That's not the intention. While a small number of homes will become heritage, NIMBYs regularly obstruct new projects using heritage studies knowing full well they are frivolous. No quashing public consults either, just streamlining with rules and reasonable timetables. 10 years ago a committee of adjustments would hear applications once a month. Today counselors can defer minor variance applications by months - years -, by simply being absent from meetings. I think it's fair to have reasonable timetables for decisions, and rules that constrain frivolous obstruction and delay tactics.
Considering developers have recently bulldozed some 150+ year old heritage properties to build subdivisions near Hamilton despite efforts to save the properties, and the big fight over the brick warehouses near the junction in Toronto, this is more than just about 'streamlining' the process. Heritage buildings get in the way of quick turnover on land acquisition, and you're either wilfully ignorant or naive if you think developers aren't going to use reduced heritage regulation to their advantage. We already have so little protection.
Reasonable timetables is great. Using accelerated timetables to force through development before communities can have their say is not. Considering how beholden to developers this Ford government is, I have zero faith that this is just about ensuring timely discussion.
That's urban sprawl. Our problem is we're having trouble with intensification, better use, and redevelopment of existing space and sweating existing infrastructure.
I think transportation and congestion issues are a result of segregating commercial/industrial areas far away from residential areas. The public transit network is reasonable in the GTA, sadly it's a schmozzle of systems and operators, and struggles with cost due to poor operational efficiencies.
But urban sprawl is a huge part of the problem, especially if panic-adding housing is seen as part of the solution. Adding lots more units is great, but it only makes sense to add them in a way that doesn't create huge issues in the future. Toronto commute times are among the worst in the world, and for no reason besides poor planning and integration. And by far the fastest way to add dwelling units is in high-density towers, not single-family housing. But adding high-density requires concentrating infrastructure upgrades.
Also, considering the size and geography of Toronto, the public transit options are laughably bad, nowhere near reasonable, and among the worst in the developed world at this scale. You will never improve this by just adding bus routes, as the biggest advantage of transit is skating past the traffic jam.
The reason transit and housing go hand-in-hand is that transit is the single most difficult and costly infrastructure upgrade to implement when simultaneously trying to create supply in a sustainable fashion. Just blindly adding units at developer discretion not only doesn't solve the existing problems, it creates a myriad of other issues. Without a plan to integrate the huge number of new units into existing areas, you end up with uncontrolled urban sprawl.
There are plenty of transit solutions available, but Toronto has been crippled by back-and-forth mayoral and provincial nonsense. When they finally did get something built, it was done out of political expedience and convenience, not need. Having live near the Skytrain in Vancouver, I'm mystified by the refusal of the much more cost-effective elevated rail options here, opponents of which seem to spend more time talking about the Gardiner than actual existing rail systems.
OK, what about York Region? They have their YRT with dedicated surface routes, an army of modern busses, many of them high-capacity articulated beauties. The system was installed ahead of the clustered Markham Center and Vaughan center development. It's not uncommon to see a 100 passenger bus rolling thru town empty. The GO trains that pass thru town have lost 90% of it's ridership in the last 2 years yet it's still pulling it's max 10 double-decker cars - they could get by with one.
I can't speak to York specifically as I mostly avoid the place, but a quick Google suggests at least the Vaughan centre development is exactly the sort of thing I'm advocating. That said, measuring transit usage by seeing an empty bus is not exactly useful, nor is looking at GO usage during Covid, when most are trying to avoid crowded spaces. Making plans based around covid demands is as smart as buying a house in the sticks on the assumption that one's job will be online forever more...
If people live in houses that have poor transit service, they have to drive anyway, and driving to switch to transit is often extremely difficult due to limited and/or expensive parking costs. Giving people crap transit and then saying they don't use transit so there's no point in adding more transit is as backwards as demanding the TTC turn a profit when no such requirement is made for the fully subsidised road network. Paying for these services via taxes is one of those governmental loss leaders that generates positive economic activity that more than pays for the initial outlay.
(I recall the BC Liberals making a similar demand of BC Ferries, which forced the system to drastically increase ferry ticket prices. This added cost drove down usership, which forced them to again hike prices. This mostly destroyed the tourist activity on Vancouver Island, putting a whole swathe of businesses under, and costing the government more in lost tax revenue than the initial ferry subsidy had cost them in the first place.)
It currently takes me best case 2-3 hours to take transit from the lower city in Hamilton to downtown Toronto at rush hour. The express trains stop running between 5:20 am and 9 am eastbound, and between 3:30 pm and 7:30 pm westbound, which suggests the issue is capacity, not demand. I attend a number of meetings downtown, and would happily park my company truck to avoid the bumper-to-bumper on the QEW/Gardiner and the downtown s**t show, but I can't justify the time cost.
I don't see public transportation or tract housing as issues. Toronto has 1/5th the density of NYC, The challenge is how to eliminate unreasonable obstacles and frivolous delay mechanisms. Both will speed up the solution and reduce costs.
But Toronto can't continue to grow at the pace it is while maintaining the same low density. It's just not sustainable on any number of levels. We need to start finding a way to get closer to NYC density, or we face more of the same: insanely high housing costs combined with insanely high commute costs. And reducing costs only makes sense if it's a true reduction, not just kicking the can down the road and creating an exponentially higher cost for taxpayers later...
