Quote:
Originally Posted by rdaner
Interesting! I just want to add that as a resident of central Toronto without a car that the neighbourhoods around basically every subway station are very walkable. Though suburban stations started out being surrounded by parking those days are gone and most have signifiant high-rise towers that have retail/amenities and community facilities that work well for their residents! This is now happening around GO stations.
I am not saying high rises are perfect but they aren’t as bad as many make out on this forum. I imagine that many of you are suburbanites in smaller centres so it may be understandable.
|
And of course we also need to remember that streetcar suburbs were not self-contained, 15 minute cities. Their whole existence was predicated on being connected to the city by rail transit lines (streetcar routes) hence their name. That's what allowed the city to expand beyond a typical person's comfortable walking range before the proliferation of motor vehicles. While streetcar suburbs are today fairly urban since they've been completely enveloped by the city and are very central, at the time they were on the urban fringe and didn't have the urban amenities they have now. They would have had basic things like corner stores and a local pub, but people took the streetcar into the city for most of their regular needs. The streetcar extended people's walking distance in an era when cities were built around walking as the main transportation method.
Streetcars are obviously different from subway and commuter rail lines in that they're slower and more integrated into the streetscape, but streetcar suburbs were very close to the central city compared to contemporary suburbs so travel distances weren't any longer. Plus they were faster back then before there was car congestion to deal with. So if you were to build a residential area with the density and basic form of a streetcar suburb on greenfields on the edge of the current metro area, they would still need to be connected to the central city by rail lines to provide residents with at least some of their needs such as employment. That's the central feature of such a development model.
The challenge is that the edge of the metro area is so damn far from the central areas now because of all the contemporary car-suburb crap in between. So it would be a major challenge to make rail lines that are fast enough to provide a similar travel time. But the idea that there can be areas with streetcar suburb density but that aren't reliant on a connection to the central city isn't a thing. The density is too low to be internally self-sufficient, while large cities are just too populous now for even dense ones to cram into a walking-distance land area. So neighbourhoods either need density higher than streetcar suburbs or to rely on external connections using cars or transit.
Prev
Linear Mode
