TORONTO – As part of National Engineering Month which celebrates engineering excellence in the month of March all across Canada, the Engineers Without Borders Canada Toronto Professional Chapter hosted their first ever Global Engineering Innovation Symposium (GEIS) and Global Engineering Innovation Challenge (GEIC) last Saturday at the University of Toronto, which gathered close to 200 attendees.
Recognizing the need to engage engineers in solving the lingering problems of society, the GEIS creates an environment for learning, creating, and sharing ideas, while the GEIC is a competition aiming to provide students and professionals an opportunity to innovatively solve real-world problems. This year, the competition asked entrants to solve Toronto’s pressing transportation problems and four finalists were chosen to pitch their ideas at the GEIS.
Keynote address
When Paul Bedford took over as Toronto’s Chief City Planner in 1996, the city had approximately 2.3 million people. Today, that number has grown to 2.7 million people and it’s expected to reach 3 million people by 2031, and that’s not even counting the surrounding areas such as York, Durham, or Peel. In fact, the City of Toronto estimates the population of the Greater Toronto Area to reach 7.45 million people by 2031.
“If you can picture adding all of greater Montreal into this region with no improvement in transit or road transportation, you know what the end result is going to be,” said Bedford, adding that “This region will [have] 13.5 million people by 2041.”
Since retiring in 2004, Bedford served on the Metrolinx Board of Directors from 2006 to 2011 where he developed a $50 billion regional transit plan called The Big Move. During his keynote address at the GEIS, he argued that given Toronto’s population growth, intensification and mass transit are the city’s practical choices.
“Density is our friend, it’s not an enemy. Congestion is our friend, it’s not the enemy. The reality is you need to have enough people living and working to support viable transit. You can’t just pretend business as usual – we build a regional subway network or regional transit network, and think it’s going to make any economic sense because it won’t.”
“We need to intensify, we need to concentrate, and we need to create viable, good, healthy neighbourhoods and healthy communities.”
During his tenure as Chief City Planner, a soft site analysis was done which looked at all the main streets – approximately 160 km of streets – in Toronto that are zoned for commercial and residential development, and found 1,500 properties that could be easily redeveloped and intensified with 1,000 square feet average size unit, 6-storey buildings, generating 120,000 units of housing. These are sites such as doughnut shops, gas stations, and used car lots.
“A lot of planners that I know believe you must have greenfield land to grow and expand. I say that’s nonsense. Yes, you need some, but the reality is if that was the only way cities grew, the city of Toronto would be in terrible shape,” said Bedford.
“We’ve added 400,000 people to the city of Toronto through intensification with no greenfield land of any kind,” said Bedford in regards to population growth since 1996.
“Widening roads doesn’t solve anything,” said Bedford on the 400-series highways. “We know that’s not the answer, especially when we’re a region going to 13.5 million. All you got to do is look at London, Paris, and New York in terms of how will they ever function if they didn’t have a fabulous urban and regional transportation system? So transit is our future.”
“Things are going to get a lot more expensive in terms of price of gas. And that is another important prier to get our act together.”
“We need more subways, and in the right places, not Finch Avenue,” said Bedford. “There’s no density.”
“We need LRTs, we need more buses, we need more streetcars, and we need more GO train – all day GO train service throughout the entire region.”
On the issue of funding, Bedford explains that people are willing to pay provided that they see the results early.
“People are generally willing to pay more, but they also want to see improvements early, not in 25 years. If you buy a house and you get a mortgage, the good thing is you get to live in it. Here, the difference is you buy in to this and you don’t get to live in the house. So I think one of the key things, and I’ve told Metrolinx this, is that on day one of these new revenue tools – whatever they are or how much they generate – flood the region with massive improved levels of service.”
“For example, if you’re in Burlington and you normally drive to the GO station because the bus comes once every hour, well that bus should come every 15 minutes. People need to see, feel, and touch the difference on day one.”
“You have to be equitable, fair, and they have to be geographically distributed,” added Bedford on the funding mechanisms.
And part of getting proposed funding to work is how it gets framed. “You got to compare those choices with what most of us probably buy every day. Because people think everything now is free, they go crazy about any new revenue tool.”
Finally, Bedford added that Toronto needs political leadership on this issue, citing Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s success in a 2008 referendum that passed a 0.5 percent regional sales tax with 67% of the vote, and pushing further for projects to be completed in 10 years instead of 30 years’ time.
“Political leadership is very critical. It’s a tough job, but they’ve got to come together and they’ve got to bite the bullet on this.”
“The key to transit to me is dependability and service. If you’re getting on the transit you want to know generally that you’re going to arrive to your destination within five or ten minutes to when you think you should. Not an hour later.”
(Continued)
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