Should the name of this topic be changed? It's not been a proposal for a long time now.
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This man has transit users covered
20-year street furniture rollout is hitting its stride under the eye of city veteran Kyp Perikleous
Kenneth Kidd
FEATURE WRITER
Kyp Perikleous is standing in a transit shelter on the southwest corner of King and York Sts., the kind of place that has, after a fashion, become his natural habitat.
"It's a little bit taller," says the man overseeing the city's new street furniture program. "There's blue banding so it highlights (the name of) the cross street."
Glass-walled save for one side reserved for advertising, the new shelter's interior features a little two-seater bench along with a map of the TTC system.
On the outside, there's a small, black rubber board, where locals can post notices about neighbourhood events or, more commonly elsewhere, yard sales, lost dogs and the like.
Perikleous, formally the city's manager of traffic planning and right-of-way management, is now overseeing the installation of a lot of shelters – a scheduled 400 per year through 2018, the pace slowing thereafter.
In all, the 20-year program will see nearly 26,000 new pieces of street furniture spread across the city, from shelters and benches to newspaper stands and recycling bins. But, given some design and manufacturing delays in 2008, the rollout will only start hitting its stride this year. Within the next couple of weeks, for instance, all of the current benches will disappear from city streets to be replaced by a new, standard model.
Which also means that any complaints about the furniture's design or where it is and isn't tends to end up "on our lap," says Perikleous. "You can never satisfy everyone."
This could pass as the motto of the whole program, or at least its initial stages, which didn't proceed without controversy.
Two of the biggest players in the street furniture business – Cemusa (now doing New York City) and JCDecaux North America (Chicago) – both opted out of the bidding, saying the risks were too high and the prospects of making a profit just too slim.
The eventual winning entry, from Astral Media using furniture by Toronto designer Jeremy Kramer, didn't lack for critics, which might be inevitable for any design that has to combine esthetics with sometimes subtle day-to-day functions. The clear glass and the armrest dividing the bench in shelters, for instance, are meant to discourage the homeless from sleeping there.
But the jury remains out on whether a single design is right for the entire city, given that roughly two-thirds of Toronto was built after World War II. Should Queen St. downtown get the same treatment as Brimley Rd. in Scarborough?
What is clear is that the city's streetscape desperately needed a makeover. There are several generations of shelters out there, more than a dozen styles of benches, and all manner of recycling and trash bins, many with advertising.
Under the current program, Astral will pay for all of the new furniture but only be allowed to sell ads on the shelters on commercial streets.
"You're not going to see all these competing ads cluster in a corner," says Perikleous. "That's what we're trying to clean up."
The deal will see the city will get a guaranteed $428 million in payments spread over 20 years, possibly more, should ad revenues exceed targets. Astral is responsible for maintenance, and at the end of the contract, the city gains ownership of the furniture.
Perikleous came to the program in 2005 from right-of-way management, where he had, among other things, written a new front-yard parking bylaw to consolidate the mishmash of rules used by the pre-amalgamation municipalities.
A 22-year veteran with the city, Perikleous joined up after receiving a diploma from the Toronto School of Business and spending two student summers with the city as a parking meter collector and then payroll clerk. "I started as a summer student and kind of never left."
Nor is this his first brush with shelters. In 2001, Perikleous was in charge of rolling out the first 600 shelters designed by Kramer – not for Astral, but for a predecessor company, CBS Outdoor, whose contract expired in 2007.
Now he's overseeing roughly two dozen staffers, since it turns out that placing street furniture is trickier than you might think. City staff must measure each potential site, take photographs, and prepare a scale drawing at the soon-to-be standard rate of 50 a week.
The rules are fairly exacting. Shelters on commercial streets, for instance, have to be within reach of an underground source of power. And every shelter has to be 0.6 metres (including the curb) away from the road, but still leave a pedestrian "clearway" on the sidewalk between 1.525 and 2.1 metres.
That's why one version of the new shelters doesn't include side walls – to accommodate both pedestrians and commuters where space is too tight.
The rules won't stop complaints.
"People are passionate about their areas," says Perikleous. "You have to understand where they're coming from."
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