Montreal has done it. Toronto hasn't.
By
Justin LingStaff Columnist
Justin Ling is a staff columnist for the Star and an investigative journalist based in Montreal. Reach him by email:
jling@thestar.ca
In Montreal this past weekend, two city councillors launched a new website:
avant-apres.ca. That’s “before-after” to us anglophones.
It shows a map of the city, with pins scattered throughout the hip Plateau-Mont Royal neighbourhood. Click a pin, and it’ll pull up two photos: one from several years ago, and another from this year. You can slide the images back and forth to see what’s changed.
Each diptych tells the same story — of a city that has become more pleasant, more green, more fun and more safe. A street next to a school went from two traffic lanes to pedestrian-only; it’s now lined with planters and park benches. A
four-lane stroad outside a metro station was narrowed into a one-lane, one-way street lined on either side with bike lanes wider sidewalks. A parking lot next to an arena was turned into a playground.
Building a website like this for Toronto would be depressing. Look back at a Bloor Street crammed with traffic years ago, then slide over to today and see the province
ripping up bike lanes, reverting to bumper-to-bumper gridlock and parked cars. Nearly a decade after King Street became (mostly) reserved for streetcars downtown, it remains congested with cars and backed-up TTC vehicles.
I know the “smug Montrealer shows up to tell you how to do things” routine is tiresome. But my adopted city has managed a pretty serious glow-up in the past 10 years. It wasn’t straightforward, and plenty of problems persist, but Montreal has secured a spot in North America’s urbanist hall of fame. And it feels like things are getting better.
The opposite is true of Toronto.
Montreal’s with Valérie Plante as mayor has over her two terms, built North America’s most impressive cycling network, and became a nicer place to live. (Plante’s Projet Montréal party lost power last year, but the new administration has kept most of her priorities going.)
Toronto takes in nearly double the annual revenue Montreal does yet seems to be doing far less with it.
There are some structural barriers. One that looms large is Ontario’s bumbling premier,
Doug Ford, who insists on inflicting his incompetence on the city, ripping out bike lanes, banning speed cameras, slashing the size of council and so on.
Montreal is not perfect — come check out our potholes! — but it has benefitted enormously from smart policy choices.
Montreal has a willingness to rethink space for cars and give it back to the people. In Plante’s eight years as mayor, more streets were closed to cars; more lanes were given over to pedestrians, transit and cyclists; and more physical barriers were installed to slow down traffic. This has made drivers — particularly those who commute into the city — grumpy, but it has also made the city unquestionably better.
Toronto needs to take some inspiration from Montreal.
Just as pressing: Toronto needs to find a way to get people moving. Trying to cram more cars onto the road
will not make that happen. The city cannot grow if cars are its main form of transportation: the math doesn’t math.
Newsflash: returning to the past isn't an option. Trying to placate voters who want to take Toronto back in time, back to when traffic congestion wasn’t so bad is doomed to failure.
Today, Toronto has about 250 kilometres of proper bike lanes total — and Ford is taking that number down. (Montreal, by contrast, has more than 1,000 kilometres.)
