Customer Reviews

Shape of the Suburbs: Understanding Toronto's Sprawl

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Like Sewell's earlier book The Shape of the City, this eloquent little book explains how Toronto-area planners created high levels of sprawl: through aggressive construction of roads and sewers into suburbia, rubber-stamping suburban development applications, and anti-urban road design policies. A few of the fascinating facts in this book:

1. In the 1940s, Toronto's transit surplus actually ran a surplus- and it continued to be more or less self-financing until the 1970s (when government decided to reduce suburban fares to the same level as city fares, and money-losing suburban rail lines were built). In some ways, these innovations were successful: ridership rose from 310 million riders in the mid-1940s to 460 million in 1990. But at a heavy cost: city-oriented Toronto transit costs .47 per rider, but suburban GO Transit costs 4.71 per rider. As a result, when transit subsidies were reduced in the 1990s, ridership nosedived.

2. 1940s planners favored policies that today would be considered pro-sprawl by many planners. For example, the city of Toronto's 1943 plan (like later plans) proposed that new areas be half as dense as older neighborhoods, and that numerous expressways be built. In those days, provincial legislation actually required the city of Toronto to directly pay for suburban roads, on the theory that its existence generated suburban traffic. And just as the federal government supported expressway construction in the United States, Ontario later paid for Toronto-area expressways.

3. The provincial government, responsible for water and sewer service, consistently sold service to newer suburbs at far less than the cost of provision: for example, in 1971, water cost .61 per gallon, about twice the cost of what ratepayers paid.

4. Despite these pro-sprawl policies, Toronto is still less car-dependent than American cities; in the older part of the city of Toronto, 51% of households have no car, and 60% of daily trips are by walking and cycling. And even Toronto's outer neighborhoods are far less car-dependent than their American counterparts. In inner suburbs, 17.4% of households have no car (as opposed to 7.8% in Cheektowaga, a not-particularly-wealthy inner suburb of Buffalo), though outer suburbs have car ownership rates comparable to those of the USA. And even Toronto's outer suburbs have 1.5 miles of transit ridership more day, about twice the regional average in Buffalo. This may be because Toronto suburbs, though far less compact than older parts of Toronto, are about twice as densely populated as most American suburbs. (NOTE: I got statistics about American suburbs from sources other than Sewell's book).

I do wish Sewell had devoted more space to design issues in the suburbs (such as road design, parking, and zoning) - the sort of policies that explain why Canadian suburbs are more thinly populated and car-dependent than their urban neighbors.