infrastructure : In The News

Toronto's ongoing waterfront revitalization has caught the attention of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, pointing out that Pittsburgh has made similar strides in highlighting its own waterfront. The key difference, as one might imagine, is in the Toronto development's massive $1.5 billion scale.


As writer Christine H. O'Toole puts it:
 
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Source: The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

UK flight site PrivateFly’s 2015 Airport Poll included Toronto's Billy Bishop airport among its ranking of the "Top 10 Most Stunning Airport Approaches." 

Of the 147 different global airports that received nominations this year, the downtown Toronto airport was ranked seventh in the world.  

Included among the voters' comments were:

"The gleaming city skyline to your north, the vast blue sweep of the great Lake Ontario to the south, and lush green parkland of the island mixed with the boats in the harbor directly below you make this airport's approach truly majestic."

And:

"Arrival into this airport brings you between the skyscrapers of an international city and lush Canadian Parkland. Both framed by the Great Lakes in a fantastic juxtaposition between earth and human creation. Stunning!"


Read the rest here. 
Source: PrivateFly.

At the Guardian, Paul French takes a look at Toronto’s PATH system, which now sprawls under 30 km of downtown streets.

"The explosive growth of Canada’s largest metropolis, evident from a nest of cranes toiling on a skyline where more high-rise towers are under construction than any other North American city, is fuelling expansion of the PATH system in lockstep,” he notes.

However, as much as the system is an engineering wonder, it’s not without its detractors, including residents who ask if it’s sucking street life off the streets, and architects like Jack Diamond who wish it could be a grander, more cohesive affair. Still, change is coming: the newest phases of the PATH are coming out from underground and into airy skywalks, as Toronto’s office core crosses the Gardiner and the railway lands.

Read the whole story here. 
Source: The Guardian.
 

"The need to retain public spaces in our cities as they develop and grow requires increasingly ingenuitive thinking. A new development in Toronto shows just that sort of thinking in action," writes Gizmag about Toronto's soon-to-be-developed new green space hovering above the train tracks down near Union Station. 

The park, which will be located at 45-141 Bay Street between two buildings, is the work of real estate company Ivanhoé Cambridge for Metrolinx and is "part of the ongoing development of Union Station. The plans include the addition of a new bus terminal, two office buildings to be constructed standing either side of the rail corridor, and the park area between the buildings," the article says. 

The park will not only connect the buildings, which are designed to achieve LEED Platinum certification, but will provide the city with a public space "for recreation and leisure" while also connecting them to the underground PATH. 

Another article in Bloomberg provides additional context. That article reports that the 2.7 million square foot office complex will cost around $2 billion, with construction set to begin in spring of 2015. 

Read the full story here. 
Original Source: Gizmag

Toronto’s chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat delivered a keynote speech at the Planning Institute Australia WA State Conference at the end of July to highlight Toronto’s “shift” to public transit and its mission to improve congestion, all while challenging the constraints of urban sprawl.

Perth and Toronto have different challenges. While Perth expands outward, Toronto’s challenge is to improve conditions within the boundaries of a city that has reached its growth boundary.  Still, Keesmaat said, Australia’s largest city with a population of just under two million could learn a thing or two from Toronto. 

“There might be some interesting lessons learned with respect to how you begin to transform to an advanced form of urbanism once you move away from that approach of continuing to develop in a very suburban way,” she said. 

“We’ve been there and gone down that trajectory over the course of the past 30 years and we’re now at a moment where we are beginning to urbanise our suburbs by focusing on adding mid-rise development along our corridors and by ensuring we have the density we need in order to make transit a real option.”

Toronto and Perth are both maturing cities, Keesmaat said, and as cities mature limits need to be put in place. She told Perth about Toronto’s protected greenbelt which caused a “fundamentally shift the land economics of the region and forced many suburban developers to become urban developers — they changed their game.” But beyond this, the focus of her speech remained on transportation and congestion, and its direct ties to population growth. 

She said planning high-density communities makes transit options more sustainable, the key to reducing traffic congestion in the long run. 

“It’s a zero-sum gain, that if you continue to plan low density communities there will never be environments that can successfully sustain public transit because there simply isn’t the critical mass to make high-frequency transit use work,” she said. 

For more from her speech, read the full story here. 
Original source: Perth Now

As part of the city's preparations for the 2015 Pan Am/Parapan Am Games, the Pan Am Sports Centre (TPASC) is currently being constructed at the University of Toronto Scarborough campus.

Now, it has been announced that the TPASC will host the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Swimming trials from April 5-10. 2016. It marks the first "legacy high performance sports event in Toronto that is a result of infrastructure built for the 2015 Pan Am and Parapan Am Games," said an article that appeared in Swimming World Magazine. 

Here at Yonge Street, we've been exploring the legacy that the Pan Am/Parapan Am Games will leave on our city's infrastructure. 

"This is the first of many future hosting events for high performance athletes and sport in Toronto," says Professor Ira Jacobs, TPASC Chair and Dean of the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education at the University of Toronto, in the article. 

"The Toronto Pan Am Sports Centre represents the single largest investment ever made in amateur sport development in Canada. Co-owned by the City of Toronto and the University of Toronto Scarborough, TPASC was developed in partnership with the Government of Canada and the Province of Ontario. TPASC will be the site of several events for the 2015 Pan Am and Parapan Am Games, including all aquatics events," the article says.

Read the full story here. 
Original Source: Swimming World Magazine

After months of deliberations, Toronto has been selected as the Intelligent Community of the Year at the Intelligent Community Forum, held in New York last week. 

This comes after years of "knocking on the door," as Network World put it, for many years now. Toronto ranked in the top seven in 2005, 2013, and 2014. The annual title celebrates cities that use smart IT infrastructure to grow communities, create jobs, and contribute to economic growth, among other things. 

"Toronto was selected because it performed impressively against a set of diverse criteria and focused its academic, creative and private sectors, as well as its City Council leadership on the work and continued success of the entire community. In our view, Toronto offers a glimpse of how to flourish in the new economy and of how to adjust to the changes of the digital era," said ICF co-founder Lou Zacharilla in a press release.

Zacharilla also apparently called Toronto "New York City with manners."

Really, it was the efforts of Waterfront Toronto that solidified this year's crown. The organization has been pushing to make Toronto's contributions in this realm known. Waterfront Toronto's forthcoming "innovation district" will "provide 12,000 new residences with 100 Mpbs broadband to individual homes, and 10 Gbps networking to businesses…with the goal of providing design and media companies in Toronto with the highest transmission rates in the world," Network World reports. 

"This is a significant win for Toronto; one that recognizes the great efforts made in the city to work together on using information technology to create jobs, attract investment and make us more competitive," said Toronto Deputy Mayor Norm Kelly in the press release. "The work of Waterfront Toronto to collaborate with government, businesses, and the education and research community is helping establish Toronto's waterfront as an example of how to use future-ready information and communication infrastructure to attract jobs and residents."

Read the full story here. 
Original Source: Network World

Toronto has ranked the fourth best place in the world overall for infrastructure, sustainability, livability and health, according to an annual study comparing major metropolitan areas across the continent. 

The report, called Cities of Opportunity, pegs 30 cities against one another in a number of indicators and categories, many of which Toronto performed well in, including receiving the highest possible grade for quality of life. 

Toronto placed second overall for transportation and infrastructure, with only Singapore ahead. Toronto received the top spot for public transit systems, but the overall score was affected by a 13th place ranking in traffic congestion, and 12th for ease of commute. "Toronto's rankings in these two variables also reflect the city's current reality, in which the lack of a fully integrated regional transportation system is one of the leading challenges for Toronto." 

Toronto was the only non-Asian city to break into the top 5. 

Toronto tied with Sydney for second place (with a marginal difference in Toronto's favour) in health, safety and security. Stockholm took the number one spot in this category, but each of the top contenders shared similar qualities: populations averaging 2.5 million. 

"Larger cities, with larger populations, must strive harder, and expend more resources, to secure the healthy and safety of their residents," the report said. 

Toronto fared well  in our political environment, end-of-life care, hospitals and health employment, crime, and health system performance. 

When it comes to sustainability and the natural environment, Toronto scored major points for air pollution and natural disaster risk, but poorly in thermal comfort, a factor the report admits the city can do little about aside from knowing how to cope with it and improve it, which is what pushed Stockholm to the top. Toronto's overall positioning in this category has dropped since last year.

Toronto also ranked high in the ease of doing business, an indicator that factored in cost and economic clout, but we ranked low in cost of living. 

Read the full report here. 
Original Source: PWC