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Liz Mastrotucci loves walking to and from work.
She's less frazzled and much healthier, having lost 30 pounds,
since she stopped riding the King streetcar and started walking
to the office 18 months ago.
"That route is very congested and very slow," Mastrotucci
said. "I found I would leave home in the morning feeling
very chipper and very cheerful, looking forward to the day,
but by the time I'd been jostled and pushed and punched and
shouted at on the streetcar, I would get to work feeling all
bitchy and crabbed out."
Mastrotucci, who works at The BrainStorm Group, an advertising
agency at Richmond and John Sts., discovered it took only
a half-hour to 40 minutes to get there from her home in the
Distillery District. Most days, it took as long, if not longer,
by transit, she said. And, walking, she was even relaxed coming
home in the evening. "It's a great way of leaving the
office behind. I feel energized because I've had a good brisk
walk after sitting behind a desk all day."
Walking is making a comeback among downtown dwellers.
Studies cited to support the city's official plan show walking
is the preferred choice of mobility for people who live and
work downtown. The studies focused on people who live along
the waterfront and in the "Kings" the King-Spadina
and King-Parliament areas.
While slightly more than half own a car, only 16 per cent
drive to work if they work downtown. A full 45 per cent walk
to work; 32 per cent take the TTC.
"What we found, it blew me away," says Rod McPhail,
the city's director of transportation planning. "As a
transportation planner, and I've been doing this all my life
... I never would have guessed the number would have come
back that high."
The number of walkers will only grow as the city prepares
for an expected 1 million more residents over the next 20
years. Already, condominiums sprouting on and around Bay St.
and the waterfront will add another 40,000 homes within two
kilometres of Union Station.
But it's not a walk in the park if you're a pedestrian in
this city. Forty-three pedestrians were killed in 2003 and
15 have been killed so far this year. More than 2,400 pedestrians
are injured on Toronto's roads every year; that's an average
of six people per day, according to city statistics. Over
the past five years, about half of all fatal vehicle accidents
involved people jaywalking or crossing between intersections.
"We're still seeing far too many people, pedestrians,
killed on the streets each year," says Helen Riley, who
belongs to Feet On The Street, a pedestrian advocacy group,
and helped found the Toronto Pedestrian Committee.
"If that same number of deaths and injuries happened
anywhere else an epidemic, a nursing home there would be a
huge outcry and serious steps taken to avoid it happening
again. That's not happening."
Walkers, for starters, want police to do a better job at enforcing
traffic laws.
"I guess they need to get people to stop talking on their
cellphones, which is 98 per cent of the time, or enforce the
fact that if you're turning right at a red light, you still
have to stop and perhaps check for pedestrians," says
Paul Girling, who walks every day from his home in the Dundas-Sherbourne
area to his job at the Eaton Centre. "It's always the
people turning right."
Mastrotucci, too, has had near run-ins with cars. "I
find the average Toronto downtown driver wouldn't think twice
of running you over and leaving you in a pool of your own
blood if they can make it through the light doing it,"
she says. "There's very much a sense of entitlement that
drivers feel and the pedestrians are very much on the defensive."
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Pedestrians also want wider sidewalks, something especially
important to seniors and the disabled, who say sidewalks should
be wide enough to handle two scooters or wheelchairs side
by side.
"Sometimes the sidewalks on Bay St. are so crowded you
have pedestrian traffic jams," commuting expert Janet
Lo told a conference last month in support of car-free day.
Wayne Scott, a member of the Hoof and Cycle Courier Coalition,
says the city could marry its commitments to both pedestrians
and cyclists by removing parking from city streets and giving
half the lane to cyclists and the other half to a wider sidewalk.
"Why do we have dormant vehicles taking up in the most
valuable space in town?" says Scott, outlining his idea
to remove the parking lane. "I really think that's the
way it's going to go. There's not really much of an alternative.
We can't move the buildings back, so we've got to make the
most use we can of the downtown area.
"The merchants are always held up as the sticking point
because they need the parking out front of their stores. You
just have to turn to the vendor and say, You can use the extended
sidewalk for your business and draw in all these walking customers,
or you can take all the stuff back inside the stores, so we
have enough room for garbage cans and people walking by.'"
Transportation planner McPhail says he understands the needs
of cyclists and pedestrians and they will all be taken into
account as the city grows:
- The proposed waterfront development will take pedestrians
into account with the creation of a public promenade, 25 metres
in width, which would run along the water's edge.
- The refitting of Union Station will allow for more pedestrians
and better foot traffic flow with larger subway platforms.
More bicycle-only lanes are on the way following the success
of the transformation of the Dundas St. E. route between Kingston
Rd. and Broadview Ave. to two lanes from four, to accommodate
cyclists.
- An expanded underground PATH network for pedestrians, which
currently covers 27 kilometres as far north as Dundas St.,
as far south as the Air Canada Centre, as far west as Simcoe
St. and as far east as Yonge St. While sidewalks won't be
made wider, they will seem more spacious as the city tries
to reduce the clutter of newspaper and pamphlet boxes.
"We are really starting to appreciate the importance
of the pedestrian amenity in the downtown," says McPhail.
Walking to work isn't really a choice in suburban areas. But
the city believes the car doesn't have to be the first choice.
Officials picture the day when more than half the workers
heading to Scarborough or North York work centres will take
transit, cycle or walk, and car trips will be less than half.
Currently car trips into those suburban centres represent
60 to 70 per cent. "It's a long-term plan," says
McPhail. "I remember the Yonge-Sheppard area 30 years
ago when it was just ma-and-pa retail stores with some apartments
over it. A lot changes over time."
And it won't come too soon for gridlocked Toronto, where rush
hour is an oxymoron that means three hours twice a day that
force commuters to spend more time in cars and less with family.
"We might think about what our city might look like if
it were designed for children instead of for cars," says
Dr. David McKeown, Toronto's medical officer of health. "We
could learn how good it feels to ride a bicycle to work. We
might realize how cars separate us from our neighbours. We
might discover how rich our lives could be if we reclaimed
more of our streets for pedestrians, bicycles and healthy
transit."
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