TORONTO —- More than 130 cranes hover over this shimmering city and its suburbs along Lake Ontario. Scores of office towers and hundreds of thousands of condo and apartment units have been built over a couple of decades, transforming a downtown that was riddled with parking lots.
Strict land planning has forced developers — even in the suburbs — to build taller buildings to reduce sprawl, preserve green space and protect environmentally sensitive land. The region has built onto its transit network, but for those investments haven’t kept pace with growth. Congestion costs Toronto about $2 billion a year in lost productivity, by one estimate.
More than 100 Atlanta civic, business and government leaders are in Canada’s largest city to learn how Toronto handles regional issues.
The takeaway: to find fixes for thorny problems like congestion and public services, it takes long-term vision, regional planning and engagement from government, business, civic and academic leaders.
The 19th Atlanta Regional Commission LINK trip is crisscrossing Toronto, North America’s fourth-largest city with a metro population of 8.7 million people. The region is highly educated, a banking power and home to some of Canada’s largest corporations.
Funding for transportation has been tough to find from local, provincial and federal governments, but residents want action, Toronto Mayor John Tory told members of the Atlanta Regional Commission’s LINK trip.
There are tens of billions of dollars in transportation projects in the greater Toronto pipeline; about $16 billion is set for rail. A funding plan makes the federal government, the Ontario province and local governments equal partners in paying for transportation.
Congestion is a problem across communities, Tory said. “Citizens don’t care about municipal boundaries. They want to get home.”
A master plan for Greater Toronto Area has curtailed development in the Green Belt, a vast swath of territory north of the city. It’s partly where Toronto gets its drinking water. Fear of sprawl in the area and the cost to provide water, sewer and transportation led Ontario leaders to limit development in the region and to devise a new transportation program, said Gregg Wassmansdorf, an executive with real estate service firm Newmark Grubb Knight Frank.
Low-rise development used to dominate the Toronto area a decade ago. Now high-rises do, he said.
The master plan “took a lot of land supply out of the development pipeline,” Wassmansdorf said. “It focused development inward.”
Such a development curb isn’t likely in Georgia, but it has accelerated a trend toward re-urbanization in Toronto. It’s also inflated housing prices intown and created an affordable housing problem.
A rail line is expected to be completed this year linking downtown Toronto to its airport, an asset Atlanta has had for years. Light rail and bus rapid transit projects are in the works for major suburbs.
“There’s a lot of momentum, but now it’s about implementing and catching up,” Wassmansdorf said.
The region is diverse — half of residents are foreign-born — and that has forced the region to engage newcomers and adapt its services. One of those of greatest needs is transit.
In the Greater Toronto area, about a quarter of residents ride transit. In metro Atlanta, the figure is 3.3 percent, according to the ARC.
The Toronto transit gap is particularly troublesome in inner-ring communities developed after World War II that were built for cars. Many working poor people don’t have cars, not unlike in metro Atlanta.
Tory said regional and provincial cooperation was necessary to tackle his city’s issues. He pointed to a nonprofit advocacy group called Civic Action that connects civic, business and government leaders.
Tory challenged LINK participants to take “collective action” to address metro Atlanta’s challenges. Mayor Thomas Reed of Chattahoochee Hills was convinced.
“Our constituents want us to do what’s best for them, and the reality is the region rises and falls as a group,” Reed said.
