Vertical Street Integration

Welcome back to Middle Ground; today’s issue will discuss the concept of vertical street integration and how it has and could factor into how downtown Toronto's streets are designed.

What is vertical street integration?
In the 1963 Plan for Downtown Toronto, city planners imagined Toronto as a city that would learn from the challenges of the United States to build a safer and more walkable city. Historically, streets had been shared by pedestrians, bikers, horses and cars. In the United States, the solution had become to separate pedestrians from cars horizontally by adding sidewalks next to streets where cars could drive. The city planners in Toronto recognized that many of Toronto’s streets didn’t have the capacity to handle enough cars and pedestrians if organized this way and that we would eventually need to split pedestrians and cars vertically instead, meaning one would be underground and the other at ground level. 

At the time, they imagined a simple solution: wherever possible, they would bury streets, leaving the ground level open for public transit and pedestrians. The idea was that ground level would become filled with greenspace, walking paths and streetcars while below ground, cars could travel all around the city.

Aside from the aesthetic benefits of removing cars from ground level, the city planners saw a couple practical benefits:

1. Most new buildings had underground parking so cars were already being stored below ground; having them drive below ground and turn directly into parking garages would save space compared to the significant turns required to go from ground level to a parking garage. 

2. Trucks and other commercial vehicles could deliver goods directly to basements and storage facilities underneath shops. 

What has happened to the idea of vertical street integration?

Despite how foreign this concept might sound, Toronto has actually adopted it in practice: the PATH is an example of vertical street integration. Over the past few decades, the city has slowly built up a series of underground connections and paths covering significant parts of downtown Toronto, allowing pedestrians to travel the city without needing to go outdoors. 

The problem with the PATH is that we’ve done the inverse of what was originally imagined by putting people below ground and cars above ground. While it is too late to reverse course given the significant financial investments in building the PATH, it is still possible to take the opposite approach in other parts of the city. 

Where can we implement vertical street integration?

The PATH is currently contained to the east of Spadina and west of Yonge. This means that all areas west of Spadina and east of Yonge can implement vertical integration that sees cars placed below ground and pedestrians above ground. This would be especially effective west of Spadina, where most of the downtown core still has laneways and other street-level access points, which would allow vehicles to access buildings for deliveries without needing a street-level road. 

Given that infrastructure has already been built at street level, the best course would be to make all North-South major streets or East-West major streets below-ground, allowing for easy movement both below and above ground. 

What would the advantages be?

Today’s Toronto is different from 1963 Toronto and we can’t simply be implementing policy today because it “should have been” implemented then. The reasons for implementing this policy today are to deal with modern-day problems, including:

1. Water Management - Adding more grass and water-absorbent native plants at ground level will limit future flooding. This is a growing problem for Toronto, whose drainage system has struggled to deal with increasing larger rainfalls in summer. 

2. Road Maintenance - Toronto has struggled to maintain roads for decades. By placing them underground and sheltering roads from the elements, they experience less weathering and require less maintenance. 

3. Pedestrian/Bike Paths - The longstanding debate around pedestrian and bike paths throughout the downtown core is resolved by creating a dedicated space for cyclists away from cars. 

4. Emergency Lanes - Having streetcar or service lanes above ground used exclusively for transit and emergency vehicles will reduce response times, which have been rising consistently due to increased congestion. 

5. Green Space - Toronto has a significant lack of green space. This would immediately open numerous possibilities for small neighbourhood parks or walking paths throughout the city. 

If you learned anything from this newsletter, forward it to one person who would benefit from these insights.

Liam Gill