Exterior of Creeds General Store and the Bianca Condos, looking west along Dupont Street.Lucy Lu/The Globe and Mail
In the nine months since he reopened Creed’s in a large corner space at the base of Tridel’s Bianca mid-rise on Dupont Avenue owner Jonah Creed has watched traffic through the doors build steadily. The space, he says, is twice the size of the firm’s previous location, a low-slung former industrial building about a block east, set well back from the street.
The large windows provide a panoramic view of Creed’s food market and its café, as well as the cleaning service that’s long been its staple. But while the street-front location and the space represent a clear positive, Mr. Creed remains underwhelmed by Dupont itself – a four-lane, heavily trafficked arterial into the core. According to the city, traffic counts show that 90,000 to 140,000 vehicles will pass various Dupont intersections in a typical 24-hour period.
One sunny morning earlier this month, all the tables out front sat empty during the morning rush hour. “It is not ideal,” Mr. Creed says. “I mean, obviously there needs to be some improvement for pedestrians. It’s not Queen Street. Dupont is a highway and cars just rip by.”
While his assessment of Toronto traffic isn’t especially surprising, the specific setting poses a riddle that has eluded the city’s land-use and transportation planners.
After a lengthy fight at the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) that dragged on for almost a decade, large chunks of the north side of Dupont, on a mostly industrial strip extending from Davenport Road to Annette Street, have been rezoned for mixed-use development, paving the way for mid-rise condos such as Bianca.
Eight other projects are either recently completed, under construction or in the planning process. The developers are among Toronto’s largest and include RioCan, TAS, and Freed, among others. The stretch also includes the high-density redevelopment of the Galleria Mall by Almadev.
Creeds is a marketplace featuring a cafe, a grocery store, as well as dry cleaning services.Lucy Lu/The Globe and Mail
But while an estimated 4,550 new homes are planned for the Dupont corridor (including the Galleria site), the city hasn’t done anything to transform the street itself into a corridor suited for all those new residents. Besides a short stretch west of Lansdowne Avenue, there are no bike lanes. Bus service is spotty. The sidewalks tend to be narrow. And at night, Dupont is often transformed into a noisy speedway, frequented by street racers who drive noisy muscle cars.
New Dupont residents may actually be even more acutely aware of this inhospitable environment because some of these projects will likely have limited underground parking due to a recent change in planning policy that reflects climate goals and declining car ownership.
“The intensification needs to be conjoined to the transition in how people move in the city and ensuring that people have a whole variety of choices,” says Jennifer Keesmaat, former chief planner and currently an affordable housing developer. She describes Dupont as a “traffic sewer” that desperately needs protected bike lanes. “We’re only really delivering on half the promise, she adds. “We’re intensifying, but we’re not creating a livable place.”
This story, Ms. Keesmaat points out, has played out elsewhere in the city, on busy arterials that have been slated for intensification. But Dupont’s built form is unusual in that the industrial north side, which sprung up because of the proximity to the midtown railway corridor, has long faced a strip of predominantly low-rise residential buildings along the south side.
For generations, according to Toronto historian Alfred Holden, Dupont functioned as an industrial hub, lined with gear factories, coal yards, building supply depots, auto body repair shops and the Toronto Telegram’s printing plant. The exodus of manufacturing brought a few supermarkets. The subsequent gentrification of the adjoining blue-collar neighbourhoods sparked the interest of developers, who fought the city to rezone all those employment sites.
A decade ago, with the rezoning battles playing out at the OMB, the city commissioned corridor studies on Dupont, which called for streetscape improvements – trees, benches, public art, etc. – but stopped short of proposing changes to the roadway itself.
Dianne Saxe and Alejandra Bravo, the two new city councillors who represent the wards traversed by Dupont, both say the street now needs to be calmed and fitted-out with bike lanes.
“One of my tasks is to amplify the voice of the cycling community,” says Ms. Saxe (University-Rosedale), who notes that she hears from developers along that stretch that have been asked to make streetscape improvements in front of their buildings but don’t see any changes in the way the street itself functions because those fixes are inevitably piecemeal. (City officials point out that the new projects have deeper setbacks, creating wider sidewalks.)
“It’s time to look at Dupont as a neighbourhood street,” agrees Ms. Bravo (Davenport), who points out that Dupont played a crucial urban role as an employment district close to the homes of the people who worked in those plants. Things have changed, she adds. “There has to be a complete rethinking of how we’ll serve the thousands and thousands of people who come to live there.”
A city spokesperson says that Transportation Services has included Dupont on its “candidate list” for near-term cycling infrastructure, subject to public consultation and a council vote. “Changes in residential and commercial land use along Dupont Street will inform planning and design decisions for “complete streets” improvements that support active and public transportation, but it is too early to confirm specific project timelines and design details.”
Developer Brandon Donnelly, who is close to completing a mid-rise called Junction House, a nine-storey, 151-unit condo situated at very western end of the corridor (it actually fronts on Dundas West), says the city needs to go even further and up-zone the strip of single family homes that line the south side of Dupont.
“I think single sided retail streets generally don’t work very well,” he says. “So if we’re thinking about this as eventually becoming a great urban main street, something needs to be done about land use on the south side.”
The devil, as ever, is in the planning details. When she recently began making inquiries of city staff about the future of Dupont, Ms. Saxe says she discovered the planning and transportation departments have never worked together to hammer out a single vision and then develop a plan to achieve it.
At a council meeting earlier this summer, she notes, “we gave them direction that the two departments are required to talk to each other and come back with advice as to how they’re going to plan streetscapes.” As Ms. Bravo observed, “This [was] a political direction problem.”
Ms. Keesmaat adds that in her time as chief planner, she attempted to advance a so-called “Complete Streets” strategy. It featured templates for a range of different street types across the city, so that transportation planners could simply apply these changes whenever they had to do road reconstruction work. “You can plug and play,” she says.
The wrinkle, however, was that the city’s capital budget is allocated in 10-year increments, so that improvements, such as proposed dedicated cycle tracks for intensifying corridors like Dupont, can take years just to get to the starting line.
What’s clear is that even by the normally sluggish standards of development in Toronto, the change sweeping across the entire length of the Dupont strip is well under way, from the cluster of high-rises that have sprung up in the past year or so from the Galleria Mall to half-finished projects near north-south intersection at Ossington, Shaw and Kendal avenues. Indeed, one doesn’t need to be an expert on land use planning to see that several other large Dupont sites – currently parking lots or forlorn auto repair shops – will go up next.
Ms. Bravo points out that the city needs to figure out how to get ahead of the change, as it did over a century ago with all the new development that transformed St. Clair West from pasture land into a new suburb. “On St. Clair, the first thing that was built was Oakwood Collegiate and the streetcar,” she says. “We don’t do that any more.”
The northeast corner of Dupond Street and Howland Avenue.Lucy Lu/The Globe and Mail
In the decade or so prior to the pandemic, urbanists began advocating for “complete streets,” an idea that originated in the U.S. in the mid-2000s and was taken up by cycling groups, the American Planning Association and so-called “smart growth” activists. In the early 2010s, many municipalities began adopting complete streets policies, which sought to reconceptualize roadways as public spaces that should be designed to allow for a balance of mobility modes, not just cars travelling between strips of sidewalk.
According to an APA history of the complete streets movement, typical features include “ample sidewalks, improved standards for street tree planting and other landscape elements, bike lanes, dedicated bus lanes, comfortable and accessible transit stops, frequent crossing opportunities, median islands and curb extensions.”
The City of Toronto’s own complete streets guideline dates to a council motion in 2013 and a 2014 amendment to the official plan. The guidelines themselves were published in 2017, though they have yet to be implemented anywhere. There are a few examples cited in the City’s policy research, including Queen’s Quay West and St. George Street, which was rebuilt with a private donation in the late 1990s.
The pandemic prompted some cities, such as Paris, to adopt a souped-up version of the complete streets agenda, with dramatic overhauls to its rights of way featuring more bus-only lanes, pedestrian zones and dedicated, expansive cycling infrastructure to replace vehicle lanes across the city. Paris’s much heralded “bike boom” is, in fact, a response to the city’s 2021-2026 plan to add 180 kilometres of dedicated cycling routes as well as 130,000 additional bike parking spots and 19,000 rent-a-bikes in over 1,600 locations, with 360,000 subscribers.
Toronto’s Bike Share now operates more than 7,000 bikes, including e-bikes, but the city’s cycling infrastructure bears almost no resemblance to what’s being built in the French capital.