Quote:
Originally Posted by CalUrbanist
Toronto is what American cities should aspire to. For all our talk of progressivism in American coastal cities, I find Toronto to be the most progressive in the flesh of all American cities. Its approach to transit and zoning leaves US cities, even New York City, in the conservative dustbin. New York only benefits from its pre-war legacy, and from being a crossroads of global culture and finance, but policy-wise, it’s not doing anything interesting for urbanism for the modern era. It’s not responding to the modern challenges of American sprawl. Toronto is the only American metropolis defining urbanism for the modern era. And it’s much more interesting culturally than Chicago, which is stagnant by comparison.
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The progress in Toronto is the most visible due to its size and unrelenting growth but it's really a Canada wide phenomenon. Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, KW, Halifax, etc. Canadian urban planning did a complete 180 ~25 years ago. It became clear that the auto-centric model 1950-2000 was unsustainable and municipalities needed to encourage TOD, intensification, pedestrianization, etc.
Reworking, rebuilding, re-imaging an entire city is a monumental under taking. What's astonishing is how much progress has been made in a relatively short period of time. Canadian municipalities began diverging from their US counterparts only 25 years ago but the differences are already significant.
It bears mentioning, without strong population growth it's very difficult to build enough density to support higher order PT. There's no point building a LRT line, for instance, unless there's enough population to sustain it. Canada is making the most of its population boom. The hope is that the transformation of Canadian cities can be realized before population growth stalls.
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