far less.

Putting parking revenue to work

Higher parking prices are unpopular when the money disappears into a general budget. Toronto’s recent rate increases drew the familiar objection that drivers pay more and see nothing in return. Shoup’s third reform changes what residents and merchants see. When a share of meter revenue stays on the street where it was collected, the price pays for wider sidewalks, street trees, lighting, benches, bus shelters, cleaning and snow clearing that people can point to.

Toronto has natural partners for a pilot. The city’s business improvement areas already manage local streetscape budgets, and the Toronto Association of Business Improvement Areas endorsed pricing in 2025 as a way to improve parking availability. A pilot could return a share of new revenue, above a baseline the city already collects, to one or two busy BIAs. The city keeps its existing revenue, the BIA gets a new source of funding, and both have a reason to support prices that keep spaces available. Pasadena avoided a loss to its general fund the same way: Old Pasadena’s were the first meters in the city, so returning the revenue cost the city nothing it already had.

Other cities have applied the idea to residential areas. Austin created a parking benefit district in its West Campus neighbourhood in 2005 after residents raised concerns about spillover parking from nearby commercial and educational institutions. Meter revenue there pays for sidewalks, crosswalks, transit shelters, bike lanes and street trees, while residents receive permits that exempt them from the meters. Washington, D.C. began a pilot in 2008 that directs most of the revenue to walking, cycling and transit improvements in the district.

Parking revenue can also support transit. In San Francisco, one agency runs both curb parking and the Muni transit system, and before the pandemic, parking fees and fines made up about 28 percent of its projected revenue. Toronto’s meter revenue is much smaller, and on its own it will not fund new transit lines. Directed locally, it can pay for the pieces that make existing transit easier to use: shelters, lighting and sidewalks on the way to stops, and the curb changes that let buses move through busy blocks.

Revenue return also fits how parking decisions are made in Toronto. The municipal code requires the Parking Authority to consult every ward councillor whose ward is affected by a rate change. A parking benefit district gives a councillor something to bring back to the ward along with the higher price.

What next?

The staff review council requested in May will likely reach the council elected on October 26. The evidence points to keeping the 2021 decision. Parking supply in new buildings was falling for years before the bylaw changed, developers still build parking where buyers want it, and provincial law already prevents requirements around transit stations.

The spillover concern calls for the two reforms Toronto has not finished. On meters, the Parking Authority can move from periodic citywide increases to prices set by measured occupancy, block by block. In permit areas, the city can price permits closer to the value of the space, or keep new buildings out of the program where the street is already full. On revenue, a pilot with one or two business improvement areas would test whether returning part of the money to the street changes how residents and merchants view the prices.

None of this replaces better transit, which remains the condition for lower car dependence in much of the city. Shoup’s reforms price parking at its value and spend the revenue where it is collected. Applied across Toronto, they would keep parking costs out of new homes for people who do not need a space, reduce the circling that adds to congestion on our busiest streets, and give neighbourhoods a steady source of money for sidewalks, streetscapes and better access to transit. Toronto took the first step in 2021. The second and third steps would address the concerns residents across the city are now raising.

I picked up the book for the solutions, and it has plenty. The thirty-year gap between the two documents is what I kept coming back to, because almost none of the diagnosis needed updating.

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What the ten authors agree on

The book, published by Dundurn in April, collects essays from Golden, Ken Greenberg, Enid Slack, Josh Matlow, Franz Hartmann, Matti Siemiatycki, Tim Gray, Bianca Wylie, Zahra Ebrahim, and Ilana Altman. Each takes one domain: finances, governance, housing, transportation, the environment, technology, social cohesion, public space. Greenberg’s closing chapter argues that the domains are connected and that the fixes have to be lateral rather than siloed.

The chapters agree with each other more than you would expect from ten people writing separately. Slack describes a city asked to deliver services its revenue tools were never designed to fund. Matlow describes a city whose powers are set, and changed, by a provincial government that can reduce its council mid-election. Hartmann describes a housing shortage he calls self-inflicted, produced by planning rules that favour low-density sprawl and a reliance on the private market for a product it will not build at the bottom of the price range. Siemiatycki describes a region where most people drive because past decisions left them little choice, and where transit reliability has declined while projects slipped. Gray describes the sprawl that the other chapters keep running into, measured in farmland, floodplains, and municipal budgets. Altman describes public space as underfunded relative to how much city building it now has to carry, using the waterfront, the Bentway, and the new Port Lands parks as the examples.

Most of these people have spent decades on their file. When they reach compatible conclusions independently, the diagnosis is probably right, and the interesting question becomes why so little of it has been acted on.

Sorting the list by who can act

The book’s remedies fall into two categories.

The first category needs the province. A city charter that fixes Toronto’s powers so they cannot be rewritten by a single bill. A share of sales tax or another growth-linked revenue source, so that the city stops funding provincial and federal responsibilities out of property tax. City staff put that figure at $1.1 billion a year in 2023. Region-wide road pricing. Enforceable limits on building outward. Every one of these has been recommended before, some of them by Golden’s own task force, and none has been granted. Provinces do not give up control of their largest city voluntarily, and the book does not claim otherwise. It makes the case again because the case is correct, and because the alternative is to stop making it.

The second category the city already controls. Zoning that permits a mix of housing types within the existing built area. Road space reallocated to transit and bikes. Parks and the public realm funded as infrastructure rather than as amenity. Consultation processes that produce decisions. On this category the city’s record is mixed. Council has legalized multiplexes, garden suites, and neighbourhood retail in recent years, and uptake has stayed far below the projections. The city can approve bike lanes and then spend years relitigating them ward by ward. The public realm projects Altman describes as models were mostly delivered through partnerships and waterfront agencies, not through the city’s regular capital process.

Toronto has been slow with the tools it has while waiting for tools it has not been given. The first problem is the city’s own, and it would still be there if the province granted every request in the first category tomorrow.

The friction problem

One chapter complicates the go-faster reading. Bianca Wylie, drawing on Sidewalk Toronto, argues that friction in civic processes is a feature. Slowness is where accountability lives, and a city that streamlines its way past public deliberation hands decisions to whoever can move fastest. Ebrahim’s chapter on social infrastructure makes a related point: the networks that let neighbourhoods absorb shocks are built through patient, repeated contact, not through delivery targets.

I serve on the board of a residents association, and I have watched consultation work both ways. It has caught bad proposals. It has also been the mechanism by which a small number of people delay housing that the city’s own plan calls for. The book leaves this tension open. The distinction that seems workable to me is between friction on the question of what the city should permit, which belongs in the open, and friction on each individual instance of something already permitted, which is where Toronto falls behind. Wylie’s argument is strongest on the first. The housing and transit chapters need the city to stop relitigating the second.

What next?

Greenberg ends with a call to keep showing up. The authors do not have a mechanism for making the province act. These ten authors have spent their careers on these questions, and agree on the direction and a good, detailed list of what needs to change.

Toronto votes on October 26. The provincial category is a test of which candidates will say plainly what they will ask Queen’s Park for and what they will do if the answer is no. The municipal category is a test of whether they will use the powers the city already holds. Thirty years after the first version of this checklist, the diagnosis is clear. What remains open is whether the next mayor and council will act on the parts they have control over, and what they propose to do to overcome the big provincial barrier to real progress.

He is worth listening to on this. He was parks commissioner in Bogotá, where he grew the Sunday Ciclovía from a few kilometres of closed streets into a program that now covers more than 120 kilometres every week. He founded 8 80 Cities here, has worked with more than 350 cities, and finished second in Toronto’s 2022 mayoral race. He also says he charges nothing for advice in Toronto, which makes the list a standing offer rather than a pitch.

Here are eight of his ideas worth taking seriously, and what each would take.

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1. Open the schools

Toronto has close to a thousand public schools. Every neighbourhood has at least one, usually with a gymnasium, a library, meeting rooms, a field, and a playground. The city is separately spending hundreds of millions of dollars building community centres containing roughly the same facilities, sometimes within walking distance of three schools.

Peñalosa’s proposal is to open the outdoor space, the gym, the library, and a couple of classrooms outside school hours, and let neighbourhood groups run them: farmers markets, dance classes, clubs, whatever people show up to organize. He suggests starting with twenty schools across five wards, evaluating after a year, then rolling it out.

The obstacle is jurisdictional rather than structural. The city points to the school board and the board points back. Both institutions are funded by the same taxpayers, and the buildings sit empty most evenings, every weekend, and all summer. Opening them means staffing and custodial hours, which is a real operating cost, but it avoids building a second set of the same rooms across the street.

2. Fund a few thousand small things for older adults

Roughly a quarter of Torontonians are over 60, and retired people have more free time than any other group in the city. Peñalosa’s read is that recreation programming does not reflect that at all.

His proposal is deliberately small-scale: 100 grants of $2,000 in each of the 25 wards, given to residents who want to run a group activity. Walking groups, photography, dancing, bird watching. Two conditions: it has to be a group, and preferably outdoors. Some fraction of the grants will produce nothing, which he treats as a cost of running the program rather than a reason not to.

The total is $5 million against an operating budget of $18.9 billion. The Toronto Foundation’s public health work has flagged loneliness as one of the city’s most serious problems, and the group requirement is aimed squarely at it.

3. Close the streets in front of schools

Paris closed streets in front of schools during drop-off and pickup because parents were afraid to let children walk. Within days the closures ran all day; within a week they were permanent. The trial period was a full year, with a stated commitment that if it went badly the barriers would come down, and if it went well the city would plant trees and build gardens. More than 300 Paris schools have been converted in three and a half years.

London copied it exactly and sold it differently. Parisians responded to greening; Londoners care about air quality, so London runs it as a clean air program and now has around 250 school streets.

Toronto’s version writes itself. One in four local streets here has no sidewalk at all, with the figure above 30 percent in parts of North York, so the case for safe routes to school is stronger here than in either city. The intervention is barriers and signage.

4. Run summer streets on Bloor and Yonge

Peñalosa’s open streets pitch for Toronto is Bloor from the Humber to the Don, and Yonge from the 401 to the lake, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sundays, for July and August. One year. If it fails, stop. If it works, add June.

The risk is capped by design. Toronto is not building an arena or a gymnasium. It is putting out barriers on streets it already owns and seeing whether people use them. He points to Guadalajara, where the number of local civic organizations grew from a couple to around twenty-five within three years of open streets starting, because residents concluded that things could actually change.

Toronto has tried single-day versions repeatedly. The single day is not the experiment. A season is.

5. Give the streetcars their lane

His transit argument is arithmetic. Eighty people on a streetcar occupy the road space of a few cars; eighty people in eighty cars occupy a city block. If the streetcar gets dedicated space at peak, it moves roughly 30 percent faster, which is the equivalent of buying 30 percent more streetcars without buying any.

Toronto has already run this test. King Street launched as a one-year pilot in November 2017 with a public monthly dashboard. Travel times in the worst periods fell by four to five minutes, reliability improved sharply, weekday ridership went from 72,000 to 84,000, and traffic on surrounding streets was largely unaffected. Council made it permanent in April 2019. Seven years later it is still the only corridor of its kind in the city, while the 501, 506, Finch, and Lawrence carry comparable crowds through mixed traffic.

6. Send the sidewalk budget to the streets without sidewalks

The streets without sidewalks are overwhelmingly in the inner suburbs. Wealthy neighbourhoods have both 30 km/h limits and speed humps every fifty metres, while much of the rest of the city has neither.

His fix is a budget rule rather than a target: for the next ten years, the sidewalk budget goes to streets that have none. The Missing Sidewalk Program has run on roughly $2 million a year, which is not a serious number against a $16.6 billion tax-supported budget. He would pair it with a 30 km/h limit and humps in every residential neighbourhood in the city, keeping 40 and 50 on the arterials.

7. Send the forestry budget to the neighbourhoods without trees

The same rule applied to the tree canopy. Citywide, canopy sits between 28 and 31 percent, but it exceeds 40 percent in the ravine neighbourhoods and falls below 15 percent in the lowest-income areas. For the next ten years, planting money goes to neighbourhoods under a set threshold.

The city already talks about tree equity at the neighbourhood scale in its forestry planning. The difference is that a budget rule can be audited and a target can be restated every year.

I live in a neighbourhood that already has the humps, the canopy, and the sidewalks, and I serve on the board of my residents association. Both of these rules mean my street gets nothing new for a decade. That is the correct outcome.

8. Unlock the public spaces the city has already given away

Toronto’s public tennis courts are largely permitted to community clubs, some carrying waitlists of hundreds or thousands of people that clear only when members leave or die. Peñalosa suggests permits awarded by lottery for three years instead of renewed indefinitely, and half of peak hours reserved for public play, with club members still able to play during those hours.

Allotment gardens have a waitlist measured in years, and the city has built one new block of about fifty plots in the hydro corridor. There are kilometres of hydro corridor. The pattern in both cases is a public asset allocated once, to whoever asked first, and never revisited.

Why these stall here

The pattern across all of it is that Toronto is willing to try things and unwilling to scale them. King Street succeeded on its own metrics and stayed one street. Open streets have run as single days rather than seasons. Corner stores were legalized last November in eight of twenty-five wards; sixplexes passed in nine, with the rest of the city able to opt in later. My ward is not on the corner store list, and opposition from residents associations like mine is part of why. I disagreed with that then and I still do.

Peñalosa’s advice on this is to approve the citywide plan in the first month of a term and build it over four years, because taking a network kilometre by kilometre hands every kilometre to whoever shows up to oppose it. His pilots are real, but the decision behind them is made at the scale of the city.

The trade-off deserves saying plainly. Ward-level decisions are a genuine form of local democracy, and a councillor who can tailor a rule to their residents is doing the job voters elected them to do. The cost is that citywide problems get ward-sized answers, and a policy that applies only where it was already popular changes very little. Toronto has evidence on this. Fourplexes were legal citywide from May 2023, and by November 2024 had produced 452 permits and 108 completed projects against a staff projection of 5,000 to 25,000 units by 2031. Permission underdelivers even when it is universal. Granted ward by ward, it starts from further back.

What this costs

Almost nothing on Peñalosa’s list requires a provincial decision, a new revenue tool, or a capital program. The pandemic made the same point by accident, when bike lanes approved in 2008 and 2014 were built in a matter of weeks once the decision was made.

Ask anyone seeking your vote this October whether they would apply changes like these across the whole city or leave them to each ward. That answer tells you more than which items they say they support.

Every idea on this list has been done somewhere, most of it in cities with less money than Toronto and several with worse winters. Barriers, grants, permits, scheduling, and budget rules all sit within a council’s own authority. Toronto could start on any of it without asking anyone’s permission.

At about the same time, the City announced it had secured up to $1.5 billion over ten years from the federal and provincial governments. In exchange, Toronto will cut development charges on new homes by 40 to 60 per cent for at least the next three years. The deepest cuts, 60 per cent, are proposed for family-sized homes: apartments and multiplexes with two or more bedrooms, and single and semi-detached houses. One-bedroom and bachelor units would get 40 per cent. This delivers on the framework Prime Minister Carney, Premier Ford, and Mayor Chow announced back in March, which also removes the HST from most new homes, worth roughly $100,000 on an average new condo. The province estimates the cuts alone will shave about $83,000 off the cost of a new single or semi-detached home, and the City estimates the deal could help get 44,000 new homes built. Add it up with the HST rebate, and a new home in Toronto could cost up to $200,000 less in taxes and fees.

If you’re not up to speed, development charges are one-time fees the City collects on every new home to pay for the infrastructure that serves it: roads, transit, water mains, sewers, parks, libraries, fire stations. The idea is that new homes should help fund the services their residents will use, rather than sending the whole bill to existing taxpayers.

Development charges have been growing enormously for some time. In 2018, the development charge on a new single-family home was about $41,000. Today it is $137,846. The charge on a one-bedroom apartment went from roughly $10,000 in 2014 to $52,676 today, a five-fold increase in a decade. A two-bedroom apartment that owed about $25,000 eight years ago now owes $80,690. According to CMHC, these charges and related fees make up 8 to 16 per cent of the price of a new condo. Think about what that means for a young family buying an $800,000 unit: tens of thousands of dollars in municipal fees, folded into their mortgage, paid off with interest over 25 years. How did the fees triple in eight years? Between rate reviews, the charges rise automatically with a Statistics Canada index of construction costs, so when building costs surged after the pandemic, the fees surged with them.

Development charges are a common topic of debate, and there are two frequent objections to lowering them.

The first is that developers are getting rich, so why should we cut their fees? A typical condo project targets a profit margin of about 15 per cent, earned over the five to ten years it takes to assemble land, win approvals, pre-sell, and build. Contingencies run around 5 per cent, and when costs slip, as they have relentlessly, actual returns can fall to 5 to 8 per cent, on a venture where the downside is losing everything. Construction costs in Toronto rose about 80 per cent between late 2018 and 2023. Since 2024, more than two dozen condo projects representing thousands of units have been cancelled outright. Insolvencies are spreading through the industry, mostly among smaller builders, and even the city’s most famous project, The One at Yonge and Bloor, ended up in receivership after its developer defaulted on $1.23 billion in loans. If building homes in Toronto were a licence to print money, construction would not have stopped. Yet in the first three months of this year, only 246 pre-construction condos sold in the entire city, against a ten-year quarterly average of around 4,000, and not a single new project launched. The fees never came out of developer profits, because there weren’t profits to spare. They went into prices, and when prices couldn’t rise any further, they went into projects that simply never got built.

The second objection is that new development won’t help regular people because developers only build luxury condos. I understand where this comes from, but it has the causation backwards. When every new unit owes $50,000 to $80,000 in development charges, plus HST, plus land, plus construction costs that rose 80 per cent, the only units that are financially possible to build are expensive ones. We didn’t get luxury condos because developers prefer wealthy buyers. We got them because our own rules made anything else not feasible to build. It’s also worth remembering that luxury mostly means new. The concrete apartment towers of the 1960s were marketed as modern living; today they’re some of the most affordable rentals in the city. This year’s new building is the next generation’s attainable one, but only if it gets built.

Those rules gave us a barbell. On one end, detached homes that cost well over a million dollars. On the other, tiny investor-oriented condos, the shoeboxes that made sense as speculative assets and not much sense as homes, which is why tens of thousands of them now sit unsold. What’s missing is everything in between: the duplexes, triplexes, sixplexes, and small walk-up apartments that older Toronto neighbourhoods are full of, and that a family priced out of a detached home would actually want. Planners call it the missing middle. For decades it was illegal to build on most residential land, and once the City legalized multiplexes, the fees finished the job the zoning had started. Before Toronto exempted small multiplexes last year, a three-unit building owed around $150,000 in charges before a shovel touched the ground. Above six units, the charges still snap back at roughly $50,000 per unit, which is a big part of why nobody builds the eight-plexes and small apartment buildings our best streets are made of.

This is why the June deal matters more than the headline number suggests. It is the first housing policy in years aimed squarely at the middle. The deepest cuts are weighted to family-sized units and multiplexes. Stacked with the existing exemption for buildings up to six units plus a garden suite, and the HST rebate, the arithmetic on a modest apartment building starts to work for the first time in a generation. The missing middle has been missing for reasons, and one of the biggest reasons just shrank by more than half.

The remaining obstacle isn’t economics. When a fourplex or a small apartment building is proposed on a quiet street, the objections are familiar: character, parking, shadows, traffic. Those concerns aren’t imaginary, and as I wrote earlier this year, we only move forward when we’re honest about trade-offs. The trade-off here is that the look and feel of some streets will change. But I’d ask my fellow long-established homeowners to weigh what we get in return. The chance for our kids to afford a home in the neighbourhood they grew up in, instead of moving to Barrie or Calgary. Somewhere to downsize within a few blocks of our friends when the house gets too big, instead of leaving the community entirely. Enough neighbours to keep the local shops open, the bus frequent, and the school off the closure list. Density isn’t something being done to established neighbourhoods. Done gently, it’s what keeps them alive.

None of this means the deal is free. The $1.5 billion backfilling the City’s infrastructure budget comes from federal and provincial taxpayers, so the cost of growth wasn’t eliminated, it was moved. To their credit, the funders built in accountability: the money arrives in instalments tied to construction milestones, with clawbacks if the promised homes don’t materialize. The cuts are guaranteed for three years while the City’s comprehensive review of development charges runs into 2027, and when the intergovernmental money eventually ends, the revenue has to come from somewhere, which starts a conversation nobody enjoys about Toronto’s property taxes, still among the lowest in the region. And cheaper homes are not the same as affordable housing: the province has paused inclusionary zoning until mid-2027, leaving the deal’s rental stream to carry that load. Projects that include at least 20 per cent affordable units can defer their remaining charges indefinitely, which has supported over 8,000 rental homes so far, including more than 2,000 affordable ones, with 10,000 more targeted. Real, but modest against the need.

The sharpest critique of deals like this one comes from Strong Towns, the movement founded by engineer-turned-writer Chuck Marohn that I’ll write more about soon. Strong Towns has argued for fifteen years that fees like these never truly covered the cost of growth. A development charge is a one-time payment in exchange for a permanent obligation: it pays to build the pipe, but nothing to operate it, maintain it, or replace it in fifty years when it wears out. Toronto is the proof. Over the same years that development charges tripled, the City’s backlog of infrastructure repairs kept growing anyway. It stands at more than $9 billion today and is projected to more than double to $21 billion by 2033, even under the largest ten-year capital plan in the city’s history. If those fees were covering the real costs of a growing city, where did the backlog come from? This year’s budget even deferred nearly $2 billion in parks work that was supposed to be funded by development charge revenue that isn’t arriving. The fix is to align the city’s ongoing revenues with its ongoing responsibilities, and fund the maintenance of what exists before expanding what doesn’t.

The deal funds Waterfront East Transit: a 3.8-kilometre extension of the streetcar network from Union Station along Queens Quay East, down Cherry Street, and out to Ookwemin Minising, the new island Toronto created in the Port Lands by giving the Don River back its natural mouth. The City is contributing $1 billion, with the federal and provincial governments funding the rest. When complete, the line will carry more than 50,000 trips a day and enable over 75,000 new homes. The Harbourfront streetcar opened in 1990, the extension east was environmentally approved in 2010, and the approval sat unfunded for so long it expired. Toronto has been about to build this line for sixteen years. What finally unlocked the money wasn’t a transit argument. It was a housing argument. Build the transit first, and the homes follow.

So what can you do? Later this year, City Council votes on the design and phasing plan for Waterfront East Transit, and the development charge review runs into 2027, with opportunities for public input along the way. One short email to your councillor supporting the transit line, and a submission to the review when consultation opens, matter more than you might think. And the next time a multiplex or small apartment building is proposed near you, show up, or at least write in, because the loudest voices at those meetings are rarely speaking for the people who need the homes.

The question this deal really raises isn’t who pays for the city. It’s whether Toronto keeps growing and flourishing, and that starts with fixing housing. Right now we offer a young family a choice between a detached home they can’t afford and a shoebox they don’t want, and then we wonder why they leave. The missing middle is the missing answer. For the first time in years, the economics, the zoning, and three levels of government are finally taking steps to address it. The $1.5 billion doesn’t guarantee success, but it does remove a significant barrier.

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37% of Torontonians report feeling lonely at least 3-4 days per week, according to a study from Toronto Foundation’s Vital Signs in 2023. 60% of Canadians feels disconnected from their community, according to a 2024 Angus Reid survey, with that percentage up at 68% for 18-34-year-olds. Implied in these survey results is that the 925,000 lonely people in Toronto would rather not feel that way. They want more friends, acquaintances, to know their neighbours, to feel they belong to a community. And yet, given these numbers have not been improving, they are struggling to make any of those things happen.

Making new friends as an adult is not easy. According to Rebecca Adams, three conditions are required to form a new close friendship: proximity, repeated unplanned interactions, and a setting that encourages vulnerability. To put it another way, we need to be within conversation distance of someone regularly enough to interact with them on a regular basis, and we need to feel we can share something beyond a comment about the weather, something personal. When we are children in school, we often experience these conditions. We’re around other kids our age in classrooms and schoolyard for many hours every day, we have lots of unplanned interactions with peers, and we’re more vulnerable and unfiltered by default given our age. But as adults, we are rarely in circumstances that meet all three requirements.

Jeffrey Hall’s research concludes it takes about 50 hours to move from acquaintance to casual friend, about 90 hours to form a real friendship, and more than 200 hours to upgrade it to a close friendship. Those are some serious hours. The three conditions above are required to light the spark of a potential new friendship, then the two people need to want to spend lots of time together to make it stick. Our city is not designed to make this kind of connecting happen. Our buildings, city blocks, and especially single-family home neighbourhoods are designed for efficiency, privacy, and cars rather than unplanned interactions and expressing vulnerability.

So what does it actually mean to “build community”? We can look at community in two ways: affinity-based and proximity-based. An affinity community is one that forms because of shared interests, identity, or values. Running clubs, religious institutions, university friends, sports teams, and Meetup.com groups are good examples. Proximal communities are people you encounter because of shared physical space. These are your neighbours, coffee shop regulars, parents at the playground, dog owners at a park, the people you keep running into at the grocery store. By definition, you don’t choose these people, and they tend to have much more diverse economic, social, and political backgrounds than in affinity communities. The people in your proximal community are your source of weak ties: acquaintance-level connections that generate a sense of well-being and belonging. Proximal communities force a mixing that flattens status hierarchies and creates a healthy, vital mixing of a diverse set of people.

The “third place”, a concept introduced by Ray Oldenburg in 1989, is somewhere that’s neither home (first place) nor work (second place). It could be a pub, coffee shop, library, park, or community centre. Third places allow anyone to show up, and encourage regular, low-stakes socializing. Over the past decade, third spaces have been disappearing due to zoning changes, higher land costs, more remote work, and increased social media use. A 2024 YMCA study showed that 36% of Canadians have no third place at all, while 65% wished there were more such places. Putting aside the health risks, previous traditions of going to the pub after work had huge benefits for creating a sense of belonging and generating lots of loose ties, some of which developed into friendships. Religious spaces such as churches also served this purpose, but attendance has been steadily decreasing for some time. Even Starbucks has played a role in the decline of third places as they remove seating and reduce the size of many stores, encouraging customers to pick up a coffee and leave rather than hang around for a few hours.

Given all of this, what can we do to build community, increase the number of loose ties people have, and generate more real friendships? “Hey Neighbor”, created by Graham McBain, has a 10-step community building playbook that is rapidly gaining traction and showing great results in many communities. The playbook provides a very practical, step-by-step approach to meeting your neighbours and creating recurring events to bring them together. Steps include defining a boundary of roughly 200 homes, being conspicuously friendly with more small talk, starting with a low-stakes event like coffee on a driveway, and making an effort to get to know the people who turn up. After that, setting up a simple virtual hub such as a Whatsapp group and keeping a steady rhythm of events is important. Over time, expanding the diversity of events and having more organizers will take things to the next level. McBain offers free weekly virtual classes to help you get started.

Because we’ve optimized our city for efficiency, convenience, and privacy, that’s what we got. Third places used to provide a convenient outlet for proximal communities to form, but those have been disappearing. To combat the loneliness and disconnection many Torontonians feel, it will take conscious and deliberate effort. The “Hey Neighbor” approach has proven to be effective and will work in Toronto communities. Whether you follow their template or not, becoming aware of this type of approach can help you increase your number of loose ties, perhaps lead to new friendships, and turn the concept of building community into a real thing.

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The driver and I talked about Uber, of course. How cool it was that he had a new, flexible job he could do any time he felt like it, and how excited he was that some people had started to book rides. Neither of us knew that rideshare would become much more dominant than taxis in the coming years. In 2024, there were 212,000 rideshare trips in Toronto completed by over 26,000 Uber or Lyft vehicles. Compare that to less than 7,000 taxis still on the road, down by half in eight years. The numbers tell us what anyone who has taken an Uber knows: rideshare is a far superior experience to a traditional taxi. Easier to book and track, seamless payment of the amount quoted upfront, no need to provide a destination or directions, and a rating system to incentivize good service. The few times I’ve taken a taxi in the past decade have reminded me how much worse that experience is.

While this level of mobility convenience is fantastic and something we now take for granted, another big change is coming. As you may have heard, autonomous taxis are rolling out at scale across the United States, and it’s only a matter of time until they arrive in Canada. Waymo has already begun lobbying the City of Toronto. While there is no way to predict exactly when autonomous taxis will begin service in our city, my guess is probably less than five years, and perhaps less than three. Transport Canada does not yet allow fully autonomous vehicles, but that will change. In the US, Waymo is operating in six cities and completing more than a half-million trips per week with more than 2,500 vehicles. And they’re growing fast, expecting to get to one million rides per week by the end of this year. That’s a lot of autonomous rides, which gives us a pretty good sense of what to expect once those rides begin and scale here.

There are many pros and cons to this new paradigm. The most significant pro is safety. Humans are terrible drivers, evidenced by the 1M people killed globally on the roadways every year, not to mention the many more injuries and even more minor collisions and near-misses. Autonomous vehicles never get distracted or tired, and do not make the kind of mistakes humans do. They are not perfect, but data shows they are much safer. After all, 94% of crashes caused by humans are due to errors such as the driver being drunk, distracted, or speeding. Putting the statistics aside, getting into an autonomous taxi will feel safer because every car will drive the same way rather than the current randomness of what kind of driver you will get.

The next most significant benefit to autonomous taxis is the one thing that did not change when we went from taxis to Ubers: having a stranger in the car. It turns out that mostly everyone greatly prefers not having to interact with, or be in the presence of someone they don’t know while being transported from one place to another. This is one of the reasons so many people choose to drive themselves around rather than take an Uber, let alone public transit. Removing the driver from the equation while still offering the convenience of a taxi is a big deal, as it provides most of the benefits of driving your own vehicle while not actually having to do the driving, deal with parking, refuelling, or maintenance. Riders in San Francisco are choosing to pay 30-40% more than a human-driven Uber just to be in a vehicle with no driver.

There are other benefits, but these are the two big ones, so let’s get to the most significant con: traffic congestion. Just as the shift from taxis to rideshare shifted people from transit to Ubers and Lyfts, even more people are likely to choose an autonomous taxi instead of taking the TTC. Close to half of current rideshare users said they would take transit if rideshare wasn’t available. While not all Torontonians can afford rideshare over transit all the time, there are a significant number of transit riders who have the means to make that shift more often, and likely will. This will not only impact farebox revenue for the TTC, making it more difficult to maintain or expand service, but will also add more cars to our already congested roads. Curbside congestion is also an issue, as autonomous taxis stop for pick-ups and drop-offs, blocking live traffic lanes more of the time. That said, overly congested roads act as a disincentive for people to choose car-based travel of any kind, especially when a viable alternative like transit or cycling exists. The key is to continue to invest in building and maintaining these travel modes, so there are convenient, safe, and reliable options beyond hailing a Waymo.

The city could also tax autonomous taxis to mitigate the congestion issue. The fee per kilometre could be higher when no passenger is present, encouraging the vehicles to operate as efficiently as possible. It’s also possible to mandate or incentivize some degree of integration between autonomous taxis and the public transit system. For example, these taxis could transport transit passengers to their nearest station in areas where density doesn’t justify fixed-route buses.

Winter weather is not something Waymo or its competitors have much experience with yet, as most of the initial cities they’ve deployed in are warm ones. While there will be issues to address, Waymo has the advantage of multiple types of sensors rather than only cameras. Tesla, on the other hand, is camera-only, which does not work very well in a snowstorm. In the long term, our climate will not be a barrier to this service.

Regardless of the potential downsides, autonomous taxis are coming to Toronto, it’s just a question of when. Now is the time to determine the optimal way to adopt this new technology so it complements the transportation system and leads to a better mobility experience for everyone.

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The incentives of these existing home owners are at odds with what is necessary for Toronto to continue to grow in a healthy, sustainable way. A Toronto with streets that are vibrant and walkable, with a mix of retail, residential, and welcoming public spaces. With a mix of types and sizes of homes, woven into all neighbourhoods, rather than the majority of the city having nothing but detached, single-family homes. Where those who cannot afford such a home are not relegated to a tiny condo unit or to a more suitable home far outside the city limits.

Strong Towns calls this the “next increment of development”. Healthy neighbourhoods evolve gradually rather than being built once and never changed. In my own neighbourhood in uptown Toronto, there has indeed been incremental development over the years. Originally, these streets were lined with small bungalows, most of which have now been replaced with much larger two and three-storey homes. Some of the original bungalows remain, fewer every year. Owners of these homes wanted more space, and could afford to build it. This example of the next increment of development happened because it was aligned with the interests of existing home owners. The next increment after this one, building a variety of types and sizes of homes, will benefit future residents of these neighbourhoods, while existing residents perceive these changes as net-negative.

Existing home owners have the loudest and strongest voice at the table where new development is approved or denied. In Scarborough, for example, the Committee of Adjustment recently blocked the development of a six-storey building with eight three-bedroom units, citing neighbourhood character. This committee is comprised of 35 volunteer residents. What are they missing? Are they right that allowing this kind of development in their neighbourhood only benefits those who would move in, while being a very bad thing for existing residents?

This is at the core of the issue. Building more density and variety of homes into neighbourhoods benefits everyone, including long-term residents.

More neighbours means more customers for local businesses. The most popular neighbourhoods have a local cafe to walk to in the morning, a dry cleaner down the street, and a few lovely locally-owned restaurants nearby. Enough housing density is required to drive enough business to keep these around, and to encourage new small, local retail and dining options to open up. Some of Toronto’s most desirable areas, such as the Annex, Roncesvalles, and the Danforth are popular because of local, walkable retail and dining, supported by the housing density in these communities. More walkable destinations also increases the feeling of vibrancy in a neighbourhood.

Another significant benefit to more housing density is financial sustainability. Low-density single-family homes do not generate enough tax revenue to support the infrastructure and services that a thriving, vibrant city requires. Strong Towns has studied this extensively, and the data is clear. We need to budget a significant amount of money every year just to prevent Toronto from falling apart, let alone build new infrastructure like transit, libraries, community centres, and parks. Shifting the majority of our neighbourhoods from low to medium density will grow the tax base and put the city on much more solid financial ground.

Finally, a neighbourhood with a mix of types and sizes of homes will open up more options for existing residents in the future. As they grow older, their children move out, and they require less space, they can move into a smaller unit while continuing to live in the same community. Or perhaps as those children move out, they may choose to live nearby, renting a unit in a low-rise apartment building or in a garden suite.

Accepting trade-offs is how we move forward. I understand that for someone who’s owned a detached, single-family home for decades, a sixplex or a low-rise apartment seems like nothing but trouble. While there will be some downsides, there are also many benefits to accepting the missing middle into your community. Neighbourhood character is not static; for Toronto to continue to grow and evolve in a strong, healthy way, that character must evolve too.

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That said, I’m not suggesting everyone should give up their cars. Toronto will continue to benefit from the expanding transit network, and perhaps one day will be able to continue building bike lanes so we have a contiguous network. At the same time, motor vehicles will continue to be the dominant mode of transportation in the city, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Electric and autonomous vehicles will change the dynamics of driving in a yet-to-be-determined way, but driving will always remain a very convenient, efficient, and preferred mode of getting around.

Vehicles have been growing over the years. SUVs outnumber sedans, and many people drive pickup trucks even though they never haul anything that requires one. Vehicle weight has increased by 30% since 1981 and vehicle size by 26% since 1990. Even pickup trucks have gotten larger, increasing by 1,000lbs since 1975. In 2010, SUVs were 17% of global car sales, now they are 58% in many cities. You get the picture.

Why do we drive larger vehicles? Some people just prefer it, but it’s important to note that there are a lot of incentives for auto manufacturers to sell more SUVs and pickup trucks and less smaller sedans. Profit margins are much higher for SUVs compared to sedans, and they are often subject to fewer environmental regulations. Everyone has a right to buy and drive whatever vehicle they’d like, but people who prefer to drive a smaller sedan have fewer options, and are bombarded with marketing telling them that SUVs are safer, more fun, and just better.

On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, we have mini cars. There are many types of very small vehicles: Kei Cars in Japan (not to be confused with K-cars from the 80s), quadricycles in Europe, and golf carts being driving in some American cities nowhere near a golf course. None of these are permitted on the streets of Toronto.

You may be surprised to know that in Ontario, there is a 10-year pilot going on for low speed vehicles (LSV). These LSVs are electric, have four wheels, travel up to
40 km/h, and cost $10-15k. You need a driver’s license and insurance to drive one, and they are are only permitted on streets with a speed limit of 50 km/h or less. While the provincial pilot started in 2017, the City of Toronto voted to opt-in to this pilot in 2024.

They look something like this:

So yes, for almost two years you could have been zipping around the city in a little golf cart-like vehicle. What’s stopping you? Safety? Yes, that’s an issue. Here’s the conundrum: SUVs are indeed safer for their drivers, but are much more dangerous for everyone else on the roadways, especially those on bicycles or on foot. Mini cars such as LSVs stand no chance in a collision with an SUV, but if you happened to bump into a pedestrian they would almost certainly be fine. This isn’t a convincing argument to drive an LSV for your own safety, but does highlight the net-negative safety impact of more people driving larger vehicles. Winter is also not so great for LSVs, and we all know how long that lasts. That said, it’s likely more pleasant for most people to drive an LSV in winter compared to riding a bicycle.

These are real and valid concerns, and there is no argument to replace the majority of vehicles with LSVs. But they are another option to add to our transportation ecosystem. LSVs could be used in residential neighbourhoods to pick up groceries or access transit when it’s too far to walk. They could provide mobility to seniors or those with accessibility challenges. Amazon deliveries could be made by LSV, reducing the amount of space they occupy while making many stops in a residential neighbourhood. City fleets could also benefit from LSVs, as could students getting to school where transit and cycling is not so appealing.

In most cases, a regular-sized car, transit, a bicycle, or your own two feet are your best choice when heading out the door. But in some cases, an LSV may be just the right thing to meet your needs. Some American cities have built dedicated golf cart lanes that have spurred significant adoption. Given our struggle to build bike lanes in Toronto, doing the same is unlikely, but that doesn’t mean LSVs have no place. Limited, yes, but the more mode choices we have, the better chance to tone down motonormativity just enough to improve our neighbourhoods, our communities, and our city.

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Even more miraculous is that reviews of the line to-date have been quite positive. In contrast to the very slow Line 6 Finch, which has infamously been outpaced by an intrepid winter runner, Line 5 is zipping along at up to 60 km/h thanks to the majority of it being tunnelled underground, avoiding pesky traffic lights and all those left-turning vehicles. Once traffic signal priority comes online and the maximum speed is increased to 80 km/h, things should improve even further, and Line 5 may live up to being called rapid transit.

Putting aside the extreme delays and budget overrun, the opening of this line is extremely good news for Toronto in many ways. 25 new stations and 19km across the middle of the city should draw plenty of new transit riders who would otherwise drive, resulting in less traffic congestion. All of the previous Eglinton bus riders should now have a more comfortable, reliable, and quick commute. And with a Line 5 western extension already in the works, not to mention the Ontario line with 15 stations and almost 16km of its own, Toronto will finally have a more comprehensive rapid transit network.

At the same time, one of the big missed opportunities here was building lots of housing units right above and around the new stations. This was considered early in the project, but didn’t make it into the final design. While the stations are visually appealing and well-functioning, there is a single-storey glass pavilion on top of each one where a tower full of housing should be. Visit other cities such as Hong Kong and you’ll see just that: housing and commercial developments on top of half of the system’s 87 stations. This generates more than half of the Hong Kong transit system’s revenue, which is significant, and funds further transit expansion. While Toronto doesn’t need the density of Hong Kong, this is still a missed opportunity for more housing that’s directly connected to transit. This would also generate significant new revenue to fund more new transit, not to mention paying down the massive maintenance and repair backlog.

Even if the glass pavilion design makes it unlikely housing could be built on top of the stations, there remains an opportunity to build more density around the stations. So far this is happening very unevenly, with enormous intensification around Yonge, Mount Pleasant, and in Leaside, but very little anywhere else. Improving policies around mixed-use zoning and reducing red tape to build more density and retail around more of the stations will mean the new line doesn’t just transport people through these neighbourhoods. More stops can become attractive destinations to live, eat, and spend time, resulting in a more vibrant midtown socially and economically. This is especially important for communities like Little Jamaica, where businesses endured years of construction disruption, many of which disappeared, and could benefit from the kind of thoughtful development that brings foot traffic back.

As construction is already underway on the Ontario line and other existing line extensions, now is the time to incorporate plans for more housing and retail around all the new stations that will come online. At the same time, it’s not too late to transform Line 5 into a true transit corridor rather than a faster version of the old buses. If this is done well, with a mix of unit types and sizes, mixed with various kinds of retail, the impact will be significant. Not only will this improve housing affordability, it will also motivate even more drivers to shift to transit, further reducing traffic congestion. Addressing the two most significant issues in our city at the same time is a rare opportunity, and one that we should focus on next.

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Improving transit reliability, speed, and safety is very important, and will result in more people choosing transit over driving. More transit signal priority, better line management, and funding state of good repair will get us there. And with the Eglinton Crosstown (line 5) finally almost ready to open, even more commuters will live near an (eventually) rapid transit line. The Ontario Line is several years out, but will drive even more transit use, further reducing the quantity of cars clogging up the roads. All good stuff.

That said, even these transit improvements and expansion will not divert enough car trips to eliminate congestion. It will improve, yes, but we need more. One option is to build even more transit lines, but these are very expensive, and getting even more expensive over time. Line 6 cost $2.6B, line 5 is $13B and counting, and the Ontario line is projected at $27B. That’s a lot of billions. Given the state of our municipal budget, and how we should be spending more of that maintaining what we’ve already built (see below), it would be very difficult to fund many more rapid transit lines anytime soon.

While we continue to optimize every last bit of space we have to jam as many cars, busses, LRTs, and bikes through the city, what if we could use the space above the roads? No, not flying cars, although those may be coming too. Gondolas. Yes, gondolas. Stay with me.

Paris just opened Europe’s longest urban gondola in December. Riders coast over the roads for 17 minutes, a trip that takes 40 minutes by bus. 11,000 people are expected to ride it every day, and it’s actually France’s seventh urban gondola, so this seems to be working. This new gondola line cost $138M euros, or about $200M CAD to build. No billions here.

In Medellin, there are 6 gondola lines that carry 220,000 passengers per day. Some of these lines traverse terrain unsuitable for vehicles, and all of them transport people much more quickly than if they took the bus. 2.5-hour commutes have been reduced to minutes. Many of them connect to tram lines where passengers continue their journeys. In La Paz, Bolivia, up to 300,000 people per day ride one of 11 gondola lines. Many trips of over one hour now take 10-15 minutes.

Gondolas are often chosen to replace buses when there are mountains, ravines, or other rough terrain that makes ground transportation more difficult and expensive. But they can be deployed anywhere. Cost-wise, gondolas cost anywhere between $5 and $50M per kilometre depending on the terrain and technology (more on that next), while LRTs are $200M to $700M per kilometre, and subways are $800M to $1B+. For comparison, a typical urban freeway costs $45M to $90M per kilometre. In other words, gondolas are an order of magnitude less expensive to build than rapid transit. The entire Paris gondola system cost roughly 1% of the Ontario Line budget.

I’m not suggesting gondolas can replace rapid transit, or that they should be considered instead of busses in all cases. But given their success in other parts of the world, and with their attractive price point, they could be a viable, innovative solution that makes a lot of sense in some areas.

Where, you might ask? How about the Toronto Islands. While I like a good ferry ride as much as anyone, wouldn’t it be lovely to coast over the lake in a gondola, sipping a beer while watching the islands come into view? They would have to glide high enough to avoid the ships and low enough not to collide with the planes headed to Billy Bishop, but that seems doable.

The Don Valley corridor would also be a great place to build a gondola. Roads and valleys don’t work well together, and cutting through (over) the valley would connect the Danforth to downtown, not to mention the Evergreen Brick Works, a fantastic public space which is currently very difficult to get to unless you’re driving. There are ravines in Scarborough that could also be considered as viable gondola routes.

Traditional gondolas are have fixed points of origin and destination, with some stations in between. But new technology, such as Whoosh (love the name) by Swyft Cities, allows for autonomous pods that travel independently on a network of cables and rails. Instead of running on a fixed route, these gondola pods can make turns, routing themselves to where you want to go. You summon a gondola pod with your phone as you would an Uber, it picks you up at a nearby stations, and takes you to any other station on the line. Now we’re talking.

Let’s not get too distracted by newfangled, futuristic solutions like on-demand, autonomous gondolas. It’s still vital that we invest in not only building transit, but operating it in an efficient, fast, and reliable way. At the same time, outside-the-box solutions like gondolas could be an innovative way to alleviate congestion in specific areas, and elevate our transportation experience in more ways than one.

On a recent Saturday morning, I left my house on foot, walked 12 minutes to the nearest grocery store, listening to a podcast along the way. My noise cancelling earbuds prevented me from hearing if any of the handful of people I walked by said hello, although they probably didn’t since most were also broadcasting something into their ears. Upon arriving at the store, I found the few items I was looking for, again not interacting with anyone I passed, and headed to the checkout. As is common these days, I was encouraged to use the automated self-checkout, as there were three of these and only one human cashier. No human interaction necessary to pay for my purchase and head out. Next, I took the stairs down to the subway and just caught the train before the doors closed. Whether or not my fellow passengers were wearing earbuds, everyone was doing the typical big-city transit trick of strategically avoiding eye contact all all costs. Stare at the advertisements, out the window, or into space, but most definitely not directly at anyone else. So again, no interaction.

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These scenes are common and continuous in our city. Technology is very convenient but removes many opportunities we used to have for social interaction, even in passing. Single-use zoning, where there is separation between where we live, work, and shop also makes it less likely people in the same neighbourhood will interact since there are fewer things to do together near home. Car dependency removes even further points of interaction, especially when people enter a car parked in a garage without ever going outside. “Third places”, such as cafes can help, but not if you place your order on your phone in advance and scroll on that phone while enjoying your beverage.

According to recent data from the Toronto Foundation, we know that 37% of Torontonians describe themselves as feeling lonely most of the week, and that increases to 44% for young adults. These numbers are 9 percentage points higher than the national Canadian average. More than half of people who had had a rich friend network in 2013 no longer do. Around 2012, when smartphone use surpassed 50% and social networks like Instagram and Snapchat launched, loneliness became more common, especially among younger people. And of course the pandemic with its lock-downs also had a major impact. So while loneliness may not be a new issue, it is certainly an issue for many people in our city today, and for different reasons than in the past. Technology and urban design are significant barriers to improving this situation.

Social connection requires skills that atrophy if they aren’t used regularly. Put another way, if you haven’t said hello to a neighbour or chit-chatted with a cashier for a while, it will be harder to do that again. Awkwardness, social anxiety, and change of habit make it less likely social interactions will occur, even when they’re not blocked by technology or urban design. This means that this problem is self-reinforcing; it gets more and more difficult to interact with others the less you do it.

At the same time, we know that there are significant benefits to having “weak ties”, where you’re not necessarily friends with someone, but you interact with them on a somewhat regular basis. Many studies have shown that mood improves when we interact with more and different types of people. For example, a 2024 study found that knowing as few as six neighbours significantly reduced loneliness and improved well-being. Another study done in 2022 correlated happiness with interacting with different types of people (family, friends, coworkers, strangers), so variety matters. Yet another study by Epley & Schroeder in 2014 found that commuters who talked to strangers said they had significantly better commutes, but interestingly they predicted they wouldn’t. A smile and you’ll feel like smiling situation.

These weak connections are also the flywheel for new friendships. It’s not that every casual acquaintance needs to turn into a friendship, but some may. Given how hard it tends to be for adults to make friends, this is an important benefit of having more weak ties. Knowing a wider variety of people also increases the chances you’ll find out about new job opportunities, social events, hobbies, cultural events, and more.

So what can we do about this? Some of the solutions are structural. There’s a recent trend of some retail stores going back to human cashiers to reduce shoplifting. While that’s a different reason for this change, it does put the human-to-human connection opportunity back into your grocery run. Streets that are designed for more than just cars, with benches, wider sidewalks, and greenery can help encourage socializing. Zoning changes that allow retail stores in residential neighbourhoods can result in neighbours meeting each other more often.

Other solutions are personal. Armed with the knowledge that more weak ties is a good thing, each of us can make an effort to increase our frequency of communication with others. Recently, published a piece on talking and listening to strangers with helpful suggestions. Another recent piece about replacing the self-checkout with small talk is also relevant. For a deeper dive, check out the book We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships, by Kat Vellos.

I’m sure none of us want Toronto to be known as the loneliest city in Canada. While this is a complex issue with many interrelated causes, it is well worth addressing. Over-optimizing for convenience and efficiency with technology and urban design has had unintended consequences. We can dial that back just enough to give ourselves the opportunity to learn how to talk to each other once again.

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The backlog of of maintenance and repair work grows every year, and is projected to reach $24.7 billion by 2035. This includes $214 million for community centres, $76 million for libraries, and a whopping $2.34 billion for Toronto community housing. Then we have transit, where the TTC’s maintenance backlog is expected to reach $6.1 billion.

What is going on here? Why can’t a growing, vibrant city with a multi-billion dollar annual budget keep everything working well and looking good? Instead of allocating funds to maintain and repair existing infrastructure, we budget to build new things. In the hot-off-the-presses 2026 budget, 53% of the $63.1 billion capital budget is allocated to “state of good repair”. With nearly half of this budget going towards new or improved infrastructure, it’s no wonder the maintenance backlog is growing so fast.

Failing to budget enough to maintain the infrastructure we already have occurs in many cities, not just Toronto. It’s an issue the folks at Strong Towns focus on extensively. They describe it as a Ponzi scheme: cities budget to build new things because they receive immediate revenue from doing so, in the form of development charges, fees, and other taxes. But they do not take into account the ongoing cost of maintaining this infrastructure—that’s a problem for the future. But when that future day comes, the same pattern repeats itself, new things are once again funded while the maintenance backlog grows even further.

That’s exactly what’s happening in Toronto. Until you understand this, it’s difficult to see the pattern. Many of the new and improved items in the budget sound great in isolation, and are difficult to argue against. But as soon as you realize that every new thing we build will not be properly maintained, it becomes clear why the city is struggling with so many issues today, and why those issues will keep getting worse. These maintenance costs are hidden at first because new things don’t need to be repaired right away. The biggest maintenance bills come due 20-30 years later.

To improve this situation, we must increase the percentage of the budget for maintenance and repairs to a point where the backlog begins to shrink. Because of how long this problem has been going on, it will take time for things to turn around, but at least we’ll be headed in the right direction. This is a matter of discipline and responsibility. Just like in your personal budget where you put off a big, new purchase to pay for home repairs, we must defer building new things until we can afford to maintain what we already have.

The City is inviting residents to provide input on the proposed 2026 budget. You can register to speak to the budget committee on January 20 and 21, and submit feedback online.

The longer we defer paying for maintenance and repairs, the worse things will get. Just like when you delay fixing a leak in your roof where it ends up costing much more once you have water damage and the whole things needs replacement instead of a less expensive patch. Similarly, the longer we wait, the more it will cost, and we will end up having to replace rather than repair things like pools, community housing, and transit infrastructure. In the meantime, the experience of living in the cities gets worse, as park get shabbier, sidewalks deteriorate, and buildings feel decrepit.

As the saying goes, the best time to have addressed this was many years ago, but the next best time is now.

Toronto has clearly changed a lot since then. Serious population growth and a massive increase in the cost of housing has resulted in extreme traffic congestion, a housing affordability crisis, and a general sense of frustration and cynicism about our city. To truly improve things and take Toronto to the next level, we need to make trade-offs. The things that worked for that Toronto, free parking, single-family neighbourhoods, everyone driving, made sense when there were half as many of us. But we’ve been trying to hold onto all of them while the city doubled in size. That’s why we’re stuck. We keep wanting the benefits of growth without giving anything up.

Most of the city is still comprised of single-family homes with no retail within walking distance. To increase housing supply, we need more density, which means duplexes, triplexes, and low-rise apartments. This will also increase the variety of types of units, with starter homes available to those just getting started. Retail within residential areas means people can walk instead of driving more of the time, reducing congestion. The trade-off is that the character of neighbourhoods will change.

Roadways are full of cars, and there’s no space to add more lanes. While driving from one place to another is what most people prefer, when everyone drives, the congestion has very negative impacts on productivity, the economy, and our sanity. Reliable, efficient, safe, and pleasant transit, cycling, and walking give people viable alternatives to driving. Once enough people make use of these modes, congestion decreases. The trade-off is giving up vehicle lanes for bike lanes and giving transit signal priority over passenger vehicles.

Less congestion means reallocating lanes to bikes and transit. Affordable housing means more density. Better transit means giving it green lights ahead of cars. Accepting these trade-offs can be difficult because we are used to things working a certain way, and change is hard. The good news is, once we stop pretending we can keep things as they were, the sooner we can resolve these major issues and see Toronto thrive again. Toronto isn’t stuck because these problems are unsolvable, it’s stuck because we won’t choose.

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The City of Toronto now has its first ever Chief Congestion Officer. Andrew Posluns brings more than 25 years of public sector leadership experience to the role, including overseeing the GO expansion strategy at Metrolinx, and leading the transportation plan for the 2015 Pan Am/Parapan Am Games. Lots of relevant experience coordinating and leading transportation projects, which will certainly come in handy in this new, challenging role.

What motivated the city to create this role, originally dubbed the “traffic czar”, is easy to understand if you’ve spent any time trying to move about Toronto: it takes a lot longer than we all would like. Why? The roads are over capacity. While it really does come down to geometry (not enough space for all those cars), there is no simple solution to congestion.

Many well-informed people, such as (who publishes the excellent ), have pointed out that there is only so much a traffic czar can do, as traffic congestion is not something that can be “solved”. This is true in the sense that there is no magical combination of actions that will make congestion disappear. So it’s important that the objectives of the Chief Congestion Officer are framed correctly. Rather than “eliminate congestion”, I suggest it should be to “move the most people most efficiently”. This shift the focus from cramming as many cars as possible through the streets to making driving, transit, cycling, and walking all work better together. To design a complete transportation system that gives people the maximum number of options, and to make those options reliable, fast, safe, and pleasant.

One reason it’s been so difficult to make progress with Toronto transportation is that there are many players with no single person responsible for the outcomes. This point is very well made in on the podcast (episode 12). Transportation Services, the TTC, Metrolinx, Engineering & Construction, and City Planning are all involved in decisions that impact mobility. Each of these groups is doing their best within their own domains, but nobody is looking at the whole picture, at coordinating decisions across the board to make transportation more efficient. While the Chief Congestion Officer role does not appear to have that level of authority as it’s been designed, there is a huge opportunity to aim for that kind of across-the-board ownership of measurable outcomes.

What can we, the citizens of Toronto and beleaguered users of the transportation system do to help make our new Chief Congestion Officer more successful, and thereby improve our own experience getting from A to B? We should advocate for three things.

While there is only so much that can be done to improve congestion without reducing the number of vehicles on the roadways, smarter traffic signals will help. In his memo, Kurtis McBride, CEO of Canadian intelligent mobility firm Miovision, claims that upgrading all 2,500 Toronto intersections will cost $125M and reduce travel times by up to 20%. This is worth doing, especially considering that congestion costs the GTHA $44.7B annually.

Shifting trips from cars to transit and cycling will have the greatest impact on moving more people more efficiently.

We should advocate for reliable, fast, safe, and pleasant transit that just works. When it does, more people will choose transit over driving. The extremely slow average speed of the new line 6 LRT has everyone from the Premier to the Mayor on down focused on improving transit speed. But this is not a new problem, and not unique to line 6. Streetcars and buses have been plagued with reliability, speed, and bunching issues for decades. The good news is that there are many practical, immediate steps that will improve this that we can take directly from other cities who have already solved these problems. Giving transit signal priority (green lights) and better management of the spacing of the vehicles, for example. In cities like Zurich, trams get automatic priority at every intersection. In Toronto, streetcars wait at red lights while cars make left turns. The Chief Congestion Officer is the right person to finally make these changes happen.

Finally, we should advocate for a complete bike lane network. Today, there are fragments of bike lanes all over the city. While the kilometres of lanes has grown substantially, many more people will choose to cycle if they can always get from origin to destination more safely. As describes in his memo, we could complete the active transportation network in two years. And a well-designed network would carefully consider where to put the bike lanes, staying off of major roads whenever possible so they can be dedicated to vehicles. Most important is that the lanes form a contiguous network, not that they are on every road.

Imagine a Toronto where the streetcar arrives when the app says it will. Where you can cycle from the Danforth to the Waterfront without your route disappearing mid-trip. Where traffic lights respond to what’s actually happening on the street, not a static timing plan. That Toronto is possible. It’s what other cities have already built. Andrew Posluns now has the job of getting us there. We should hold him to it, while giving him the support and authority he’ll need to succeed.

Welcome to Rethink Toronto, the newsletter formerly known as Atom & Byte. As we head into 2026, and after six months of getting my feet wet in the exciting world of Substack authorship, I’ve decided to rebrand and relaunch this fledgling publication to focus more tightly on improving the city I love.

Toronto has changed and grown substantially over the 48 years I’ve lived here. While there have been many improvements, we’re also facing many challenges. Affordability, housing, transportation, and public safety top most people’s lists.

We’re spending more on just about everything, including housing. While the “drive until you qualify [for a mortgage]” method of buying a house has resulted in a huge number of people leaving the city, others are left with a choice between very expensive single-family homes and shoeboxes in the sky. Zoning is changing to try to address this, but there are many other obstacles to truly building out the missing middle. Renters fare no better, as it’s been decades since purpose-built rental apartment buildings were constructed, leaving many of the same shoebox condos as their only option.

If there’s one thing all Torontonians agree about, it’s that it takes too long to get anywhere these days. Traffic congestion is no longer a rush-hour phenomenon, it persists at all hours of the day and night. And while new rapid transit lines are opening for the first time in almost 20 years, they are all incredibly over budget, behind schedule, and not so rapid once they open. Cycling has gained in popularity, with lots of bike lanes being installed and rapid growth of the bike share network. But now the province has restricted building any new bike lanes that remove vehicle lanes, a classic case of “bikelash”.

Toronto is also struggling to find its identity. This is not new; in the past, we often defined ourselves by not being American, or by being somewhere in between American and European. Chicago but run by the Swiss, others called us. As Toronto has grown and developed, these identities no longer seem adequate. Who are we and what are we to be known for? A city of neighbourhoods? Of parks? Ravines? Yes, of course we are, but that’s nowhere near the whole story. That story is yet to be fully determined. We have work to do.

Loneliness is also a major issue for many people in this city. Young to old, people are feeling isolated and disconnected from each other. Social media and smartphones play a role in this, but we are also missing a sense of community in our neighbourhoods. We are lacking the loose ties between neighbours who say hello to each other in passing, who watch out for each other, who are the “eyes on the street” that Jane Jacobs so wisely described as the foundation for a vibrant, safe, welcoming city. This is made worse by zoning that prohibits mixed-use in our neighbourhoods: residential, retail, commercial, and cultural coming together to create places people can not only live, but also shop, play, and spend time together. To get to know each other.

So yes, we have many challenges. But the purpose of Rethink Toronto is not to dwell or ruminate in the negative, not to complain or cast blame. As an unwavering and determined optimist, that is not my way. Instead, this newsletter will focus on ambitious yet practical ideas for a better city, and concrete steps we can all take to make those ideas become reality.

These ideas will come from a wide variety of sources. I consume a huge amount of content from experts, urbanists, policy makers, futurists, and planners, and we really do have a ton of brainpower focused on improving Toronto. However, the vast majority of people in the city aren’t aware of all these great ideas; after all, many of these publications are aimed at other experts or urbanists, not everyday city residents. So I will bring these ideas to you with a clear, easy-to-understand way, with my own analysis, commentary, and input on how to work together to truly make things better.

We have everything we need to take Toronto to the next level, to take the next step towards becoming a truly great city that works for everyone. It won’t be easy, but it starts with a clear understanding of how things work, or don’t work, and what we can do to get from where we are today to a better future.

Stay tuned for regular posts coming your way soon. And if you have any ideas of your own, or requests for a particular challenge or frustration in the city you’d like me to focus on, hit reply and let me know.

Let’s Rethink Toronto together and create a city we’re all proud of.

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Over the past decade, there has been an increased focus by city governments to improve roadway safety. Vision Zero programs have sprung up in virtually all cities, with the aspiration of eliminating deaths and serious injuries. To attempts to achieve this, cities have been trying many things, such as:

• Reducing speed limits to as low as 30 km/h

• Installing automated speed enforcement cameras to fine drivers exceeding the limit

• Adding more signalized intersections

• Installing red-light cameras to fine drivers running reds

• Installing speed humps, medians, raised crosswalks, and bump-our corners to help pedestrians cross more safely

• Building more protected bike lanes so cyclists don’t have to ride in mixed traffic

• Changing signal phasing so pedestrians get a head start before cars

While road user safety has improved thanks to these changes, they also have trade-offs. Travel times have increased, congestion is worse, drivers are frustrated, and the backlash against these measures is real. In Toronto, the speed enforcement cameras were recently deactivated by order of the Premier, who has also banned building new bike lanes that remove vehicle lanes without his explicit permission.

On top of that, there is the consideration of “safetyism”. By implementing policies and infrastructure changes to improve safety, we are shifting responsibility away from individuals and towards government. Individuals feel less accountable for behaving in a safe and responsible way as more and more control over their behaviour is exerted. While this control may indeed improve safety, it has serious and deeper consequences that degrade the overall quality of our communities.

Even the best and least distracted humans are not safe enough drivers to achieve Vision Zero. Freedom is also important to people, and they tend not to like being restricted and constrained while driving around. All of the above policies and roadway infrastructure changes are attempts to grapple with the opposing forces of human performance, preference, and freedom versus safety. The trade-offs are significant.

Autonomous vehicles overcome the whole conundrum. They drive much more safely, even at higher speeds and with fewer safety features such as speed humps or protected bike lanes. If pedestrians or cyclists behave erratically, a self-driving vehicle is very unlikely to injure them since it can react much more quickly than a human driver. With only self-driving vehicles on the road, speed limits could be increased significantly. Traffic congestion is also made significantly worse by human drivers’ tendency to space out vehicles inefficiently. They tend to speed up as much as possible between red lights, causing bunching and not driving in sync with the signal timing plan. Autonomous vehicles don’t have this problem, and would minimize overall travel time rather than driving as fast as possible between red lights.

As I wrote previously, safer streets are an important part building better communities, as they encourage people to come out of their houses, walk, cycle, and interact with each other. Streets become animated and vibrant rather than sterile highways. Achieving this through existing Vision Zero mechanisms comes at the expense of serious trade-offs and diminishing returns due to the inherent limitations of human drivers. A concerted effort to accelerate the transition to autonomous vehicles has a lot of advantages over the current plan. Whether we remove the right for humans to drive is another matter, but even if a small percentage of people continue to drive, the improvements will be immense and these remaining drivers will also benefit from interacting with vehicles that see everything and behave consistently.

What are these policies trying to accomplish?

In years past, corner stores were common in many residential neighbourhoods, and that was a good thing. Walking to a corner store to pick up a few items was a pleasure, and these stores were owned and operated by local residents. Convenient, yes, but also a great way to build community. You bumped into neighbours along the way or at the store, had a chat, and strengthened your local ties. Mixed-use communities also reduced traffic congestion, as you could do more within walking distance.

Cities with multi-unit buildings such as triplexes and low-rise apartment buildings allow residents with different financial means to coexist. Rather than relegating lower-income folks to the extreme exurbs or to tiny condos, they can choose to live in established neighbourhoods that are closer to jobs, transit, and retail (see above). Over time, most people make more money and can afford larger or nicer homes, and having a mix of options means they can stay in the same neighbourhood and upgrade. This creates longer lasting bonds within communities.

Having smaller, affordable units in more communities will directly and rapidly address the housing crisis because people will be able to rent or buy units they can afford in places they want to live. Retail you can get to by foot will reduce the number of trips by car, reducing traffic volume and congestion.

Residents Associations and long-time homeowners in established neighbourhoods aren’t a fan of change. They tend to see things in terms of worst case scenarios. More housing density will definitely mean rude, inconsiderate neighbours. New retail too close to home will definitely result in round-the-clock noise and skyrocketing break-ins. In other words, the stereotypical Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) point of view. And so, as cities conduct public consultations and request feedback about these proposed changes, a significant amount of it has been negative.

Some of these concerns are valid, and it’s important to design the changes to avoid as many issues as possible. Gentle density within single family home neighbourhoods is best, not extreme density. Multiplexes and low-rise apartment buildings have a long history of successfully coexisting with single family homes in many cities. Taller buildings belong on more major streets. Reintroducing retail into residential communities should not be a free-for-all. Restrictions around the size, scale, and type of retail make sense. Think corner stores and cafes, not dance clubs and warehouses.

Ultimately, increasing density in neighbourhoods with single family homes is an effective way to provide more affordable housing. Allowing retail within residential neighbourhoods will improve traffic congestion by providing communities with more options within walking distance. It is possible to implement these changes while protecting the rights of existing residents. City staff, elected officials, and residents must work together to find the right balance.

The Evidence Is Clear

The data makes it clear that speed cameras are effective at reducing speeding. A recent SickKids/Toronto Metropolitan University study found that speed cameras reduce speeding by 45% in school zones and an 88% reduction in vehicles traveling more than 20 km/h over the limit. Anecdotally, I witness drivers slowing down significantly as they encounter a sign indicating a speed camera is in use. So there is no doubt about the effectiveness of the cameras. They are doing exactly what they are intended to do.

The “cash grab” accusation doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. A cash grab implies that fines are being issued and cash is being collected without moving the needle on the desired outcome, which is reduced speeding and increased safety. That’s simply not the case here.

There’s also a certain irony in Ford’s position: his own government passed enabling regulations in 2019 that allowed municipalities to run these programs. What changed between then and now isn’t the evidence, which has actually gotten stronger. All that’s changed is the political calculation.

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Understanding the Pushback

So what’s really going on here? Why all the pushback? It’s not just the Premier; if there’s one thing he’s good at, it’s tuning in to the sentiment of many citizens. Or, in this case, drivers. In each driver’s own head, they feel they’re a good, safe driver, and the bit of speeding they do is not really a problem. They’re not a danger to anyone. So while speed cameras might be a good thing in the big picture, they’re nothing but an annoyance. You either have to drive more slowly than seems necessary, delaying the arrival at your destination by a precious few seconds, or you have to pay an annoying fine. And because you believe you’re a good, safe driver, you don’t connect either of these scenarios to avoiding causing an injury or death.

This creates a tragedy of the commons situation. While each driver wants to feel like they’re getting to their destination faster, collectively faster driving leads to more injuries and deaths. The impact extends beyond individual locations, too. Research from Montgomery County, Maryland found that their speed camera program not only reduced fatal or incapacitating injuries by 39% on roads with cameras, but also saw safety improvements on roads without cameras. This is an spillover effect where drivers simply started driving more carefully throughout the community.

Therefore, while slowing down for a speed camera might feel unnecessary to any individual driver, the collective impact is overwhelmingly positive. Politicians won’t get more votes by asking people to slow down or pay a fine, but ultimately, it works, and each driver should accept that they’re serving the greater good.

Beyond Safety: Building Vibrant Communities

Preventing injuries and deaths is critically important. Road traffic injuries are the number one cause of death in children and youth in Canada. But it’s not the only positive outcome of driving more slowly. When vehicles slow down, something remarkable happens to our streets and neighbourhoods.

Consider the research from Paris, which implemented slow zones across large portions of the city. Researchers found 44% more walking, lingering, and socializing on streets with reduced speed limits compared to adjacent streets without them. Slower traffic brings people out onto the streets.

The economic benefits are also substantial. Studies show that reducing traffic speeds by just 5-10 mph increases adjacent property values by roughly 20%. Walkable urban areas with slower traffic command 35-45% premiums on rent and sales prices compared to car-oriented areas. Despite representing only 1.2% of land mass in America’s largest metros, these walkable areas generate nearly 20% of GDP.

Local businesses thrive when drivers slow down. On Valencia Street in San Francisco, after traffic calming measures were implemented, 40% of retailers reported increased sales. In Washington DC’s Barracks Row, streetscape improvements that slowed traffic led to 44 new businesses and 200 new jobs. In Lodi, California, pedestrian-oriented improvements brought 60 new businesses, dropped the vacancy rate from 18% to 6%, and increased sales tax revenue by 30%.

Speed cameras are part of creating these conditions. When streets feel safe, parents let their kids walk to school. People linger on patios and chat with neighbors. Cyclists feel comfortable riding. Local shops thrive because people can safely walk to them. Drivers themselves feel more connected to the communities they’re moving through when they slow down and have their eye out for pedestrians and cyclists. All of this creates more vibrant, welcoming, and pleasant neighbourhoods, and leads to stronger communities.

The False Choice

Premier Ford has proposed replacing speed cameras with funding for speed bumps, roundabouts, and raised crosswalks. These are good traffic calming measures, but they’re not replacements for speed cameras—they work alongside them. Physical measures affect specific locations; cameras change behavior across entire corridors and, as the research shows, even beyond them. Why ban a proven tool when you could have both?

Putting aside the fact that driving faster than the speed limit doesn’t actually save drivers much time, it’s clear that the perceived benefits to drivers of being able to make a judgment call and drive faster simply isn’t worth it. The evidence for keeping speed cameras is overwhelming: improved safety, stronger local economies, higher property values, more vibrant street life, and stronger communities. These aren’t tradeoffs. All of these benefits come as a package.

Reframing the Debate

The debate here seems to be about tax revenue or driver convenience, but that’s not really it. Really, it’s about whether we want communities designed around the perceived right of drivers to speed, or whether it’s more important to have vibrant neighbourhoods where kids can walk to school, where businesses thrive, and where streets are places for people, not just cars.

One example that struck me as especially poignant is that of the Bloordale Beach. If you haven’t heard of it, get ready for something completely different. Shari Kasman, a local Toronto artist, helped create Bloordale Beach during the pandemic. But it’s not what you think: the “beach” was created on a vacant gravel lot after a high school was demolished and before a new one was built in its place. So why a beach? It’s symbolic. Absurdist. It’s about the vibes. Beach vibes! Plan that.

The idea came to Kasman and her friend after seeing a resident sunbathing alone on the site. They put up signs naming the space Bloordale Beach, and soon after people started showing up to spend time together, make art, music, and just enjoy the impromptu public space. It’s been described as a community centre without the building. Given how many songs, poems, and documentaries have been made about it, it’s clear people loved it.

In contrast, a few weeks ago I attended the 15th anniversary of the Evergreen Brick Works. The Brick Works is a magical public space that was impressively created with a great deal of planning and hard work. An old industrial site that was anything but hospitable was turned into a beautiful space with trees, ponds, lovely hiking trails, and revitalized structures to host events and activities. Hundreds of thousands of people visit the Brick Works every year, it’s the home of a huge farmer’s market, and there are children’s programs and other community events. Every time I visit, I feel refreshed, energized, and peaceful.

Bloordale Beach and Evergreen Brick Works could not be more different. One was conjured into being as a bit of an inside joke, the other took big donations and many years of careful planning and development. One was nothing more than a flat, gravel construction site and the other is a lush, natural wonderland. One only existed for a few months and was constantly being shut down by the city, the other just celebrated its 15th anniversary with new features and improvements always underway.

And yet, both are examples of public spaces of immense value to the community. They were/are a source of joy, connection, and improved quality of life. This is a perfect example of the importance of balancing how much planning you do in a city. Not so much that would prevent Bloordale Beach from existing, and not so little to get in the way of bold, ambitious projects like the Brick Works. A vibrant city needs both.