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Complete Streets

No one—not even cyclist or pedestrian advocates—ever questions whether we should include space for cars when we’re redesigning or constructing streets: accommodating private motor vehicle use in any road construction is a given. Yet the private automobile is the only method of transportation that is routinely given a bye past the first round of design; everything else has to be studied and justified or is relegated to the margins as an afterthought. Even the way that streets are designed and funded is stacked in favour of the car: design most frequently begins with vehicle lanes—how many and how wide—and then tries to squeeze all other users into whatever space remains. Sorry, we need four wide lanes for cars. But sidewalks? Benches? Bike lanes? Crosswalks? Those are frills and we can’t afford them. Some suggest that we’d arrive at a more equitable division of space if we designed from the edges in: start with sidewalks, buffers, and space for cyclists, and then squeeze cars into whatever space is left in the middle.

Unfortunately, the political climate in Toronto has been poisoned in recent months by a meaningless catchphrase: the war on the car. But to latch onto such huff- and puffery is to ignore the fact that some of the most desirable communities in the GTA, from Unionville to Port Credit, are built on complete streets. Only we don’t label them that way: instead we call them “small towns,” “historic,” and other code words for “really nice non-car-centric places to live where you can also drive if you want to.” Complete streets are about people and neighbourhoods and, yes, not planning public infrastructure exclusively around two-tonne mobile metal boxes.