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niwell said:
First time posting on UT despite being a member for years (post a lot on skyscraperpage if people follow) but had to weigh in on this topic.

I agree, San Francisco offers a good case study for many reasons. Things like Union Square are excellent and provide examples of what Toronto could be doing. On the other hand SF is also an extremely shabby city in areas - moreso than Toronto I would actually say. They treat many of their areas neighbourhoods outside of downtown just as poorly.
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Indeed - and those neighbourhood still look quite vibrant in spite of the less than sterling public realm. I think at issue is how often our best isn't good enough because of our focus on value engineering.

AoD
 
Niwell - point taken about San Francisco. However, three of your links show wires that appear to be exclusively for trolley buses. Another is a largely residential street, and even the pickiest former doesn't complain about those. Haight and Ashbury has both - the residential street has overhead hydro while the commercial strip has only overhead trolley bus wires.

As for Queen St, the part east of Spadina has loads of overhead wires. The poles they're mounted on may not be made of wood, but they're still there. I think the difference between the two cities is that you find overhead wires in prime areas more often in Toronto.
 
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MisterF said:
Niwell - point taken about San Francisco. However, three of your links show wires that appear to be exclusively for trolley buses. Another is a largely residential street, and even the pickiest former doesn't complain about those. Haight and Ashbury has both - the residential street has overhead hydro while the commercial strip has only overhead trolley bus wires.

As for Queen St, the part east of Spadina has loads of overhead wires. The poles they're mounted on may not be made of wood, but they're still there. I think the difference between the two cities is that you find overhead wires in prime areas more often in Toronto.
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The difference in SF is it's harder to distinguish commercial from residential streets compared to Toronto. You will have a few blocks of storefronts and then houses. There are some streets that are wire free, but others that have loads of them - commercial or not. Disregarding wires there are tons of utility cuts and the pavement tends to be in terrible shape. The quality of sidewalks is simply bad in areas - beyond what we see in Toronto. Again, I reiterate it does not detract from my experience of the city at all, but it's there.

I suppose you could say Queen east of Spadina has tons of wires. They are strung between the streetlight poles though - no hydro poles (wood or otherwise). My biggest beef would be the rusty poles themselves, not the wires. But again, very few who aren't into this kind of stuff even notice it. Of all complaints I have heard about Toronto from friends who have lived in the US or overseas, none of them have anything to do with the public realm (some of them even praise it).

Anyways, the point was that SF has managed to make some amazing spaces despite having a fairly bad public realm. Toronto can follow the same model hopefully. Some of the newer parks and the Queens Quay redevelopment are certainly steps in the right direction.
 
I think the main points I get from the recent discussion here is that our "best" areas don't meet the standards of the best areas in other global cities, and that we need to do better. These are fine points that I think everyone can agree on.

On the other hand, I would say that never before in my understanding of this city have so many people been spending so much money on so many initiatives trying to turn around these very things you guys care about regarding the public realm.

Toronto is and hopefully always will be a citizen first, de-centralized, entity. We will never be Dubai or Guangzhou where entire districts can be developed and unified by whatever government or corporate or gangster initiative. Because of this I think the "time" or oldness statement has some merit. That is because no matter what examples you can provide from other cities there is a localized effect to improvements (physical enhancements and maintenance and cleanliness of existing). Higher standards are adopted as local examples push the envelope and people copy best practices from their neighbours and other districts of the city. As a property owner and owner of multiple properties I experience this first hand. When someone does something cool that enhances their property other people in the area tend to adopt this "innovation" for their own properties. I think that is why local architectural vernaculars persist to this day even in our new global connected world. As a neighbourhood ages, and assuming it doesn't decline, there can be a virtuous positive feed-back loop that leads to continuous upgrades and enhancements and learnings from past mistakes (see London Plane trees on Bloor Yorkville) that accrue over time.

I think some people are frustrated because they can find the coolest stuff on the internet at a click of a button and say why can't everything change now because I can fine this stuff so easy? Really Toronto will improve it's built environment through a slow evolution of small initiatives made at the local level by Business Improvement Areas or residence groups or through small public and private space successes, or in committee meetings of public utilities, or real estate investment and development organization or by the quirky ideas of individual dreamers etc. It will not be willed into effect by sweeping City decrees or massive injections of money or design megalomaniacs dreaming of a fascist clean-slate.

But in the end most of the people in the city will always live in rather shabby public and private realms as the majority of people do in ALL the cities you could ever provide best practice example from for our discussions about Toronto
 
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San Francisco is an interesting example, since I think in many ways (OK, weather aside) it's a rather similar city to Toronto. SF proper has roughly the same population as the old city of TO, it is the centre of a large, relatively de-centralized urban region with many competing agendas, it has an extremely vibrant urban core that resisted many of the typical maladies of post-war North American cities and is now coping with the pressures of rapid population growth.

And yes, many of its public spaces are shabby. There are overhead wires on frontier-town wooden poles all over., cracked sidewalks and so on. Not so much right in the downtown core, but not far -- and in such a compact city nothing is ever very far.

The other factor worth noting is that SF has a degree of visible poverty that's actually hard to imagine if you haven't spent time there. Walk 60 seconds west from Union Square along Geary (not an exaggeration) and you will be face to face with one of the roughest urban environments in any North American city centre. It makes the Downtown East Side in Vancouver seem pretty manageable. There are tiny pockets of improvement but they are just that, pockets, in a vast landscape of decay. That even the most progressive big city in the US has left this unaddressed for so long will make you question a lot of things about our southern neighbor.

Some years ago the plaza in front of the Ferry Building, on the Embarcadero, was fixed up into a nice park with space for a farmers' market. It's a huge success, but for the fact that about a third of the space is used as a near-permanent encampment for the homeless.

I don't mean this to excuse Toronto's shabbiness in many places at all. When SF does fix things up, for example along the newish Third St light-rail line and, relatedly, around Mission Bay, the results can be gorgeous: nice sidewalks, buried wires, successful street trees, and all the rest. We could learn from that. On the whole, however, I would hesitate to say SF is a city we should be emulating too closely.

Boston on the other hand has a lot to teach us (and others) about maintaining beautiful public spaces.
 
niwell said:
The difference in SF is it's harder to distinguish commercial from residential streets compared to Toronto. You will have a few blocks of storefronts and then houses. There are some streets that are wire free, but others that have loads of them - commercial or not. Disregarding wires there are tons of utility cuts and the pavement tends to be in terrible shape. The quality of sidewalks is simply bad in areas - beyond what we see in Toronto. Again, I reiterate it does not detract from my experience of the city at all, but it's there.

I suppose you could say Queen east of Spadina has tons of wires. They are strung between the streetlight poles though - no hydro poles (wood or otherwise). My biggest beef would be the rusty poles themselves, not the wires. But again, very few who aren't into this kind of stuff even notice it. Of all complaints I have heard about Toronto from friends who have lived in the US or overseas, none of them have anything to do with the public realm (some of them even praise it).

Anyways, the point was that SF has managed to make some amazing spaces despite having a fairly bad public realm. Toronto can follow the same model hopefully. Some of the newer parks and the Queens Quay redevelopment are certainly steps in the right direction.
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It may be true that the commercial and residential blend into each other more in San Francisco but there are still clear commercial and residential areas. Castro for example has a commercial core with no hydro wires and residential sections with hydro wires. Lower Haight is hydro wire free. Those two streets at the intersection in the Mission District are mostly residential (with a few stores here and there); the commercial strip of the neighbourhood is Valencia, which is a block away, has no overhead wires, and is built to a pretty high standard. Of your examples, only the outer blocks of Irving Street have hydro wires, and even there the busier part of the strip has the wires buried. If your links are any indication, San Francisco has done a much better job than Toronto of burying its wires on busy commercial streets.

Yes, on Queen east of Spadina the wires are strung from streetlights instead of dedicated poles. But that's still unacceptable on such a busy, central corridor IMO. We can do better.

And I know that anecdotes don't mean much, but as long as we're bringing them up I do know quite a few people who notice the general state of shabbiness of Toronto, including the overhead wires. Even if people aren't into forums and stuff like us, it's pretty common for them to notice the general shabbiness compared to other cities they've been to.
 
allabootmatt said:
The other factor worth noting is that SF has a degree of visible poverty that's actually hard to imagine if you haven't spent time there. Walk 60 seconds west from Union Square along Geary (not an exaggeration) and you will be face to face with one of the roughest urban environments in any North American city centre. It makes the Downtown East Side in Vancouver seem pretty manageable. There are tiny pockets of improvement but they are just that, pockets, in a vast landscape of decay. That even the most progressive big city in the US has left this unaddressed for so long will make you question a lot of things about our southern neighbour.
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I suspect that the insane housing prices in SF is a big contributing factor to the homelessness issues.
 
Here's the thing about Toronto's shabby public realm, which definitely exists. It will cost money to fix this problem. Big $.

But the money is there. Mayor Tory can find it for us, and just fix this problem. He has apparently found 1/5 billion bucks so that his favoured 'hybrid' Gardiner Expressway East option can be carried out instead of the less expensive 'grand boulevard' option. So there is evidently lots and lots - indeed pots - of money kicking around. Some of it can be spent on beautification, no?

Tell John Tory we at UT have found a solution, under his capable guidance, of course, to Toronto's Shabby Public Realm.
 
I was at Yonge and Bloor last week and noticed a large area of the streetscape is now black asphalt...looked awful, especially considering all the work that went into the landscape plan.
 
What a surprise.

Toronto's public realm looks like an unmade, king size bed after a rhino orgy.
 
Here's an idea. Can't a City Councillor (Not sure who would be the best for this?) put forth a motion that prohibits the notorious exercise of utility companies digging up sidewalks/walkways, etc. and patching them with asphalt? Considering that such a motion passes, the City would have the authority to fine the perpetrators for each offense. This could be quite a lucrative tool for the City. And given that this is everyday practice in Toronto, the money collected from these fines could fund transit expansion for years to come; well, the last part was facetious, but couldn't the motion prospect fly?
 
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