The Toronto region needs to stop building office parks surrounded by giant, parking lots on the fringes and start urbanizing its job zones, putting employment near transit and creating pedestrian friendly business parks.
Urban planner Pamela Blais … has written detailed profiles of two of the region’s longstanding employment megazones being published this week by the non-profit Neptis Foundation, which has been studying the impact of provincial anti-sprawl policies.
Emerging jobs are compatible with multi-storey office towers rather than low, spread-out manufacturing facilities. Redeveloping the surface parking lots and building on some vacant business park sites could free up space for up to 57,000 office workers, according to Blais. …
“That means restricting office development at the edges of the region. No more new suburban office parks. The 100 million sq. ft. of office space we’re expecting to plan for over the next 25 years — we have to do that in a way that maximizes out transit investments and the economic potential,” she said.
The only reason these types of developments are successful is because they are near major freeways (in this case, Hwys. 404 and 407 ETR). Transit does not make them successful. Nor does being pedestrian friendly. Face it – the GTA freeways are what makes these developments successful. Don’t believe me? Just ask the realtors and tenants. They will tell you the truth.
Freeways do not create space for jobs. Buildings do. TO has had tremendous long-term benefits and concentrated job creation around its subway hubs, just as Metro Vancouver’s Expo Line is still ion full TOD build-out 31 years later.. Freeways divide communities and are not capable of moving people as efficiently as transit which uses orders of magnitude fewer per capita resources. The only thing that wins over both modes of transport is building walkable communities, as anyone who has visited or lived in TO long enough to compare it to car / freeway saturated places like Vaughan.
Night and day.