Gil Peñalosa spent 90 minutes on Iain Montgomery’s Challenger Cities podcast recently and used most of it to lay out specific, practical things Toronto could do to improve the city. Not aspirations, but proposals with a location, a cost, and a first step. Several of them use buildings and land the city already owns.
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.
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.
It is just plain nuts that streetcars run the way they do, particularly on the narrower streets where parking is still allowed. We could at least make many of those streets (King, Queen) one-way and limit parking.
Smart suggestions. Thanks.