Big Moves: Global Agendas Local Aspirations and Urban Mobility in Canada 9780228002949

Table of contents :
Cover
Copyright
Contents
Figures and Tables
Acknowledgments
1 When Canada’s Big Cities Dream Big
2 Making and Remaking Mobility in Canada’s Global Cities
3 Comparing Canadian Urban Mobility
4 Flows of Capital and Traffic
5 Globalized Agendas Confront Local Priorities
6 Canaburbs and the Future of Urban Equivocation
Appendix Data Dictionary
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

big moves

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M c Gill-Q ueen’s Stud i es i n U r ba n G ov e r n a n c e Series editors: Kristin Good and Martin Horak

In recent years there has been an explosion of interest in local politics and the governance of cities – both in Canada and around the world. Globally, the city has become a consequential site where instances of social conflict and of cooperation play out. Urban centres are increasingly understood as vital engines of innovation and prosperity and a growing body of interdisciplinary research on urban issues suggests that high-performing cities have become ­crucial to the success of nations, even in the global era. Yet at the same time, local and regional governments continue to struggle for political recognition and for the policy resources needed to manage cities, to effectively govern, and to achieve sustainable growth. The purpose of the McGill-Queen’s Studies in Urban Governance series is to highlight the growing importance of municipal issues, local governance, and the need for policy reform in urban spaces. The series aims to answer the question “why do cities matter?” while exploring relationships between levels of government and examining the changing dynamics of metropolitan and community development. By taking a four-pronged approach to the study of urban governance, the series encourages debate and discussion of: (1) actors, institutions, and how cities are governed; (2) policy issues and policy reform; (3) the city as case study; and (4) urban politics and policy through a comparative framework. With a strong focus on governance, policy, and the role of the city, this series welcomes manuscripts from a broad range of disciplines and viewpoints.   1 Local Self-Government and the Right to the City Warren Magnusson   2 City-Regions in Prospect? Exploring Points between Place and Practice Edited by Kevin Edson Jones, Alex Lord, and Rob Shields

  5 Welcome to Greater Edendale Histories of Environment, Health, and Gender in an African City Marc Epprecht   6 Still Renovating A History of Canadian Social Housing Policy Greg Suttor

  3 On Their Own Women, Urbanization, and the Right to the City in South Africa Allison Goebel

  7 Order and Disorder Urban Governance and the Making of Middle Eastern Cities Edited by Luna Khirfan

  4 The Boundary Bargain Growth, Development, and the Future of City–County Separation Zachary Spicer

  8 Toward Equity and Inclusion in Canadian Cities Lessons from Critical PraxisOriented Research Edited by Fran Klodawsky, Janet Siltanen, and Caroline Andrew

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  9 Accountability and Responsiveness at the Municipal Level Views from Canada Edited by Sandra Breux and Jérôme Couture 10 A Neighborhood Politics of Last Resort Post-Katrina New Orleans and the Right to the City Stephen Danley

12 China’s Urban Future and the Quest for Stability Edited by Rebecca Clothey and Richardson Dilworth 13 Big Moves Global Agendas, Local Aspirations, and Urban Mobility in Canada Anthony Perl, Matt Hern, and Jeffrey Kenworthy

11 Shaping the Metropolis Institutions and Urbanization in the United States and Canada Zack Taylor

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BIG MOVES Global Agendas, Local Aspirations, and Urban Mobility in Canada

a n t h o n y p e r l , m at t h e r n , and j e f f r e y k e n w o rt h y

McGill-­Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2020 ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

978-0-2280-0160–7 (cloth) 978-0-2280-0161–4 (paper) 978-0-2280-0294–9 (eP DF ) 978-0-2280-0295–6 (eP UB)

Legal deposit third quarter 2020 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Big moves: global agendas, local aspirations, and urban mobility in Canada / Anthony Perl, Matt Hern, and Jeffrey Kenworthy. Names: Perl, Anthony, 1962– author. | Hern, Matt, author. | Kenworthy, Jeffrey R., 1955– author. Series: McGill-Queen’s studies in urban governance; 13. Description: Series statement: McGill-Queen’s studies in urban governance; 13 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200232312 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200232711 | IS BN 9780228001614 (paper) | I SB N 9780228001607 (cloth) | ISBN 9780228002949 (eP DF ) | IS BN 9780228002956 (eP D F ) Subjects: LC S H: Transportation—Canada—History—20th century. | LC SH: Infrastructure (Economics)—Canada—History—20th century. Classification: L CC HE 215.A2 P47 2020 | DDC 388.0971—dc23

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5/13 Sabon.

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Contents



Figures and Tables  ix

Acknowledgments xiii   1 When Canada’s Big Cities Dream Big: Visions of Global Gold Dance in Their Heads 3   2 Making and Remaking Mobility in Canada’s Global Cities 21   3 Comparing Canadian Urban Mobility: Patterns of Confluence, Divergence, and Specificity 53   4 Flows of Capital and Traffic 99   5 Globalized Agendas Confront Local Priorities 153   6 Canaburbs and the Future of Urban Equivocation 186

Appendix: Data Dictionary  209

Notes 249 References 253 Index 293

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Figures and Tables

figures

1.1 Canadian residents returning from overseas air travel by port of entry, 1958–84  11 1.2 Visitors from overseas countries entering Canada through air travel by port of entry, 1963–84  12 1.3 Corporate-headquarter relocations by sector, 1970–81  13 3.1 Urban density in six Canadian cities compared to the ­average for ten American cities  62 3.2 Urban density for thirteen large American cities in 2005  63 3.3 High urban densities in parts of the Vancouver region. Photograph by Jeffrey Kenworthy.  64 3.4 High-density development adjacent to light rail transit along the Toronto waterfront. Photograph by Carolina Zabas Roelandt. 64 3.5 An example of a prevalent medium-density housing t­ ypology in Montreal’s inner-city area. Photograph by Jeffrey Kenworthy. 66 3.6 Annual transit boardings in Canadian cities compared to American cities, 2005–6  67 3.7 Annual transit boardings per capita in ten large American cities, 2005  68 3.8 Montreal’s subway system, known as the Metro. Photograph by Jeffrey Kenworthy. 69 3.9 Vancouver SkyTrain approaching Main Street–Science World station. Photograph by Jeffrey Kenworthy.  70

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x

Figures and Tables

3.10 A section of Montreal’s extensive expressway system ­passing through downtown. Photograph by Jeffrey Kenworthy.  73 3.11 A twelve-lane section of Toronto’s expressway infrastructure. Photograph by Carolina Zabas Roelandt.  74 3.12 Vancouver’s Canada Line rapid-transit infrastructure. Photograph by Jeffrey Kenworthy.  76 3.13 Annual car-passenger kilometres per capita in twenty American, Australian, and Canadian cities, 2005–6  82 3.14 Mean urban densities in global cities, 2005–6  88 3.15 Mean job densities in global cities, 2005–6  89 3.16 Car ownership in global cities, 2005–6  89 3.17 Transit-seat kilometres of service per person in global cities, 2005–6 90 3.18 Transit-system average speeds in global cities, 2005–6  91 3.19 Percentage of total daily trips by transit in global cities, 2005–6 91 3.20 Car-vehicle kilometres travelled per capita in global cities 2005–6 93 3.21 Car-passenger kilometres per capita in global cities, 2005–6 93 3.22 Transit boardings per person in global cities, 2005–6  94 3.23 Transit-operating-cost recovery in global cities 2005–6  94 3.24 Car-vehicle kilometres travelled to earn one US dollar of gross domestic product in global cities, 2005–6  95 4.1 Montreal and surrounding municipalities prior to ­amalgamation in 2002  104 4.2 Toronto and surrounding municipalities prior to 2002  105 4.3 Vancouver core urban area and surrounding municipalities in 2002  106 4.4 Montreal expressway and rapid-transit infrastructure  108 4.5 Toronto expressway and rapid-transit infrastructure  109 4.6 Vancouver expressway and rapid-transit infrastructure  110 4.7 Comparison of expressway- and rapid-transit-infrastructure length in Montreal, 1955–90  111 4.8 Annual investment spending on extending expressways in Montreal, 1955–90  114 4.9 Annual investment spending on extending rapid transit in Montreal, 1955–90  115 4.10 Montreal’s rolling five-year total investment spending on extending expressways and rapid transit, 1955–90  117

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Figures and Tables

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4.11 Total system-length development of expressways and rapid transit in Toronto, 1949–96  118 4.12 Annual capital expenditure on expressways in Toronto, 1949–77 119 4.13 Annual capital expenditure on extending rapid transit in Toronto, 1949–96  120 4.14 Toronto rolling five-year total investment spending on expressways and rapid transit, 1949–98  122 4.15 Total system-length development of expressways and rapid transit in the Vancouver urban core, 1956–2002  125 4.16 Annual capital expenditure on extending expressways in the Vancouver urban core, 1933–92  127 4.17 Annual capital expenditure on rapid transit in Vancouver’s urban core, 1980–2002  129 4.18 Vancouver’s urban-core rolling five-year total investment spending on extending expressways and on rapid transit, 1933–2002 131 4.19 Annual investment spending on expressways in Montreal by source of funds, 1955–90  133 4.20 Percentage of all expressway investment spending in Montreal from all sources, 1955–90  134 4.21 Annual investment spending on rapid transit in Montreal by source of funds, 1955–90  135 4.22 Percentage of all rapid-transit investment spending in Montreal from all sources, 1955–90  137 4.23 Percentage of total investment spending between expressways and rapid transit in Montreal, 1955–90  138 4.24 Annual investment spending on expressways in Metropolitan Toronto by source of funds, 1949–77  139 4.25 Percentage of all expressway investment spending in Metropolitan Toronto from all sources, 1949–77  140 4.26 Annual investment spending on rapid transit in Metropolitan Toronto by source of funds, 1949–96  141 4.27 Percentage of all rapid-transit investment spending in Metropolitan Toronto from all sources, 1949–96  143 4.28 Percentage of total investment spending between expressways and rapid transit in Metropolitan Toronto, 1949–96 144 4.29 Annual investment spending on expressways in Vancouver by source of funds, 1933–93  146

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Figures and Tables

4.30 Percentage of all expressway investment spending in Vancouver from all sources, 1933–93  146 4.31 Annual investment spending on rapid transit in Vancouver by source of funds, 1980–2002  147 4.32 Percentage of all rapid-transit investment spending in Vancouver from all sources, 1980–2002  148 4.33 Percentage of total investment spending between expressways and rapid transit in Vancouver, 1933–2002  149 4.34 Spending split between expressways and rapid transit for Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver  150 6.1 High, medium, and low densities in major Canadian cities, 2001 194 6.2 Density portraits of major Canadian cities  195 ta b l e s

3.1 A national and international comparison of Canadian cities on key indicators of transportation and land use   59–61 3.2 Categorization of the distinctive and disparate dimensions of Canadian urbanism  87 3.3 Density factors of Vienna surrounded by Phoenix, 1990  97 6.1 Population growth in Laval, 1941–71  200 6.2 Population growth in Mississauga, 1931–2001  202 6.3 Population growth in Surrey, 1986–2011  204

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Acknowledgments

Behind every book there is a story. In this case, such a narrative in the background of the pages that follow shares something with the diversity that makes cities hotbeds of both creation and frustration. Our collaboration was built upon connecting heterogeneous experience and expertise about cities, development, and mobility. We hoped that our diverse backgrounds and approaches would enable new insight into Canada’s urban trajectory. Yet the resulting disparity also heightened the suspense about where our commitments of time, energy, and labour – significant inputs needed to realize any book project – would wind up in the pages that followed. What enabled us to prevail through this uncertainty was sheer ­mulish stubbornness that can only be described as faith. We convinced each other that something important would be revealed from creating a new base of understanding about the ways in which Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver had built their expressways and rapid transit. This conviction fuelled our commitment when the interplay between research and writing, the heartening and the disheartening, the energizing and the exhausting, the convivial and the lonely, and the exhilarating and the deflating stretched out over close to a decade. Now that our results have become clear, we have many people and organizations to thank for their willingness to help us understand what we were doing along the way and support the financial costs of  this journey. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada launched this endeavour through awarding Anthony Perl and Matt Hern one of their subsequently reformed, and much appreciated, Standard Research Grants. Simon Fraser University also awarded Anthony Perl a small research grant to enable the concluding round

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xiv Acknowledgments

of research on this investigation. And S F U ’s University Publication Fund contributed to the costs of preparing and digitizing the manuscript for publication by McGill-Queen’s University Press. For Anthony Perl and Matt Hern, the hard work and forbearance of a small legion of research assistants close to home helped them gather the data with which we have worked, and many thanks are due to Vincent Hopkins, Adrienne Kinzel, Samantha Lundy, Jordan Magtoto, Joshua Newman, Michael Ohnemus, Michael Oram, Michael Soron, Bjoern Surborg, and Duncan Wlodarczak for all their work in supporting our investigation. In the later stages of the project Denis Agar produced the maps that help to visualize what we uncovered along the way. We are indebted to all these individuals. Further afield, in the world of global mobility data where Jeff Kenworthy has built much insight, thanks are due to the innumerable public servants who work in planning and transport agencies around the world and gave of their time and energy over many years to provide important data on metropolitan areas. Without these individuals, of whom there are too many to name, invaluable perspectives on where and how Canadian urban mobility fits into the global scheme of things would not have been possible in this book. A debt of gratitude is also due to Monika Brunetti, Jeff Kenworthy’s research assistant, who made the latest set of global-cities data collection possible through her time-consuming data entry and data-management process. One would imagine that in a world of exponentially expanding access to online information, it would become easier to obtain the detailed urban data that support much of our comparative analysis. However, it is in many ways the opposite. Owing to the diminution of the government sector generally around the globe, the capacity and willingness of government agencies to assist with data requests are now less than they were decades ago. Data transparency and ease of access to some items have increased due to the Internet. Perversely, at the same time they have also reduced due to commercial confidentiality issues, seen especially in the attempts to restructure public transport to be more business-like and in some cases to partner with private business. Previously, almost anything one wanted to know could be found in comprehensive, audited annual reports from government public transport agencies. This information has now been fragmented into a plethora of sources involving private operators who are less than willing to share data.

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Acknowledgments

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The long and short of global trends is that systematic and carefully assembled urban data in the planning and transport field are impossible to obtain in any country and require years of painstaking assembly. Canada is no exception on this, and indeed the Globe and Mail ran a special feature on 7 May 2019 called “Find the Gap” about the mountain of data gaps that exist in Canadian society. The problems in the transportation field are highlighted on page A11 of this article through a contribution from Jeff Kenworthy. The grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada made our research and other research support possible. Further appreciation is owed to the Canadian Journal of Urban Research, which published our initial findings on the relationship between the global ambitions and the expressway building of Canadian cities, in an article entitled “Streets Paved with Gold: Urban Expressway Building and Global City Formation in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.” We presented early findings at the annual meetings of the Urban Affairs Association’ held in 2010 (Honolulu) and 2011 (New Orleans) and of the American Association of Geographers held in 2012 (New York). There were, of course, many colleagues and friends through the years who helped us think through particularly puzzling findings, talked us down from various ledges, advised us out of technical problems, and directed us away from various goose chases. Special thanks are due to Geoff Mann, Am Johal, Brendon Hemily, Richard Gilbert, and Ken Cameron for their support. At McGill-Queen’s University Press, we immensely appreciated the capabilities and patience of Jacqueline Mason who supported our efforts to make this manuscript as good as it has become, without reminding us of all the time that it took to do so. Our manuscript’s prose was polished and sharpened by Angela Wingfield’s adroit editing and indexing. As always, it is partners, close friends, and families who bear the brunt of writers’ anxieties, self-absorptions, and long hours. To them we offer our constant gratitude, appreciation, and love.

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1 When Canada’s Big Cities Dream Big Visions of Global Gold Dance in Their Heads

Big Moves offers a new perspective on Canada’s three largest cities, Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. Urban scholarship has long sought insights from examining the scale and scope of mobility infrastructure, and here we embrace and extend that analytical tradition. We are adding both a global dimension and a comparative perspective to explore the questions of why Canadian cities built their mobility infrastructure in the ways that they did, and what effects these configurations have exerted on Canada’s urban development. We suggest that new insights can emerge from close consideration of the global influences on urban expressway and rapid-transit infrastructure in each of the three cities. To gain this analytical purchase we have systematically compared each city’s major mobility infrastructure and connected it to the larger context of global-city-development dynamics. Exploring the timing and circumstances of Canadian cities’ emergence into the global urban network reveals new perspectives on transport policy, infrastructure development, and land-use repercussions. A close interrogation of this timing illuminates the driving forces that have shaped the physical form and the socio-economic function of urban mobility in Canada’s large cities. We invite readers to join us in an investigation of when, how, and why Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver invested in their urban mobility infrastructure and what it can tell us about the ways in which Canada’s big cities have emerged and relate to each other and the world. Our exploration is centred upon the era of mass motorization across North America that followed the Second World War, extending from the 1950s through the 1990s. During this time period, distinctive – and

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distinguishing – configurations of expressway and rapid-transit infrastructure were built in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. The resulting mobility and land-use impacts have become apparent over decades and have shaped these cities in fundamental ways, both differentiating them and illustrating the powerful influence of global forces on local agendas and communities within Canadian cities. We argue here that the development trajectories can be understood by reconsidering the confluence of forces that have shaped the realization of major mobility infrastructure in these cities – that is, their expressways and rapidtransit lines. We take care throughout the book to consider the repercussive effects of expressway and transit decisions on larger land-use patterns and to evince the interaction between expressway decisions and the development of rapid-transit infrastructure. Amid all of their particularities, a pattern of global influence on Canadian urban mobility emerges across the three cities. While the effect of expressways on Canadian cities has resembled broader experiences across North America during the twentieth century, Canada’s three largest metropolitan centres have arrived at specific mobility outcomes and impacts through the introduction of major infrastructure. These enigmatic experiences call for analysis that extends beyond municipal boundaries without losing sight of the social and spatial effects that major mobility infrastructure brings to cities. Larger forces emanating from provincial, national, and global sources need to be identified, and compared, to reveal a complete picture. Global-city theories can offer an important lens for clarifying Canada’s varied experience in the development of urban mobility infrastructure. Our foundational claim is that the paths taken by mobility-infrastructure-development plans and programs in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver have depended on when, and to what degrees, these cities aspired to expand mobility in order to advance their position in global financial, trade, cultural, and communication networks. Each city’s degree of aspiration to access and attract global capital – and the resulting community responses – directly influenced its deployment of major mobility infrastructure. Our extended examination of Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver at the specific historical junctures when expressways and rapid transit became part of the urban fabric illuminates both the influence of global-city agendas in Canada and the resulting spatial and social constructions. Without a national expressway-building program to foster policy convergence,1 such as that experienced by the United States (Squires

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2008), the drive to attain, retain, or carve out a recognized place among global cities has been an important factor shaping major mobility infrastructure in Canada’s three largest cities. Previous research into the country’s urban expressway building, and to a lesser extent its transit development, has examined local and provincial policy dynamics, including the role of community organizing, citizen activism, municipal politics, and provincial development agendas (Lee 2007; Bourne 2000; Frisken 1994; Colcord 1987; Kaplan 1982; Leo 1977; Pendakur 1972). These assessments however, have paid relatively little attention to the role that global linkages and agendas play in Canada’s urban transportation development. Differing ambitions and differing timelines of global-city formation and aspiration in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver have critically inflected decisions about how to respond to growing urban automobile travel, and these are worthy of closer examination. We want to add an important note about our use of urban terminology. There are a number of designations for urban space and society that appear throughout this book, and it is critical to outline how and where we deploy specific terms. The scope of this study and its comparative focus led to multiple methodological quandaries, which relying on previous research did not resolve. In the extended time frame that we have chosen to explore, the boundaries of Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver have shifted considerably, and the political maps have been drawn and redrawn by amalgamation, de-­amalgamation, municipal withdrawals and inclusions, and the huge growth of all three urban regions. The challenges of nailing down apples-to-apples comparisons have proven daunting at times, but we feel confident that the path we have charted here is a clear and justifiable one. The key for readers is to be alert to our descriptions of how, where, and when we have made choices about the scale and scope of urban mobility-infrastructure development across time and space. Thus, when we are speaking in the theoretical and macro-senses, the word city, or cities (as in Canada’s big cities), refers to the whole urban region of the place under discussion. This is the everyday, vernacular usage of the term the city – as when someone talks about New York City, it is commonly understood to mean the five boroughs, not just Manhattan. We believe this is an important and politically critical designation to understand cities as more than just lines on a map. When our analysis focuses in particular on data that we have collected and compared across cases, however, out of necessity our

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terminology becomes more precise. When we use metropolitan region, we mean the self-defined urban region including suburban municipalities such as Laval (Montreal), Mississauga (Toronto), or Surrey (Vancouver). When we speak of city centre, core city, or City (capitalized), we are referring to the politically and cartographically defined space within the urban centre, which sometimes includes more than just one municipality but always incorporates the core urban space in which people live and work within that region. When we speak of suburbs, we are referring to the metropolitan regions outside that urban core. For further explication of our methodological approaches, measurements, and chosen demarcations, please refer to the appendix, “Data Dictionary.” the evidence on urban mobility infrastructure across canada

Our search for the forces that have shaped Canadian urban mobility led us to the trio of large cities that are frequently grouped together for examining Canadian urban phenomena. In many fields of inquiry, researchers have long investigated trends and outcomes in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, focusing on these cities as a relevant universe of data. The considerable accumulated body of urban research compares and contrasts these cities and reveals insights into subjects as diverse as immigration patterns (Hou and Bourne 2006; J.T. McDonald 2004; Newbold 1996); housing (Mah and Hackworth 2011; Skaburskis and Moos 2008; Haan 2005; Downs 1997); growth management (Turcotte and Vézina 2010; Shearmur et al. 2007; Tomalty 1997); and quality of life (Murdie 2008; Frenette, Picot, and Sceviour 2004; Mason 2003). We join and seek to add to this analytical trajectory. The major infrastructure needed to move vehicles and people rapidly through a city inevitably exerts powerful impacts on urban form and function, but the effects of Canada’s urban road building, in particular, have been somewhat obscured by the inconsistent use of terminology. Since Canada has no established term for mobility infrastructure that conveys the exclusive functionality of high-speed, high-volume movement of motor vehicles, we have chosen to use the term expressway for the infrastructure category that reveals the clearest evidence of a priority on motor-vehicle movement over public space in an urban setting. But unlike nationally planned and financed highway networks (e.g., the German autobahn or the US Interstate Highway System),2

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specifications of expressways are not consistent throughout Canada’s major cities. For example, as there are no policy prohibitions by higher orders of government on local access to major highways, even the Trans-Canada Highway often blurs into boulevards and other major arterial roads when it transects urban areas. Both planners and planning researchers in Canada have thus treated highway form and function in non-standard ways. Comparing the ways in which expressway infrastructure has influenced Canada’s three largest cities has required us to develop clear and consistent measurement standards for data collection. The core attributes that we identified, both of which must be present to qualify a length of road infrastructure as an expressway, are fully controlled access (i.e., no direct entry to the road from adjacent property) and free-flowing high-speed interchanges with other automotive infrastructure (i.e., no at-grade intersections, whether signalled or not). Once we had consistently identified and measured expressways, we assembled a chronology of all such infrastructure introduced during the twentieth century within each city’s municipal boundary, from the time that Vancouver started making such investments in 1933 until Toronto ended its spending to extend such infrastructure, in 1996. Our definition of rapid-transit infrastructure is consistently shared in and beyond Canada’s large cities, facilitating this dimension of our data collection. Based upon Vuchic’s (2005) comprehensive delineation of public-transport planning and operations, we classify rapid-transit infrastructure as an electrically powered railway operating a frequent service, with high capacity and priority over other modes of urban mobility (TransLink 2016b). Typically, this priority is achieved by using an exclusive right-of-way that is either elevated or below grade. In some cases, however, rapid transit can use city streets in a fully reserved lane and with signal priority. In Ottawa, for example, busways have provided rapid-transit infrastructure without rails, but these do not exist yet in Montreal, Toronto, or Vancouver. The physical and financial data on urban expressways and rapid transit will be fully presented and examined in chapter 4. They demonstrate that Montreal spent less to build more expressways overall, compared with Toronto and Vancouver, because it pursued multiple expressways earlier and with a close connection to global mega-events (e.g., Expo 67 and the 1976 Olympic games). Toronto created an intermediate-sized but truncated network of both expressways and rapid transit, and Vancouver built almost no expressways and no rapid

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transit in its urban core until provincial and municipal officials joined forces to leverage another global mega-event, Expo 86, to assemble the investment needed to launch its rapid-transit network. The timing of expressway and rapid-transit construction in each city is central to revealing the global influences on Canada’s urban mobility that this book seeks to interpret. We believe that documenting and interrogating the circumstances that either enabled or impeded expressway and rapid-transit construction can shed new light on the ways in which globalized ambitions have influenced the building of major mobility infrastructure in Canadian cities. The global aspirations of each city, and the success of its attempts to access the necessary capital, allowed certain mobility infrastructure and development possibilities to be realised. But not all the dreams for major mobility infrastructure that were embodied in plans and political platforms came true. The fact that Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver were at demonstrably different stages of global-city formation from the 1960s through the 1980s, when their formative mobility-infrastructure development was being advanced, led to strikingly different expressway and rapid-transit outcomes. The chapters that follow chronicle and compare these experiences, moving from east to west geographically. We peel back the multiple layers of planning, policy, and politics that envelop the major mobility-infrastructure initiatives that have shaped Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. Each chapter highlights a different theme that can advance our understanding as we puzzle out how global forces have become engaged and entangled with local visions of what a city should be, and how the burdens and benefits of such visions have been distributed. In the balance of this chapter we focus on identifying the variation in the key global linkages that existed when Canada’s largest cities formulated their plans for expanding mobility infrastructure. We highlight the relative autonomy that these cities obtained in initiating their major mobility goals, attaining a degree of freedom as a consequence (perhaps unintended) of the federal government’s mostly steering clear of developing both a national urban policy and a national transportation policy during the postwar decades, with only occasional exceptions. The timing and degree of global-city formation varied considerably across the three largest cities, with profound implications for their approaches to mobility development.

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g l o b a l - c i t y at t r i b u t e s s h a p i n g canadian urban mobility

For a generation now, global-city theory has provided a central conceptual framework for understanding urban development and reconfiguration in a post-industrial age. Drawing on Hall (1966), Friedmann (1986), and many others with roots as deep as the early twentieth century (Geddes 1950), global-city theorists have sought to examine the international connections between cities in business, commerce, and culture in order to understand the swiftly changing relationships between urban development and global economic and social networks. Sassen (2001), Castells (2000), Abu-Lughod (1999), Beaverstock, Smith, and Taylor (2000), and many, many others have developed foundational insights into the interaction between global influences and their local impacts on cities. The past several decades have seen a profusion of global-city research that assembles information and accumulates data to build and reshape theories of the effect of global forces on cities. While global-city theory provides a solid base of knowledge on which to build our analysis, most efforts to capture and refine understandings of global-city positioning, linkages, and outcomes have focused on events and trends in the more recent past than those of our investigation. We strongly believe that analyzing global influences on Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver beginning earlier in the twentieth century is a necessary precondition to understanding the factors and forces that have shaped the mobility attributes of these cities. Beyond helping to explain the major mobility-infrastructure variation among Canada’s three largest cities, a more historically grounded global-city analysis responds to some important critiques that have been levelled against this approach to understanding urban conditions. These critiques include the exclusion of smaller metropolitan areas and most cities in the global south from global-city analysis (J. Robinson 2002); the need to recognize that all cities exhibit globalcity characteristics (Amin and Graham 1997); the challenge of explaining heterogeneity in global-city formation processes across multiple locations (Thrift 1996); the need to account for the interrelationship of cities, regions, and states (Smith 2001); the limitations of an analytical approach that relies upon narrowly specified economic indicators (King 2015); the fetishization and performativity

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of ranking cities against one another based on an exclusive set of characteristics (McCann et al. 2013); and the tendency of global-city theory to exclude huge portions of every city’s population from its analytical field of vision (Buechler 2014). Examining Canada’s bigcity mobility development during much of the twentieth century, and the response of social movements, can help us reimagine each of these three cities with greater subtlety and nuance than global-city theory often implies. We thus seek to advance and augment global-city theory by more seriously integrating difference and specificity of place into our research. There is considerable asymmetry among Canada’s largest cities during the twentieth century’s major mobility-infrastructure development that we explore. When expressway building moved into high gear across North America, Montreal was unequivocally Canada’s biggest node in the global economy, building on its historical trading relationships with Europe and emergent, but extensive, commercial ties to the United States. In the 1960s, Montreal was recognized as Canada’s pre-eminent city and the country’s primary point of contact with the centres of money and power in Europe and North America. Bankers and capitalists seeking investment would typically go to Montreal first and only proceed to Toronto if they had not found what they were looking for there (F. Martin 1979). Montreal was the hub for investment capital to flow into the country through the mid-1960s, after which Toronto’s economic influence began to surpass it. It was only during the 1970s that “the massive shift of Canadian head offices out of Montreal (mainly to Toronto) accelerated in the immediate aftermath of the election of the first indépendantiste Parti Québécois government in 1976” (Germain and Rose 2000, 2). Similarly, throughout most of the 1960s, Montreal led Canada as a gateway for international air travel, the primary mobility mode for postwar globalization, both by Canadians returning from abroad and by international visitors. Airport-passenger-arrivals data (fig. 1.1) reveal that through 1967 Montreal was the primary port of entry for Canadians returning from overseas. Toronto received fewer than half of the international travellers arriving in Montreal when the world’s attention was focused on Expo 67, a combined world’s fair and celebration of Canada’s centennial that had a profound influence on Montreal’s mobility infrastructure, discussed in detail in chapter 4. Thereafter Toronto surpassed Montreal as the primary port, and throughout the 1970s its lead in international air transport traffic

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1,000,000 Toronto

Passengers

800,000

600,000 Montreal

400,000

Vancouver

200,000 0 1958

1963

1968

Year

1973

1978

1983

Figure 1.1  Canadian residents returning from overseas air travel by port of entry, 1958–84 Source: Dominion Bureau of Statistics (1958–70), catalogue no. 66-201; Statistics Canada (1971–72), catalogue no. 66-201; Statistics Canada (1973–84), catalogue no. 66-001.

became significant. Vancouver was a very distant third among the country’s international civil aviation gateways during this time. Figure 1.2 reveals that arriving international visitors were also initially concentrated in Montreal, which was Canada’s top port of entry for non-immigrant international visitors until 1968. During Expo 67, Canada’s international visitors headed disproportionately to Montreal. The data further underline that Montreal was Canada’s pre-eminent global city with its highest density of international connectivity through the 1960s. As will be seen in subsequent chapters, by the time that Toronto became the leading global city, many significant decisions on major mobility infrastructure had already been made in both cities. Meanwhile, Vancouver had few global-city attributes when it faced and rejected its most famous (or perhaps infamous) expressway-building proposition. Toronto’s transformation from being the second city to being the country’s leading global city was triggered by the uncertainty over Quebec’s future within Canada. The election of the Parti Québécois in 1976, with an avowed agenda to take Quebec, and Montreal with

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700,000 600,000 Toronto

Passengers

500,000 400,000 300,000 Montreal

200,000

Vancouver 100,000 0 1963

1968

1973 Year

1978

1983

Figure 1.2  Visitors from overseas countries entering Canada through air travel by port of entry, 1963–84 Source: Dominion Bureau of Statistics (1963–70), catalogue no. 66-201; Statistics Canada (1971–73), catalogue no. 66-201; Statistics Canada (1973–84), catalogue no. 66-001.

it, out of Confederation triggered a wave of capital flight and marked the start of a relatively abrupt relocation of globally focused businesses and investment from Montreal (Albert 1980). This rebalancing of Canada’s financial centre of gravity was concretized when the Bank of Montreal (1975) and the Royal Bank of Canada (1976) moved most of their operations to Toronto, although their registered headquarters remained in Montreal. This meant that all five major Canadian banks (Royal Bank of Canada, Bank of Montreal, Scotiabank, Toronto-Dominion Bank, and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce) became functionally centred around Toronto’s Bay Street (Rice and Semple 1993). The financial sector’s relocation from Montreal to Toronto was mirrored by corporate moves in other sectors. From 1970 to 1981 Toronto saw huge gains in company headquarters for the resource,

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20,000 Financial Manufacturing Resources Service

Assets/Revenues ($1,000,000)

15,000 10,000 5,000 0 –5,000

–10,000 –15,000

Montreal

Toronto City

Vancouver

Figure 1.3  Corporate-headquarter relocations by sector, 1970–81. Source: Adapted from Semple and Green (1983).

manufacturing, service, utility, and financial sectors, while Montreal hemorrhaged them. As shown in figure 1.3, no other city in Canada (including Vancouver) exhibited significant aggregate gains in corporate relocations during this period, meaning that Toronto’s gain in corporate offices came overwhelmingly at Montreal’s expense (Semple and Green 1983; Semple and Smith 1981). Stock-exchange-transaction data demonstrate a similar rebalancing of equity markets between Montreal and Toronto during the 1960s and 1970s. The two cities were on relatively equal footing in terms of issues traded into the 1960s. Although there were considerably more shares traded in Toronto, more of Canada’s major corporations were listed in Montreal. Both exchanges were among the busiest in North America with a 1958 ranking of “second [Toronto] and fourth [Montreal], respectively, … in terms of share volume and third [Toronto] and sixth [Montreal] in terms of dollar volume” (Walter and Williamson 1960, 313). By 1976, Montreal accounted for only 25% of stock-market transactions across Canada, and its share fell

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further to about 10% in 1982. Although Montreal’s share of transactions on Canadian equity exchanges would rise again to almost 20%, it was back down to 10% by 1998 (Shearmur 2001, 222–4). Courchene (2001) shows that Toronto’s financial and corporate leadership functions were further entrenched following free trade agreements with the United States, and later Mexico, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (N A F T A ). Beginning in the 1980s and accelerating through the 1990s, the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) became Canada’s economic epicentre, the preferred location for American and other foreign corporations to locate their Canadian subsidiary headquarters, and by far the most globally integrated urban region. Toronto made a key transition – from a national economic capital with some international reach, to the GTA, a full-blown, globally integrated city that is intimately tied to N AF T A’s emerging geopolitical reality. As a percentage of Ontario’s gross domestic product (GDP), international exports increased from just above 30% in 1981 to over 50% in 1998, and interprovincial exports, also just above 30% in 1981, fell to under 20% in 1998 (Courchene 2001, 160). Although Toronto developed major connections to global economic networks by the late 1970s, Vancouver had few global-city attributes and fewer aspirations of attaining these until it hosted Expo 86. Even after this global mega-event and despite some international real estate investment, there was little evidence of global economic integration in corporate headquarters, financial services, and stock exchange or foreign asset location in the 1980s (Olds 1995; Semple and Green 1983). Vancouver only became identifiable as a genuine global-city aspirant during the 1990s, driven by infusions of Asian capital and by federal and provincial initiatives to create a “Pacific gateway” that would further the growth of Western Canada’s trade, natural resource, real estate, and tourism sectors. This gateway function would be ­fostered by major infrastructure investments to facilitate movement through Metro Vancouver’s port facilities, already the biggest in Canada (Germain and Rose 2000; Olds 1995; Pomfret 1993; Easterbrook and Aitken 1988; Marr and Paterson 1980). As these data highlight, during the postwar decades Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver had very different relationships with the economic and social forces that propagated global-city dynamics. This was reflected in the cities’ distinctive abilities, appetites, and agendas to assemble the considerable capital necessary to expand urban transportation infrastructure. With Canada lacking a national framework

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for public finance of such infrastructure, the effects of global-city formation were magnified. The differentiation in global-city dynamics can be seen in how the leadership of each city sought to advance mobility-infrastructure plans and in the reactions of social movements within each city to resist those proposals. t h e m u ta b l e s t r at e g i e s f o r b u i l d i n g u r b a n mobility across canada

Before presenting the physical and financial data on major mobility infrastructure that will be detailed in subsequent chapters, we broadly characterize each city along a single continuum of urban aspiration. We suggest that more ambitiously scaled dreams were consistently inspired by civic elites hoping to bring global attention and investment to their cities. Conversely, and often in direct opposition, humbler and more locally animated visions were articulated by residents and broadbased activist networks. These visions collided in each city but with very different results. Montreal’s political and economic elites articulated a distinctive approach to postwar urban-mobility infrastructure that was big, bold, and brash. The city’s vision of modern mobility was enabled and shaped by Quebec’s attempt to break from a traditional society dominated by the Catholic Church and controlled by a small, parochial elite (Germain and Rose 2000; Colcord 1987). This rupture was characterized by Quebeckers’ determination to assert French-Canadian control over economic and social development (Charbonneau, Hamel, and Michel Barcelo 1994; Colcord 1987). Montreal was uniquely positioned at the heart of this strategy to be Quebec’s gateway to the world, as it had already developed into Canada’s principal corporate, financial, and international mobility hub. That vision was manifested in bold plans for very ambitious major mobility infra structure by a unique municipal leader, Montreal’s long-serving mayor, Jean Drapeau. From 1954 to 1986, with a short break between 1957 and 1960, Mayor Jean Drapeau realized the most ambitious urban-growth agenda that Canada had yet seen. He identified mobility as an essential component in advancing Montreal to the top tier of world cities. Speaking to the Canadian Club of Montreal in 1978, Drapeau noted that “the way transport is assured may change but transport itself remains one of the factors which has the most impact on the possibility for a city to become and remain a metropolis” (1978, 10). And he had

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no doubt about the scale of infrastructure needed to facilitate metropolitan mobility – the bigger the better. Addressing the Montreal Chamber of Commerce, Mayor Drapeau insisted that “without greatness, there is no metropolis” (1985, 7). Drapeau’s vision was not universally shared, and the physical and fiscal burdens of inserting expressways into many of Montreal’s communities prompted considerable resistance, as will be discussed in chapter 5. But, whether critical or credulous, the understanding of the mobility options for Montreal was shaped by Drapeau’s success in committing, and some would say overcommitting, his municipality to a series of mobility megaprojects. There is a clear correlation between Montreal’s boundless global-city ambitions from the mid-twentieth century and its grand and costly mobility-infrastructure investments. Meanwhile in Toronto both expressway and rapid-transit infrastructure building were initially motivated by more modest aspirations. Although its building efforts would eventually fall behind what Montreal was able to create in the years between 1967 and 1976, Toronto began sooner, launching its first expressway years ahead of Montreal and building Canada’s first subway more than a decade before the opening of the Montreal Metro. Toronto’s early expressways traversed undeveloped natural spaces and lightly populated industrial areas, imposing relatively light burdens on established communities. The Province of Ontario invested substantially in the expressways that were built in and around Toronto, without federal assistance and without any overt agenda for advancing Toronto’s global-city status, which was modest at the time. Also unlike in Montreal, major mobility-infrastructure development in Toronto proceeded in a decidedly incremental fashion, without the looming deadline of an Expo or Olympics requiring simultaneous construction of multiple modes and routes (Osbaldeston 2008; Solomon 2007; Filion 2000). The first decade of Toronto’s major mobility development thus imposed fewer concentrated burdens on established communities, but that easygoing dynamic changed with the Spadina Expressway, the construction of which started in 1963. Planned to improve access between Toronto and the fast-developing suburb of North York, the expressway was designed to include an inner-city ring of feeder expressways that would have to be built through some of Toronto’s iconic neighbourhoods, including Kensington Market, the Annex, Chinatown, and Forest Hill, communities that were home to a gentrifying middle class (Ley 1988, 1994). The community reaction to

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this infrastructure and the successful mobilization against the plan will be detailed in chapter 5, but when the idea that Toronto did not need a comprehensive urban-expressway infrastructure was endorsed by Premier William Davis in 1971, a new vision for enabling urban mobility was introduced. The aspiration for major mobility in what would soon become Canada’s largest metropolis shifted to a trajectory that eschewed maximizing any one form of infrastructure and embraced making the most of more diverse, but less expensive and disruptive, infrastructure within the urban core. Just as Montreal’s dreams of monumental infrastructure drew criticism, Toronto’s vision of modesty has had its critics, especially in more recent years as the urban population has grown while the capacity limits to mobility have remained the same, and congestion has accumulated. The infrastructure parsimony established during the 1970s has yielded an outcome in which neither automobiles nor transit systems are viewed as effectively meeting Toronto’s burgeoning mobility needs (Toronto Board of Trade 2010, 39). The civic elite of Vancouver has also long dreamed big about the role of mobility in advancing the city’s prospects. From its founding as a “terminal city” for the Canadian Pacific’s transcontinental railway infrastructure, outmanoeuvring the neighbouring tidewater communities of Port Moody and Port Coquitlam, not to mention the far more developed settlement of New Westminster, Vancouver has leveraged the synergy between transportation infrastructure and urban land development. In the postwar decades these dreams sought to remake the city on an even grander scale (Berelowitz 2005; Pendakur 1972). By 1957 an agenda for urban renewal requiring “blight” removal, slum clearance, and transportation improvement had been formally articulated in the Vancouver Redevelopment Study (City of Vancouver 1957). This report proposed extensive neighbourhood reconfiguration and expressway construction following the US model to extend the existing Trans-Canada Highway through the city’s heart, bisecting the historic Strathcona and Chinatown neighbourhoods and then cutting through Gastown and along the downtown waterfront, before crossing over Burrard Inlet. As in Montreal and Toronto, these expressway plans triggered resistance and protest – in this case by a diverse set of coalitions including Chinatown business people, Strathcona residents, neighbourhood groups, civic activists, and local politicians, as examined in chapter 5.

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Unlike in Montreal, however, in Vancouver the paucity of global-city attributes made it difficult for urban-growth proponents to claim plausibly that an inner-city expressway would be a sure bet for advancing prosperity. And, unlike in Toronto before the Spadina Expressway’s reversal, the provincial government of the day in British Columbia was not inclined to channel infrastructure funding into an urban centre where it faced significant political opposition. Community resistance to expressway construction in Vancouver was creative and persistent (as it was in Montreal and Toronto), and city elites were unable to invoke either a persuasive vision of global-city development or a compelling rationale to justify the necessary investment, whether from the Province or elsewhere. This combination proved fatal for expressway-building plans in Vancouver. When the major mobility-infrastructure experiences of the twentieth century in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver are compared in the context of transportation policy and local government (the two lenses that have most often been used to interpret each city’s major mobility development), the outcomes appear quite idiosyncratic. So too do their rationales and rationalizations for developing mobility infrastructure. If one takes into account, however, the global attributes and aspirations of each city at the time that the visions of urban mobility were proposed, we submit that another valuable explanatory rationale will emerge. w h at c a n a d a ’ s d i v e r g e n t u r b a n - m o b i l i t y trajectories can reveal

This chapter’s consideration of how global-city attributes have impinged upon dreams and visions of urban mobility across Canada lays the foundation for the rest of the book. The evidence presented thus far will help to reveal more about how and why Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver pursued different paths in developing their major mobility infrastructure during the twentieth century. In the absence of both a federal highway-building program and a national urban-planning framework, these differences offer evidence about the effect that unmediated global influences from trade, finance, and communication can have on ambitions to reshape local mobility. Indeed, the transportation outcomes in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver cannot be fully explained without appreciating how the decisions about urban mobility were influenced by global dynamics.

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This book builds upon the global-city variations highlighted earlier, to create a comprehensive explanation of the emergence and development of major mobility infrastructure in Canada’s three largest cities. We believe that by exploring the urban-expressway and rapid-transit origins in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver within the context of global-city aspirations, we can contribute to a greater understanding of mobility in these three city regions. We also hope to advance the understanding that can be offered by Canadian urban theory on what distinguishes Canada’s city-making experience from the global dynamics of urbanization. In chapter 2, “Making and Remaking Mobility in Canada’s Global Cities,” we explore the notion of the “Canadian” city and what major mobility development can add to the debate over its relevance. Following the work and subsequent debates around Goldberg and Mercer’s Myth of the North American City, we consider whether it makes sense to speak of Canadian cities and Canadian urbanism as distinctive entities. We demonstrate how Canadian cities are mostly marked by divergence, at least in their approaches to developing mobility infrastructure. We do identify one shared characteristic, however, pointing out a common tendency to equivocate on the high cost and high stakes presented by major mobility options. Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver each present evidence of hedging their bets, of compromising with community concerns, and of trying to ameliorate some of the impacts of major mobility infrastructure. Canadians are often mocked for having such conciliatory traits embedded within their political culture, but in chapter 2 we consider the capacity to advance multiple and conflicting policy goals in parallel over time to be an underappreciated ingredient in Canada’s urban-planning outcomes. In chapter 3, “Comparing Canadian Urban Mobility: Patterns of Confluence, Divergence, and Specificity,” we provide a comparative overview of the existing transport infrastructure in each city, noting how the channels for increasing the speed and volume of mobility can reveal the influence of specific global-local interactions. The cities display some similarities and some particularities in their mobility patterns, but they have taken very different routes to get there, and the social and spatial consequences of their infrastructure configuration have differed accordingly. To gain perspective on the mobility outcomes in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, we compare their results with data from cities in North America, Europe, and Asia.

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Chapter 4, “Flows of Capital and Traffic,” deepens and sharpens the focus of our analysis by looking even more closely into the development of major mobility infrastructure in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. Having assembled a unique data set that measures the physical and financial parameters of major mobility infrastructure, we can present and compare new findings about each city’s expressway and rapid-transit legacy through key measures of total system length, cumulative capital expenditure, and rolling investment patterns. We also consider where each city sourced the necessary capital and on what terms it was invested. We then show how these findings reinforce and support our interpretation that policy equivocation is the common characteristic that binds urban mobility across Canada’s diversity of infrastructure form and function in big cities. In chapter 5, “Globalized Agendas Confront Local Priorities,” we examine community resistance to proposals for expressway, and occasionally rapid-transit, infrastructure in each city. Strategies and schemes intended to attract global capital into urban milieus have been typically met with protest and resistance, particularly when their effects impose immediate costs on the local citizenry. Community organizing in each city, however, exhibits distinctive contours and characteristics, which we will identify. We then consider how the particularities of these local visions have shaped, and been shaped by, the global-city aspirations at specific junctures in each city’s infrastructure-development trajectory. In our final chapter, titled “Canaburbs and the Future of Urban Equivocation,” we extend our analysis into each city’s surrounding region and make the initial foray into exploring how the nature and extent of constructing urban expressway and rapid-transit infrastructure have influenced the mobility strategies in the suburbs. We suggest that the outcomes of equivocation on major mobility infrastructure in Canada’s three largest cities have yielded particular and distinctive suburban implications that can be identified in the communities of Laval, Mississauga, and Surrey, which were selected as the most populous adjacent communities and thus the places where the effects of mobility-infrastructure choices made in the urban core are most likely to manifest. We conclude the book by probing whether the suburban mobility configurations around each big city in Canada could represent an extension of the policy equivocation that was incubated in the fiscal and physical histories we have assembled.

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2 Making and Remaking Mobility in Canada’s Global Cities

In an era of frenzied and volatile urban restructuring, Canada’s three largest cities – Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver – are often heralded as exemplars of urban livability and have been cited as worthy of emulation. These reputations call for closer examination, and we are interested in how the interplay of development agendas, global-city aspirations, and local community visions in each city has unfolded over time. We believe that a particularly fruitful perspective on these dynamics can be gained by examining major mobility-infrastructure financing during the twentieth century. We think that this information, which has long been obscured by its diffusion in multiple layers of government budgets and agency reports, offers valuable knowledge that can help explain the development of big cities across Canada. In this chapter we consider a key attribute of the rationale behind this infrastructure financing that can help both explain and conceptually connect the diversity of mobility outcomes we will chronicle in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. That attribute is the tendency of urban leaders to equivocate when it comes to making costly and contested investment decisions about major mobility infrastructure. The equivocation on when and how to invest large sums of capital on urban mobility infrastructure arises from a deep-seated predilection in policy-making that extends across the spectrum of Canadian governments. This phenomenon was clearly articulated by Carolyn Tuohy (1992, 4), who observed that Canada exhibited a fundamental “ambivalence about the roles of the state and the market, about national and regional conceptions of political community, and about individualist and collectivist concepts of rights and responsibilities.” Ambivalence about these fundamental principles of politics and markets is more than just a state of mind grounded in Canada’s culture.

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Tuohy (1992, 5) goes on to point out that Canadian ambivalence “is institutionalized, it is ‘built in’ to the structures of the state” by combining both written and unwritten components into the nation’s constitution, juxtaposing a centralized Westminster parliamentary government in both Ottawa and the provinces with decentralized federalism, and connecting parliamentary supremacy to a constitutional charter of rights. Institutionalized ambivalence has been identified and examined in investigations, for example, into the ways in which boundary representation in Canadian art has affected Canadians’ sense of place in the world (McGregor 2003). This frame has also been applied in much more focused policy analysis in the areas of Canadian employment insurance and parental benefits (DiGiacomo 2008), data protection (Bennett 1996), urban workforce development programs (Bramwell 2012), and earlier Canadian urban mobility (Perl and Pucher 1995). We see the equivocation arising from Canada’s institutionalized ambivalence as offering a perspective on how the particularities of urban mobility development have been connected to the prevalence of global institutional influences that have been transmitted through the increasing flows of trade, finance, and culture. Such an interpretive focus offers an explanation that is more precise and meaningful than the overarching application of a “Canadian” typology to this dimension of the national urban experience. It is our contention that most long-standing efforts to identify and explain a Canadian form of urban and regional development have underestimated the cumulative and distinguishing effects of globalized influences over time. We see a meaningful particularity in the degree to which urban mobility-infrastructure investments have been linked to the pursuit of increasingly globalized capital in historically distinctive ways. Many urban researchers have considered how Canada’s transport infrastructure has impinged upon local communities and consequently shaped land-use and other policy decisions (Lee 2007; Lightbody 2005; Bourne 2000; Frisken 1994; Colcord 1987; Kaplan 1982; Leo 1977; Pendakur 1972; Watt and Ayres 1974). In search of further insight we build upon their assessments by linking major mobility-infrastructure development to the particular global financial engagements of Canadian cities at specific moments in time. Canada is both a socially diverse and a geographically dispersed nation, and major Canadian cities are separated not only by considerable

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distance but also by the timing of their development initiatives and by their distinctive local identities (Turcotte and Vézina 2010; Murdie 2008; Shearmur et al. 2007; Frenette, Picot, and Sceviour 2004; Mason 2003; Tomalty 1997). We propose that the genesis of such particularities can be better understood through an interpretive calculus that recognizes global-city-development strategies, which can in turn highlight the interaction between global forces and local community agendas and aspirations. Such analysis will shed new light on how Canadian cities have been constructed, what those results have meant for their inhabitants, and what others might learn from these results, both close to home and perhaps also farther afield. To understand the development of Canadian cities, it is useful to reflect on what is simultaneously illuminated and obscured by speaking about the Canadian city as a distinctive category of urban space. We are dubious of the value that would be created by trying to conceptualize a Canadian city. Aaron Moore concurs and claims that “there is no ‘Canadian’ and no ‘American’ archetypal city any more than there is a North American one, or a Mexican one” (2014, 230). Certainly, all countries have distinctive urban regions with particular characteristics, and national context matters significantly, but Canada’s three largest cities are notable not only in their physical distance from one another but also in the degree to which they differ in social character, spatial structure, and economic-development trajectories. Canada’s indisputable regional diversity underlines the need to analyze each city by first identifying the relationship between local and global development forces and then interrogating those relationships and their particular influences on economic, cultural, and social attributes. We believe that new insight into the degree of distinction among Canadian cities will emerge from an exploration of the cumulative fiscal and physical inputs to the construction of their major mobility infrastructure. Considering how that infrastructure has been influenced by conceptions of community and then has shaped the subsequent qualities of place can help reveal what Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver share in common as Canadian cities, as well as what they represent as unique urban entities. The question of what might distinguish Canada’s approach to urban mobility takes us squarely into the debate over what, if anything, is unique about Canadian urbanism, a question to which we feel our research findings can speak directly.

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some canadian urban myths from the perspective of mobility

A closer look at the history of major mobility infrastructure will expose some myths about Canadian cities that have circulated among urbanists both within and beyond Canada. Despite their increasing levels of unaffordability, each city is still widely lauded for its ostensibly livable, sustainable, and resilient attributes. Montreal has often been described as Canada’s “cultural capital” (Wingrove 2008), Toronto as “New York run by the Swiss” (Conlin 2005), and more recently Vancouver as among “the most liveable cities in the world” (The Economist 2011). Each city has made repeat appearances near the top of mainstream global best-city rankings created by various organizations that take it upon themselves to grade the quality of urban living around the globe (The Economist 2011; Mercer 2017). And Canada’s three big cities have been invoked by urbanists, planners, and politicians as examples of good practice (Harcourt and Cameron 2007; Punter 2003). These stereotypes place Canadian cities in a class by themselves, especially when compared to their southern neighbours in the United States. In part because of their well-guarded and assiduously maintained reputations, each of these cities has attained some significance as a global node in one or more economic sectors such as trade, banking, finance, industry, and tourism (Sassen 2001, 2006; Beaverstock, Smith, and Taylor 1999), and each exhibits a duality of urban and suburban development patterns with extensive areas of sprawl ­surrounding “smart growth” cores (McCann and Simmons 2000; Bourne 2000). There is a self-congratulatory sentiment among some prominent Canadian urbanists, in particular, that the nation’s three largest cities occupy a position of deserved international recognition (Harcourt and Cameron 2007; Bunce 2004; Mason 2003; Punter 2003). It is often claimed that Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal have been able to navigate a successful course between competing development paradigms, in no small part because of successful transportation-infrastructure investments, which have enabled a unique urban amalgam that allows a symbiosis between often-conflicting land-use trajectories. Juri Pill, for example, once famously described Toronto as “Vienna surrounded by Phoenix” (1990).

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In 1986, reacting to a long-standing tendency of urban scholars to group North American cities together in their examinations, Michael Goldberg and Joseph Mercer published The Myth of the North American City, which remains the most important and most referenced book of Canadian-American comparative urbanism to date. As such, it offers a compelling conceptual portal for reconsidering Canadian cities and their particular characters. Goldberg and Mercer, both academic émigrés in Canada, argue that “Canadian metropolitan centres, while having certain features and characteristics in common with American centres, are sufficiently distinctive to require a separate theoretical treatment, a different policy making framework and a contrasting experimental sensibility” (1986, 227) They further argue that cities “inevitably bear the imprint of the nations and cultures within which they are formed” (139) and claim that, despite often being separated by huge distances, Canadian cities are similar to one another rather than to their geographically proximate or scale-­ equivalent American counterparts. Their book was firmly embedded within what has been termed “national character” literature and argues that Canadians, as a whole, display greater tendencies toward trust in government, deference to authority, and attraction to public (as opposed to private) enterprises. Goldberg and Mercer suggest that these characteristics fundamentally shape urban form, urban densities, development priorities, governmental relations, and social milieus. They contrast Canadian and American characters, respectively, as “collectivist vs. individualist” and “multiculturalist vs. assimilationist” and argue (incongruously, at first glance) that despite Canadians’ supposed deferential attitudes to authority, their expectations of public interventionism have precipitated a greater degree of conflict between federal, provincial, and municipal authorities. These putative cultural attributes, which Goldberg and Mercer claim to have identified, have manifested themselves ostensibly in Canadians’ preference for living in city centres as opposed to Americans’ embrace of suburbia. The greater tendencies are posited to be both the cause and the effect of more peaceable social relations in Canada. As Canadians value multiculturalism and collectivity, their cities are necessarily more livable; as Americans prefer suburban isolation, which reflects their focus on individualism, their cities thus are fragmented and fractious places, especially with regard to racial tensions. Goldberg

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and Mercer joined a chorus of critics who argued that these supposed preferences in the United States had been fuelled by the federally funded interstate-expressway infrastructure that simultaneously created urban blight while facilitating suburban dispersion. This comparative analysis of Canadian and American cities remains a tremendously popular trope in both academic and general discourses. In 2014 the International Journal of Canadian Studies (IJCS ) published a special issue entitled “Reopening the Myth of the North American City Debate.” Contributors revisited Goldberg and Mercer’s work, examined the state of Canadian-American comparative urban literature since 1986, and queried how the understanding of Canadian cities had evolved as a subject of urban and policy research. These authors made a collective case that Goldberg and Mercer’s work specifically, Canadian-American comparative analysis, and the larger field of comparative urban studies generally, all retain value. But the special issue’s editor, Kristin Good, also contended that there was much to gain from reconsidering Goldberg and Mercer’s findings: “The most striking element of this collection … is that … all [articles] either directly or indirectly reject, or provide evidence that undermines, Goldberg and Mercer’s cultural approach to explaining differences between American and Canadian cities and the way they are governed. Some … of the articles challenge what is perhaps the most fundamental hypothesis of their work, the idea that cities in the two countries fall into two national groups and that cities are simply reflections of national factors and should be studied as such” (Good 2014, 13). There can be little question that national frameworks influence urban development. Federal governments, national policy trajectories, intergovernmental relations, historical ties, and shared legal, military, economic, and cultural heritages each contribute to shaping cities. It is highly problematic, however, to overstate and oversimplify the claim that national structures and borders create generalizable urban characteristics that can be studied as consistent categories. As Frances Frisken (1986) noted around the time that Goldberg and Mercer’s work first appeared, subsuming sub-national, regional, and local variation into grand, national narratives tends to obscure complexity and mask difference. A more productive approach, shared among contributors to the IJCS special issue, is to ask, How do national contexts exert their causal effect? Many of the researchers who examined Goldberg and Mercer’s book in retrospect and who consider urban particularities in Canada have moved on to “privilege institutions and new

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institutionalism’s theoretical frameworks over cultural factors and theories” (Good 2014, 22; italics in the original). In accord with this retrospective evaluation, we recognize that while Goldberg and Mercer identified meaningful distinctions between American and Canadian cities and illuminated some important variances, their efforts should not have stopped at the national border. We need to extend their analysis beyond simply national differentiation to consider the variation between large Canadian cities. We do not mean to suggest that discarding national character, national culture, or national politics will advance the interpretation of urban outcomes, but we seek to situate these viewpoints intersectionally and in relation to local specificities. It is essential to consider the how, when, why, and where of national and international interaction with a specific local urban context. Just as there is no single “American” analytical frame that can explain urban development in New York, Jacksonville, Seattle, Phoenix, and New Orleans, there is no single framework for understanding Canadian urban outcomes. Canada has a small population with a low number of cities that exhibit significant global-city formation. Canadian cities also have more institutional and physical space separating them from their national government, and a more varied relationship with their provincial government overseers, compared with the relative consistency of the US federal and state influence on American cities. One significant example of such institutional openness is the absence of any pan-Canadian road-building program that is commensurate with the United States’ Interstate Highway initiative. This has left considerable room for Canada’s cities to approach transportation in different ways over time. We suggest that understanding any Canadian city requires both empirical and conceptual pluralism, and thus in this book we attempt to explain some critical junctures in big city building that have been either underemphasized or misinterpreted by previous literature on Canadian urbanism. We will explain how the yearning for global status has intersected with the availability of capital for major mobility infrastructure and then has confronted dissent from local resistance movements at critical junctures to shape Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal. We will thus consider institutional and other structural dynamics, alongside national cultural and social characteristics, as influences on urban mobility. In the balance of this chapter we will examine each city’s major mobility-development strategy from the top downwards.

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That is to say, we will highlight the tactics and the approaches that municipal, and occasionally provincial and federal, government leaders adopted and at times adapted to deliver the twentieth-century expressway and rapid-transit infrastructure that channels movement within and through Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. After examining these infrastructure outputs in detail in chapters 3 and 4, we will revisit the debates and conflict over this same infrastructure from the ground upwards, by looking at the local community concerns and challenges to creating this infrastructure. Such a multi-layered examination of postwar Canadian urban development reveals evidence that can explain the interplay between global-city aspirations and local contentions over the burdens imposed by major mobility infrastructure. The connection between global investment in cities and local transport-infrastructure development has been largely absent from the literature on Canadian urbanism to date (Filion et al. 2010; Lightbody 2005; Gereke 1991). We propose that searching out the “meaning” of a Canadian city requires looking beyond the nation’s borders to examine the exogenous influences that help shape each urban region’s development aspirations and debates at specific junctures. This needs to be complemented by exploring the reaction and resistance of local communities and social movements that were challenged by these visions. And we begin that consideration by identifying how global-city aspirations were pursued, and at times compromised, when mayors and councillors discovered that the mobility infrastructure that appeared to be appropriate and necessary to some was also seen to be exorbitant and unjustified by others. perspectives of power on contending urban mobility goals

An institutional perspective that transcends national structures to capture clearly the interaction between the global and the local can also help reveal the interactions around contention over Canada’s urban mobility agenda. As Urbaniak (2014, 206) notes, “there are many variables, of which national context is but one,” and while it is critical to place urban-development trajectories within their national and regional contexts, we suggest that Canada’s urban singularities of experience and history demand a careful examination that recognizes the governance configuration of local institutions. That configuration has been regularly influenced by global input.

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Taylor (2014, 54) contends that the global forces influencing national urban characteristics must not be underestimated: “The focus on North America to the exclusion of the rest of the world now seems quaint in the context of contemporary concern with the homogenizing effects of truly global economic forces, the permeability or hollowing out of the nation-state, and the corresponding enlargement of the scope of economic and social policy making at the local scale.” In an era where almost everything appears to be globalized, or globalizing, the forces that cross borders tend to be at least as influential as those generated within them (Garber and Imbroscio 1996). There is a huge range of exogenous influences on urban politics and development, and although “growth machine” imperatives, for example, have shaped every municipality across the globe to a greater or lesser extent, they express themselves differently at specific times in particular places, frustrating attempts to generalize with any universal insight. Even the widely held generalization that Canadian municipalities are creatures of their provinces and therefore lack the autonomy to lead on major policy initiatives is far from absolute. We will present evidence that Montreal leveraged global mega-events to help extract large amounts of capital from senior governments for both expressways and rapid transit. The City of Toronto, through its municipally owned transit agency, launched Canada’s first rapid-transit infrastructure, the Yonge subway line, without support from senior levels of government. Perhaps even more surprisingly, today’s green and sustainability-focused Vancouver once created Canada’s first segment of urban expressway, through Stanley Park, to feed automobile traffic to the privately financed Lions Gate Bridge. Canadian municipal leaders thus could, and at times did, make formative decisions about the scope and shape of major mobility infrastructure within their cities. One attribute of such decisions that is worth examining in detail is the propensity to adapt and adjust policy in the face of local discontent. Although most of the major mobility infrastructure in Canadian cities has been funded from government treasuries, the timing and magnitude of such public finance has almost always been closely correlated to the cities’ pursuit of private capital. In all three of the cities that we have examined, significant allocations of government investment were justified by claims and campaigns that new mobility infrastructure would create, or improve, foreign investment opportunities and thus attract private global capital. Whether they be spectacular mega-events in Montreal, shopping malls and office towers in Toronto,

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or new residential districts and commercial hubs in and around Vancouver, the lure of global gold has been a consistent stimulus of major mobility investment. In the wake of these grandiose infrastructure proposals, local business boosters can then animate private-sector campaigns to develop on-the-ground popular, media, and electoral support. While the funds for building new mobility in Canadian cities have mostly come from the public purse, it has always been the promise of private riches that drives the completion (or abandonment) of major new plans and schemes. a c c o m m o d at i o n t h r o u g h e q u i v o c at i o n

As alluded to earlier in this chapter, if there is a shared approach to planning mobility within and through Canada’s three largest cities, it is the tendency of their leadership to equivocate on the form and scale of infrastructure development – to hedge, to compromise, to avoid going all in and building all out – on any one singular vision or strategy. Canadians are regularly chided for both their capacity and their predilection to seek a balance among apparently conflicting perspectives (Ferguson 2007). This search for compromise is often identified as a cultural characteristic, but we want to go well beyond that supposed truism and examine the attributes that are revealed by the efforts to reconcile global forces with local values in the struggle over the different paths to meeting urban mobility needs. Canada’s three largest cities each responded to political and economic tensions over building major mobility infrastructure by mixing and matching policy options to engage with both globalized imperatives and local demands. The specific results of those efforts at accommodation, however, differed in each place and at each time that such disputes were addressed. We thus situate equivocation as a characteristic and structurally embedded Canadian response to the local concerns precipitated by globalized imperatives. Policy equivocation can serve as a tactic to both diffuse and manage political conflict across Canada (Tuohy 1992) and as an attempt to reconcile global ambitions with local concerns over time (Filion 2000). This logic becomes apparent when one examines Canadian cities’ pattern of accumulated ambivalence toward mobility infrastructure over the long term: after a major infrastructure commitment has been decided upon, urban policy-makers equivocate and pursue some form of ameliorative option. This legacy of Canada’s urban mobility

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equivocation needs to be examined through the analysis of accumulated political choices to balance competing paradigms in the heat of economic and social conflict over the shape of the city. We will thus consider how Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver have hedged their major mobility-infrastructure bets to manage the resulting fiscal and physical burdens over time. If Canadian cities have been defined, in part, by such equivocal leadership, then Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver can be seen as the products of a compromise between embracing the production of global-city attributes, on the one hand, and holding onto local urban aspirations, on the other. This interplay has yielded accommodations that are more discursive than hegemonic or dialectic, by restraining conflict over contending perspectives in the absence of any fundamental restructuring of authority or adaptation of underlying beliefs. As a result, the reader who seeks a singular and definitive answer to why Canadian cities have equivocated in planning their major mobility infrastructure is likely to be disappointed, or at least frustrated, by the diversity of reasons behind such accumulated behaviour. The forces and factors that shaped both the global and the local advocacy and resistance to major mobility investments have changed over the many decades of data that we have gathered and assembled in this book. For better or worse, the causes of Canada’s urban mobility equivocation are multiple and varied. This does not mean they are unintelligible, however. We suggest that a better understanding of their variety will help build the understanding of Canadian urbanism’s twentieth-century roots that nurture the development of our cities and suburbs to this day. The results that will be explored in chapter 3 demonstrate each urban region’s ongoing and simultaneous pursuit (albeit to differing degrees at specific times) of automobile dependence, transit-oriented development, and pedestrian-focused urban design, leading to the cumulative creation of both density and sprawl. This has resulted in these three Canadian global cities’ attaining mixtures of car-centric urban development typical of the United States and the cultivation of public transport and walkable communities found in European and wealthy Asian cities. Through equivocation, then, Canada’s three largest cities may have inadvertently developed mobility and land-use outcomes that are of interest and significance (Kenworthy and Laube 2001; Newman and Kenworthy 1999; Raad and Kenworthy 1998). We posit that equivocation over mobility infrastructure is a non-trivial

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ingredient in the recipe for how Canadian cities function. The outcomes merit attention precisely because they stand out from the experience of so many other cities, as will be shown in chapter 3. They are easy to distinguish from the results of more systematic programs for urban mobility development that were pursued elsewhere in the world during the twentieth century. Although Montreal’s, Toronto’s, and Vancouver’s leaders demonstrated an agnostic approach to the future of urban mobility, mainstream urban planning in North America was dominated by spatial strategies and infrastructure designs that strongly discouraged residents from living without a private automobile. Older Canadian and US cities that were established with walking and transit fabric (Newman, Kosonen, and Kenworthy 2016) and before the introduction of the automobile have seen their dense urban cores bisected by major highways and surrounded by sprawling automobile-city fabric in the form of suburban development. Younger cities, or parts of cities that were developed after the automobile came to dominate mobility, have been almost entirely constructed to accommodate motor vehicles as the defining condition of their growth and development.  On the one hand, the “new urbanism” (Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Alminana 2003; Calthorpe and Van der Ryn 1986) and sustainable urban philosophies (Timmer and Seymoar 2005; Grant, Marcotullio, and Sorensen 2004; Pugh 2000; Foo and Yuen 1999; Satterthwaite 1999) celebrate classical urban ideals of walkability, transit, community comprehensibility, dense housing, and mixed-use neighbourhoods. On the other hand, sprawling, low-density, automobile-oriented suburbs are claimed to realize the modernist vision of affordable and popular living arrangements for masses of people (Gielen 2006; Bruegmann 2005; Garreau 1991) and are thus often seen as the inevitable and desirable outcome of market-based transportation and housing choices (Cox 2006). Although both policy studies frameworks (Hall 1993; Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993) and urban theory suggest that the urban and suburban trajectories of these cities should clash, and certainly not coexist and accommodate each other over the long run, each of Canada’s three largest cities continues to operate within multiple paradigms that explicitly support both automobile- and transit-­oriented urban development. Competing, often adversarial, development patterns are evolving and coexisting within close proximity, a perspective that

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we believe is a useful reference point for understanding something significant about Canadian urbanism. Canada’s urban narrative continues to be nuanced and complicated in ways that demand better explanation. The evident capacity to juggle contending paradigms has led to what we will label an ambivalent urbanism in which no single paradigm definitively establishes itself over others, and the urban region retains the appearance of offering something for everyone. This seeming paradox represents a specific and perhaps transitory point that is important not just in itself but also because these three large cities are being lauded and emulated beyond Canada’s borders. We suggest that the essential characteristics of the country’s ambivalent urbanism will reveal themselves through a historically detailed examination of the approaches that leaders have pursued to implement mobility infrastructure in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. montreal and

“montrealism”

Montreal presents Canada’s oldest example of how global trade can inspire specific kinds of large-scale metropolitan development. Although much of the transportation infrastructure that enabled the city’s early growth was planned and financed in ways that resembled those of other New World cities, there was a dramatic break from these norms when the enthusiasm for mass motorization reached its apogee across North America. “Montrealism” thus offers a distinct articulation of modernism that is worth recognizing. During a single generation of municipal leadership that lasted four decades, the implementation of Montreal’s major mobility infrastructure grew out of proportion to all Canadian city-building efforts that had occurred before or have occurred since that time. Quebec’s pursuit of a new political autonomy within Canadian confederation, followed by an unsuccessful campaign for sovereignty as an independent nation, intersected with and reshaped Montreal’s urban structure and function by amplifying the capacity to create a monumental city. These economic and political conditions certainly shaped the tactics of municipal leaders, enabling a radical expansion of Montreal’s mobility infrastructure. Even as the results of such massive urban-infrastructure expansion should have stoked the engine of global-city growth, the repercussions of Quebec’s independence movement undercut

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Montreal’s relationship with the global economy, as a significant share of capital that had been resident in financial institutions and corporate headquarters departed for a safer haven in Toronto. Montreal has always been the commercial and financial hub of Quebec, and for a majority of the years since Confederation this primacy simultaneously extended to its position within Canada. The dual role as a global gateway to Canada and to Quebec contributed to a tense situation for Montreal in Quebec’s nationalist political movement during the second half of the twentieth century. Montreal was never a military garrison or a seat of government like Quebec City; instead, its primary function was commercial, as an entrepôt that facilitated the trade of Canada’s goods with Europe and other international markets, including a growing flow to the United States during the twentieth century. Unlike the even older transatlantic trade of fishery, forestry, and mining outputs from natural resource extraction in the Maritime provinces (which could be loaded directly onto ocean-going vessels departing from a number of local ports), Montreal’s trading functions thrived on the city’s being a concentrated hub for transshipment. The urban form and function of Montreal were both nurtured and shaped by its unique location at the crossroads of inland transportation routes and the St Lawrence River, which offered navigable access to the Atlantic Ocean. Goods from the interior of British North America would be shipped to Montreal, first by canoe, later by trains, and eventually by trucks, to be stored and then consolidated for export on ocean-going vessels (Easterbrook and Aitken 1988; Innis 1962). The city’s nodality at the interface of domestic and global trade flows fostered the financial and corporate functions that would position Montreal as Canada’s centre of commerce and industry into the 1970s. It thus developed as Canada’s most globalized city well before the forces of “modern” globalization were recognized as powerful urban influences. This precocious influence of global trade and commerce may have been magnified by the local ambivalence about Montreal’s place in the political and social structure of Quebec. Before the 1960s, Montreal’s urban governance was nested within a longstanding endeavour of Quebec’s francophone majority to preserve French language and culture in Canada. Dion (1975) identified this steadfast attachment to French language and Catholic religion as the cornerstone of Quebec’s resistance to assimilation.

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This larger political struggle that shaped Montreal’s destiny dated from 1763, when the Treaty of Paris transferred sovereignty over New France to the British crown. The treaty and its subsequent institutionalization in the British North America Act of 1867 provided legal guarantees to protect Quebec’s distinctive cultural, linguistic, and religious attributes. But these guarantees did not extend to economic activities, where Quebec francophones were relegated to second-class citizenship. As Rocher (2002, 76) notes, Quebec’s heritage “could only be preserved in a physical and social environment controlled by French Canadians, which explains the emphasis on [rural] agriculture.” Quebec’s traditional nationalists were thus suspicious of and hostile to the commercial inequities of Montreal and focused their efforts on preserving the primacy of the French language and the Catholic Church outside the metropolis. In Montreal the control over trade and finance had been conceded to a predominantly anglophone elite who ran the financial sector and big business. During this long era of the attenuated coexistence of the English and French communities within Quebec, the influences of globalization on Montreal’s development were thus inflected by the governance accommodations that had evolved to preserve French-Canadian heritage in the face of EnglishCanadian economic domination. Montreal’s urban development has always been influenced by this history of English-French conflict and the legacy of anglophone dominance. More than any other city in Canada, Montreal has been shaped physically, culturally, and institutionally by political duality. Every reform and civic movement, every large-scale decision, and every ­election has to be understood as having been played out on this stage. “Montreal, then, was the cockpit of French/English relations in Canada and the inheritor of both long-standing and more recent animosities. Inevitably these larger questions intruded on municipal politics, distracting attention from local concerns and adding a bitter intensity to both local elections and municipal debates. For many people, Montreal city politics was of interest not in its own right but as a subordinate arena, a stage on which larger national questions would be played out. In these and other ways, Montreal’s special role in the French/English question impeded the development of its municipal political system” (Kaplan 1982, 314). The drama of nationalism not only was performed on Montreal’s urban stage but also worked to redesign that stage in order to foster

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linkages between Quebec’s francophone community and the global economy. Starting from a strategy of municipal infrastructure development that resembled the approach taken by most North American cities, Montreal created a unique approach to advancing major mobility projects that was driven by its distinctive relationship to Quebec nationalism. When motorized mobility arrived in Montreal, its infrastructure was created through a combination of public works upgrading of municipal streets and a private franchise to build and operate electric streetcars that commenced in 1892 (Boone 1996). This approach mirrored that of most cities at the time. Municipal expansion occurred through annexations whereby Montreal amalgamated with adjacent towns but, in doing so, acquired their considerable debt burdens from investment in transport, sewer, and water infrastructure (Van Nus 1984). The goal of better connecting housing to labour-market needs in an expanding metropolis motivated efforts to improve mobility between the urban core and an expanding number of suburban communities. When Quebec’s political agenda shifted to advance the economic opportunities and social status for French Canadians beyond the rural hinterland, Montreal’s urban-development ambitions quickly shifted to a grander scale. Montreal’s abrupt embrace of massive modernization was both enabled and spurred by Quebec’s sudden break from its traditional approach to preserving francophone heritage through anchoring cultural survival in a strong rural and agricultural identity (Colcord 1987; Germain and Rose 2000). Political power that had been closely guarded by the Catholic Church and an insular francophone political elite was rapidly diffused among a broader coalition of urban and suburban French Canadians who embraced the “Quiet Revolution.” Their agenda focused on asserting a broad measure of social equality and economic opportunity for French Canadians throughout Quebec (Charbonneau, Hamel, and Barcelo 1994; Colcord 1987). This first wave of postwar nationalism sought to empower Quebec’s francophone majority to obtain a full measure of benefits from the provincial economy. Using the leverage from ambitious expansion of public enterprise, procurement, and infrastructure provision, Quebec’s provincial government sought to assert control over the economy to enable opportunities that had previously been kept beyond the reach of francophone entrepreneurs and businesses. Under the French motto of Maîtres chez nous (Masters of our own house), “this

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fusion of nationalism and modernity has produced a familiar pattern of state-led economic modernization” (Meadwell 1993, 219–20). Advancing Montreal’s prominence as an international node of commerce and finance was a key goal in such modernization, making many Quebec nationalists advocates of global-city building, including expressways and rapid-transit infrastructure. The primary agent of such change would be the state, in which “the avowed goal of the government was to permit French Canadians to allocate resources in their favour to counter the economic domination to which they were subjected” (Rocher 2002, 78). This period of unrestrained provincial ambition for state intervention dovetailed with the municipal leadership of Montreal’s mayor, Jean Drapeau. It is more than coincidence that Mayor Drapeau holds a unique position among Canada’s big-city mayors both for political longevity, having held office for twenty-nine of the thirty-two years between 1954 and 1986, and for policy audacity, having advanced the most ambitious urban-­ development schemes that have been attempted by any Canadian city to date. Mayor Drapeau grasped the opportunity for Quebec’s state-led transformation on an urban scale and then articulated and orchestrated Montreal’s ambition for global recognition in the top tier of world cities as the natural expression of that agenda. The mayor succeeded in simultaneously leveraging Montreal’s global-city goals upon both Quebec’s agenda to create a new francophone economic elite and Canada’s anxiety about losing Quebec from the Canadian federation. While Drapeau’s urban-growth strategy may have been novel and not replicable, the means to achieving it had much in common with globalcity-development efforts elsewhere in the world. As noted in chapter 1, Drapeau’s monumental ambitions relied upon the large-scale construction of urban expressway and rapid-­transit infrastructure. And if grandeur was a key ingredient of the mobility needed to propel metropolitan development, then mega-events and mega projects were an effective means to attain the outcome. Drapeau held a fervent belief that spectacular urban-development projects and events were the key to advancing Montreal’s prospects. He sloughed off criticism that he was devoting time and effort to special events and legacy projects instead of focusing on the needs of Montreal’s underprivileged, famously declaring, “The ugliness of the slums in which people live doesn’t matter if we can make them stand wide-eyed in admiration of works of art they don’t understand” (Germain and Rose 2000, 84). Consequently, many of Drapeau’s

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projects were notoriously grandiose and expensive and often politically reckless (Paul 2004, 579). The fiscal formula that Drapeau pioneered for expanding major mobility infrastructure worked through linking it to mega-events, such as Expo 67 and the 1976 Olympic Games. This strategy enabled Montreal to leverage provincial and federal funding for massive investment in both expressways and rapid transit, as we will explore in detail later. These mega-events catalyzed a synthesis of nation building, province building, and city building that stands out in many ways. The concentrated and simultaneous realization of multiple expressway and rapid-transit infrastructure projects is unparalleled in Canada’s history. To make this happen, Drapeau primed the fiscal pump by committing hefty amounts of municipal spending, ranging up to half of Montreal’s entire city budget, to major mobility infrastructure in the years prior to Expo 67 (Frisken 1994). He could then plausibly claim that the city had tapped out its fiscal capacity to meet the promises that had been made to secure the exposition, and thus leverage the provincial and federal governments into funding urban mobility infrastructure. As an example, the Province of Quebec spent $500 million, equivalent to $3.5 billion in 2014 dollars, on expressway infrastructure for Expo 67 (McKenna and Purcell 1980, 150; Manuel 2017). The full extent of this funding will be presented in chapter 4. Infrastructure delivery had to unfold rapidly in order to meet the fixed deadline of Expo 67, and later the Olympics. This meant that the bulk of Montreal’s major mobility infrastructure was built with minimal community input (Germain and Rose 2000). Significant protests and organizing against the destruction of homes and the fracturing of neighbourhoods, which will be detailed in chapter 5, prompted relatively little alteration in the timing or location of planned infrastructure. The only significant community success was that resident and merchant groups succeeded in having the Ville Marie Expressway moved away from the waterfront as it approached the downtown core, in order to reduce disruption of the port and Old Montreal (Kaplan 1982). Thus, despite a sizable coalition of local resistance, Montreal was substantially unfettered in developing urban expressways – as compared to Toronto or Vancouver – because of the leverage gained from its global-city strategy of hosting mega-events. Although Expo 67 and the 1976 Olympics garnered intense global attention while they unfolded, these mega-events left Montreal with

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a mobility legacy that would influence the city long after their closing ceremonies. Writing in The Nation, Ervin Galantay suggested that the spirit of Expo 67 would be carried forward by its infrastructure legacy: “The excitement and élan of Expo will not vanish from Montreal when the temporary buildings are dismantled … the new bridges and highways will remain as substantial souvenirs” (Galantay 1967, 562). But the passage of time is not always kind to souvenirs, as Montrealers would soon discover. Several megaprojects associated with Drapeau’s grandiose strategy have become discredited as embarrassing white elephants. These include the infamous Mirabel Airport and the Olympic Stadium (Berlin 2012, 13). Montreal’s future was, in many ways, mortgaged by the debts and maintenance costs incurred for its lavish infrastructure legacy. During the decades of economic stagnation that followed the corporate and financial relocations to Toronto, Montrealers carried a heavy fiscal burden from their overbuilt mobility. Yet despite these challenges, Montreal’s expressway and rapid-transit infrastructure represents Canada’s most complete expression of the modernist vision for abundant mobility in a global city. The combination of extensive expressways and rapid transit has enabled Montreal, more than any other Canadian city, to blend the transit orientation of many European cities with the automobile friendliness found in most North American cities, yielding an aggregate midpoint in mobility trends between Europe and North America, to be elaborated in chapter 3. This embodiment of ambivalence about urban mobility set the stage for relatively effective use of both automobiles and transit in Montreal. The success of its globalcity-­development strategy in creating economic opportunities for francophone Quebeckers also promoted a broader ambivalence about the necessity of militant resistance to Canada’s anglophone majority. Separation from Canada seemed less necessary to Montrealers, with the evident success of their city’s development as a francophone metropolis within a bilingual Canada. When the stimulus effects of city-building initiatives on Quebec’s economy did not yield commensurate political opportunities for radical nationalists to advance their cause, as they did for pragmatic francophone citizens to find a satisfactory accommodation within Canada, the stage was set for a more dramatic conflict. Instead of strengthening conditions that could generate dissatisfaction and thus tip the balance toward independence, the increased affluence of

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residents in a globalizing city appeared to moderate popular militancy, provoking nationalists to more extreme measures, including urban violence. In reflecting on Quebec’s struggles over independence, Jane Jacobs concluded that nationalists such as members of the Front de Libération du Québec (F L Q) felt compelled to take direct action to disrupt the accommodation between their metropolis and global capitalism. This action suggested that “violence was a means for the F L Q to express their own desperation and support for the sovereignty to Quebec’s people” (Pinkoski 2012, 203). The largely urban acts of violence, combined with the election of a sovereigntist provincial government that had pledged to hold a referendum on independence, triggered a flight of capital and of corporate elites from Montreal soon after the infrastructure investments spurred by megaprojects like Expo and the Olympics had vastly expanded the capacity for urban mobility. The economic stagnation that accompanied Montreal’s subsequent decline from primacy as Canada’s top global city may also have contributed to lower automobile ownership, which, along with markedly higher population density, has worked to create Canada’s highest level of transit usage per capita. Not only does Montreal stand out within Canada for mobility via public transport, but it leads North America in having significantly lower car use and much higher transit use than any other city, even New York. Equivocation about choosing between major mobility infrastructure geared to the automobile versus offering an alternative to the car may have proved costly, but the legacy gave Montrealers more transportation options than most Canadians have available, and these make moving around the city easier during both good and bad times. toronto and

“torontoism”

Toronto was Canada’s second city for a much longer time than it has occupied the top rung in Canada’s global-city hierarchy. While it grew into Canada’s corporate and financial centre in the late twentieth century, its urban transportation capacity has yet to catch up with the status of being the nation’s leading global city. This lag reflects a long-standing institutional and cultural inheritance from a time that decisions about infrastructure were inspired by modesty and frugality. For most of its history, the idea that Toronto should aspire to be a great metropolis, as opposed to a good and functional city, was regarded by many as the

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height of civic irresponsibility. Toronto’s civic culture and the infrastructure investments that it justified were shaped by deep Victorian and Protestant values embedded in the history and culture of Upper Canada, as the province of Ontario was once known (Jenkins 2003). Although the Victorian ethos exerted considerable influence upon urbanizing regions across the British Empire, the capital of Ontario was influenced by a potent British colonial outlook that often guided municipal politics and policy. This is not to say that Toronto was culturally monolithic in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or that linguistic and ethnic diversity were absent from the city, but Toronto’s governing elite were predominantly Protestant, anglophone, and Loyalist. These elites viewed themselves as custodians of a British bastion that existed to support Crown and Empire. Toronto’s reputation as the “Belfast of Canada” (Smyth 2015) appeared natural and proper to the municipal elites who were suspicious of the influences that immigrants might exert on urban development. Many of Toronto’s municipal and provincial elected officials, and most mayors through the Second World War, were members of the Orange Order, a sectarian fraternal organization devoted to preserving Protestant supremacy throughout the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the British Empire (Jenkins 2007; Houston and Smyth 1978). Central to the Loyalist identity was an insular, modest, and defensive world view that eschewed the kinds of grandiose plans and grand projects that cities like New York and Chicago were embracing in the early twentieth century and which Montreal, and even Vancouver, would come to adopt later in the century as means to spur their growth. Toronto’s Victorian roots encouraged a conservative approach to developing urban mobility infrastructure, one that often viewed monumental urbanism as a collective manifestation of suspect character. There was thus no urgency to build either grand expressways or extensive rapid-transit infrastructure in this understanding of Toronto. During the city’s first wave of rapid industrial growth, streetcars provided the primary mode of urban mobility, and their financing was undertaken by private investors. A monopoly franchise for electric streetcar infrastructure was awarded to the Toronto Railway Company in 1891 for a thirty-year period. While such private provision of public transportation was the norm across North American cities in this period, Toronto’s results stood out. Toronto’s urban density grew in synchronization with its streetcar network, so that by 1910 per capita transit usage was second to only

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that of New York City within North America (McKay 1976). Between 1910 and 1920 Toronto’s population doubled, while streetcar infrastructure grew by twenty miles (thirty-two kilometres), or only 17% (Doucet 1978). The Toronto Railway Company refused to extend urban rail infrastructure beyond the municipal boundary that had existed when its franchise was awarded in 1891, and also refused to cede access to its monopoly over rail access to the urban core. This greatly inhibited the development of “streetcar suburbs,” which were being created by competing streetcar franchises in many other North American cities at the time. Toronto’s middle-class residential districts remained closer to the core than in cities where expansive transit infrastructure had encouraged relocation to new housing developments in greener pastures (D. Davis 1979). Instead, Toronto’s urban density and transit usage grew in tandem, and Toronto’s per capita transit usage approached the capital of North American public transportation, New York City, but achieving this at a lower density than that of Manhattan. While this precocious embrace of compact urban form might appear fortuitous in retrospect, the spatial efficiency that boosted revenue for the streetcar’s private owners came at the expense of the transit users who were increasingly packed into a fixed number of routes and services. Travel by overcrowded streetcars had become an unwelcome burden for Toronto’s citizens well before the First World War. As would occur on the road network a century later, Torontonians found themselves enduring congestion and delay due to the modest spending on, and resulting limited supply of, transport infrastructure that those holding the purse strings were willing to pursue. The public’s dissatisfaction with congested transport-infrastructure supply periodically boiled over into spontaneous demonstrations of public anger at the streetcar’s private operator (Radforth 2015). When the Toronto Railway Company responded to streetcar crowding by trying to collect fares upon boarding (since the crush of passengers was preventing the complete collection of fares on board), violent outbursts ensued. In 1918 Torontonians grasped the opportunity to deliver a political message through the more peaceful means of a municipal plebiscite on the future of transportation development. With the Toronto Railway Company’s franchise set to expire in 1921, voters were given an opportunity to advise the city council on what to do next. By a very wide margin, voters endorsed the municipal acquisition of Toronto’s

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streetcar infrastructure and its subsequent operation as a public utility. Toronto thus created a municipal public-transportation agency to manage the streetcar infrastructure, which was known as the Toronto Transportation Commission (T T C ) until 1954 when it was renamed the Toronto Transit Commission. The City of Toronto borrowed for just three years, 1921–23, $50 million ($6.73 billion in 2015 dollars) to enable the TTC to acquire, refurbish, and expand Toronto’s streetcar infrastructure (D. Davis 1979). The results were transformational – not surprisingly, because, as will be shown in chapter 4, this amount of funds far exceeded what Metropolitan Toronto would spend on expressways in the thirty-four years from 1949 to 1983 ($4.65 billion, inflation adjusted) and was over half of what the city would spend on mass transit during the forty-seven years from 1949 to 1996 ($12.46 billion). Toronto’s early twentieth-century streetcar investments represent the single largest infusion of capital into urban transportation infrastructure, over such a short period, in that city’s history or, for that matter, in Canadian urban history (Colton 1980). Canada’s first underground rapid-transit route was built upon this foundation of public investment in the T T C’s capability and achievements. In January 1946 Toronto’s electorate gave an unequivocal endorsement of spending the T T C ’s operating surplus that had accumulated during the Second World War, to construct subway lines under Yonge Street and Queen Street. Public support was overwhelming, with the measure passing by 79,935 to 8,639 votes (Filey 2016). The Yonge Street subway line was opened in 1954 and became Canada’s first rapid-transit infrastructure and North America’s first postwar rapid-transit construction. Indeed, between the Toronto subway and the Montreal metro, Canada built the only rapid-transit infrastructure in North America during the 1950s and 1960s – contrasting with a major pause in US rapid-transit development from the completion in 1940 of New York’s Sixth Avenue subway to the opening in 1972 of the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system (Jones 2008). A notable factor that enabled Toronto’s precocious postwar initiation of rapid-transit infrastructure was the earlier resistance of private investors to investing in streetcar expansion. In a demonstration of urban mobility equivocation, private under-investment during Toronto’s streetcar franchise had precipitated a democratic backlash that prompted municipal government to transform transit into an accountable public agency. As long as new mobility infrastructure

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could be financed while the public debt that had been taken on to acquire and expand street railways during the 1920s was being repaid, governing elites and citizens remained satisfied with the work of the TTC (Kaplan 1967). In the immediate postwar era when few cities around the world, and no others in North America, were building underground rapid transit, Toronto found itself in a unique position to spend public capital on launching Canada’s first subway. This anomaly was not a coincidence but drew directly from Toronto’s earlier adoption of municipal ownership for its streetcars. As Young (2012, 78) emphasized, “of paramount importance was $12 million in reserves that the Commission had accrued during the war. Because the TTC was owned by the City, more surplus revenue went towards system improvements, not private shareholders’ pockets.” This surplus of $12 million in 1946 was equivalent to over $160 million in 2014 dollars and gave the TTC the fiscal capacity to embark on rapid-transit infrastructure development at a time that other cities lacked such reserves. Toronto also got off to a smooth start in building urban expressways because its initial routes traversed lightly settled spaces alongside rivers and lakefront industrial zones, meaning that few residents would be disturbed. The Lakeshore Expressway opened in 1958, four years after the Yonge Street subway, and was named after the location that it would reshape. By the time it was extended in 1964, it had been renamed after the first leader of Toronto’s metropolitan government, Chairman Frederick Gardiner. This elevated expressway originated just south of Toronto’s financial district at Bay and King Streets and ran through industrial land, railway yards, and port facilities to connect with the western suburbs Mississauga and Oakville. The Don Valley Parkway (D V P ) was built through a ravine and completed in 1964, opening high-speed-vehicle access between Toronto’s core and the northeast suburbs, including the master-planned bedroom community of Don Mills (D. Robinson 2011; Solomon 2007). Unlike the subway, whose finance and planning grew out of entirely local initiative, Toronto’s expressway infrastructure was developed in a fiscal partnership with the Province of Ontario. Ontario’s provincial finances were robust and able to meet half the capital costs of Metropolitan Toronto’s initial round of expressway construction in the 1960s. But, as had occurred during the first wave of streetcar development, Toronto’s conservative culture prioritized moderation over grand visions for both expressway and rapid-transit infrastructure.

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According to Colton (1980, 117), Chairman Gardiner sought to balance priorities in Metropolitan Toronto’s fiscal strategy out of a conviction that “he and the metropolitan government would suffer unless spending decisions observed a basic equity between the suburbs and Toronto proper.” That meant spending less on rapid transit than the City of Toronto favoured, while also restraining the fiscal appetite of suburban municipalities for expressway investments. As a result of this measured pace of infrastructure expansion, by the time that highway engineers had begun to implement projects in established neighbourhoods, Toronto’s residents had accumulated more experience with the impacts of urban expressways than Montrealers possessed when their planned network was rushed to completion in time for Expo 67. The Spadina Expressway was due to become the next major addition to Toronto’s nascent network of urban expressways. Its construction began in 1963, as the Gardiner Expressway’s extension and the DVP were nearing completion. Intended to improve access between Toronto and the fast-developing suburb of North York, the Spadina Expressway was designed to include an inner-city ring of feeder expressways. While the Gardiner and Don Valley expressways had managed to avoid disrupting established communities, Spadina and its feeder routes would have been built through some of Toronto’s long established neighbourhoods including Kensington Market, the Annex, Chinatown, and Forest Hill, home to a gentrifying middle class (Ley 1988, 1994). Expressway opponents, including Jane Jacobs, soon came together under the umbrella of the Stop Spadina, Save Our City Coordinating Committee (S S S O C C C) coalition. Since Toronto was not explicitly pursuing a global-city development agenda as Montreal had done, the debate over the Spadina Expressway focused on the best way to meet local and regional mobility needs, rather than meeting elite expectations of the infrastructure needed by a “world-class city.” Partly in response to public concerns about the negative neighbourhood impact of expressway building, Metropolitan Toronto produced its own transportation plan in 1966, comparing expressway infrastructure with subway and express-bus alternatives. The plan recommended a “balanced” approach that would see the completion of the Spadina Expressway and then shift subsequent projects to the expansion of the rapid-transit infrastructure (Wellman 2006; Nowlan and Nowlan 1970). By 1969, construction delays and cost inflation had exhausted the budget allocated to the Spadina Expressway project. When Ontario’s

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transportation ministry moved to grant additional funds to Metropolitan Toronto, SSSO C C C challenged the decision, and construction was halted pending a Cabinet review. Before that review could be completed, William Davis became Ontario’s new premier and made an executive decision to cancel the project. In 1971 he delivered what came to be known as the famous “cities are for people” speech in Ontario’s legislature, stating, “If we are building a transportation system to serve the automobile, the Spadina Expressway would be a good place to start. But if we are building a transportation system to serve people, the Spadina Expressway is a good place to stop” (quoted in Sewell 1993, 179). Following the premier’s decision, the southern half of the Spadina Expressway route was abandoned along with the planned inner-ring of connecting expressways. Some, but not all, of the transit infrastructure that had been identified in Metropolitan Toronto’s “balanced” transportation plan was developed. The results were hailed as a fiscal success: “Through the mid 1960s [Metropolitan Toronto’s] debt charges represented 25 percent of annual operating expenditures – the maximum allowed by provincial regulations. Yet the charges were always met, largely because of rising property assessment and correspondingly rising property tax revenue – increases that were fueled, of course by the infrastructure being built with the borrowed money. One is hard-pressed to imagine a more successful case of debt being used for the public good” (White 2016, 21). At the time of this writing, Toronto is served by both a patchwork of expressway routes and a rapid-transit network that falls short of Metropolitan Toronto’s recommended 1996 plan. Many of the innercity neighbourhoods that the Spadina and other expressways would have disrupted, however, are now vital urban communities served by light-rail and subway infrastructure. Unlike the mobility balance envisioned by Metropolitan Toronto’s planners in the 1960s, in which transit and expressways would complement one another to meet urban mobility needs, the city’s infrastructure decisions since the 1970s have yielded an outcome in which neither automobiles nor transit systems are seen as delivering sufficient urban mobility for Canada’s largest and most globalized city (Toronto Board of Trade 2010, 39). va n c o u v e r a n d

“ va n c o u v e r i s m ”

Vancouver is an immature city, even by North American standards. Modern urban formation only began late in the nineteenth century,

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despite the fact that the Fraser Canyon and Lower Mainland had “as dense an early-contact, non-agricultural population as anywhere in the Western Hemisphere” (Harris 1998, xii). The urban core expanded rapidly during the early decades of the twentieth century (MacDonald 1970) and began another growth spurt in the 1990s fuelled by Asian investment and immigration. While much attention has been paid to the debates among elites in and around Vancouver over urban and suburban policy priorities for mobility and development (Collin and Robertson 2005; McAllister 2004; Donald 2002), more insight can be gained from recognizing the strategies that have enabled the co-production of density and sprawl in and around Vancouver (Gad and Matthew 2000; McCann and Simmons 2000). Although both of these development dynamics have appeared to be somewhat successful in the recent past, the question of whether two spatially divergent and theoretically antagonistic development patterns can coexist over time remains to be answered. During much of the twentieth century Vancouver and its surrounding communities similarly negotiated, delayed, ameliorated, and mediated the frictions between global and local forces of urbanism to allow for the simultaneous development and flourishing of sprawling automobile-centric and denser transit and pedestrian land-use visions. The dissonance and discontinuities within Vancouver’s development trajectory have typically been legitimated by appealing to neoliberal “market choice” arguments that cities ought to offer citizens a wide variety of choices and then let consumer decisions guide mobility and land-use policy. This embrace of free market values, coupled with strategic spending of public funds on infrastructure, has enabled Vancouver to join Montreal and Toronto in equivocating about contradictory development and mobility strategies over time. Perhaps the clearest example of such ambivalence regarding metropolitan mobility is that, while expressways are almost entirely absent within Vancouver’s city limits, they have been wholeheartedly embraced in the metropolitan periphery. Similarly, the rapid transit that was steadily advanced in the city and its immediately neighbouring communities has moved much more slowly in extending to the region’s fastest-growing suburban municipalities. The old chestnut in which a scholar chides a bureaucrat – “That may work in practice, but it will never work in theory” – captures the pragmatic spirit reflected in Vancouver’s juggling of urban and suburban development priorities and competing mobility paradigms. There is also another possibility, lurking behind the apparent paradox of contemporary

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mobility, however, that Vancouver is not successfully mediating contending paradigms but is simply riding the upswing of a long wave in a boom-and-bust cycle fuelled by real estate speculation that allows for investment in both expressways and rapid transit – thereby creating a growing tension that will rupture when the cycle turns. This remains to be seen and could only be tested following a real estate market crisis. When it came to expanding major mobility infrastructure, Vancouver’s civic elite sought to pick up where the pre-war construction of the Stanley Park Causeway and Lions Gate Bridge (to be examined more fully in chapter 4) had left off, by creating an expressway route that could move motor vehicles to and through the city at high speed and volume. By the 1960s, expressway plans had advanced into municipal acquisition of real estate along the infrastructure’s proposed route. This strategy was aligned with the North American model of postwar “slum clearance,” which sought to reshape cities through the purchase and tear down of older buildings that were seen to have outlived their usefulness. In 1970, Vancouver’s most significant demolitions for expressway building occurred when the historically Black community of Hogan’s Alley was destroyed to make room for the Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts. These short feeders to the planned elevated expressway were completed in 1972. To the public officials who had supported their construction, the viaducts represented the first phase of modern mobility that would speed vehicles to and through the central business district and along the city’s waterfront. But the rest of the planned expressway development never occurred, leaving Vancouver as the only major North American city without an inner-city expressway, just a wellhidden mini-expressway through Stanley Park and two short and marooned viaducts that are now slated for demolition (Farmer and Perl 2018). Many observers have interpreted Vancouver’s aborted urbanexpressway program as a victory of community power over technocratic planning and elite development preferences, which in many ways is a correct, but incomplete, answer to the question of what derailed this automobile-centric, mobility-infrastructure vision. Jo-Anne Lee describes Vancouver’s detour from the North American expressway trajectory as follows: “Against all odds, politically marginalized residents and their supporters from diverse ethnic and class backgrounds formed a neighbourhood organization, the Strathcona Property

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Owners and Tenants Association (SPOTA). Their last-ditch struggle to defend their homes, ways of life, and rights to place helped put a stop to a tri-level government program of ‘slum clearance’” (Lee 2007, 382). The success of Vancouver’s community resistance, which will be explored more fully in chapter 5, looks less like a surprise upset when one takes into account the municipal leadership’s failure to secure capital for expressway building. Investing in urban infrastructure was not a priority of British Columbia’s government during the Strathcona Expressway’s gestation period. From 1952 to 1972 Premier W.A.C. Bennett allocated billions of dollars to highway, railway, and hydro-electric infrastructure across the province’s hinterland to advance his Social Credit Party’s agenda of economic growth through natural resource development, and rural infrastructure was seen to have a much higher payoff, in both economic and political terms, than urban projects. Within a dozen years, however, British Columbia’s government had shifted from balking at major mobility investment in an urban expressway to enthusiastically supporting a rapid-transit corridor serving that same urban core. No change in government had occurred to precipitate this opening of the provincial treasury, making the change in direction surprising on the face of it. But a new alignment of global-city promotion at the local level, an inter-­ provincial alliance for showcasing Ontario’s rapid-transit technology, and a market-oriented rationale for enhancing the province’s profile as a place to invest and do business combined to bring municipal and provincial leaders together to embrace government support of an automated transit system, which represented a very different mobility investment than the previous vision of expressway-led urban redevelopment in Vancouver. The Greater Vancouver Regional District had long been planning for a ground-level light-rail-transit (L RT ) infrastructure to enhance the mobility offered by the local bus service and share the streets with cars and trucks (Sullivan 1980). This vision for LRT would have required reallocating road space, away from motor vehicles, but such a zero-sum transfer of infrastructure capacity was not favoured by the provincial government. The Minister for Municipal Affairs at the time, Bill Vander Zalm, and the Minister of Transport and Communication, Jack Davis, pushed back on Greater Vancouver’s plan, because the LRT proposed at grade road crossings would inhibit car traffic. Vander Zalm later recalled: 

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Mr. Harcourt and the committee was basically of the view that level crossings didn’t matter much, because if you could make things a little bit difficult for the automobile, then people would be inclined to take transit a lot more quickly. And our view was that the only way that we could really make transit very appealing to people would be to make it very comfortable, and very fast, and very convenient. So, with that, the Regional District was fairly determined. And they really weren’t about to change their recommendation, but they would consider whatever we had to offer. My instruction to the Ministry was to find a system that would not require eleven level crossings, several on Kingsway, which would really cause a traffic mix up … ideally, you could provide very well for both [the car and transit]. (Vander Zalm 2009) Vander Zalm’s narrative reveals a coherent, yet equivocal, approach that was at work in the development of urban mobility-infrastructure policy in and around Vancouver. The Vancouver region’s rapid transit would be funded by the Province only if it could run without limiting the use of the existing road infrastructure by automobiles. In order to accomplish this, a much costlier, elevated guideway, tunnels in downtown Vancouver, and later development (such as the Canada and Evergreen Lines) have been required to completely separate rapidtransit and major road infrastructure. Equivocation about the allocation of infrastructure capacity to both automobiles and transit was thus embedded in Vancouver’s mobility investment principles from the time that globally inspired investment funds began to flow again in the late twentieth century. h o w fa r c a n a c i t y g o i n t r y i n g t o “ p r o v i d e v e r y w e l l f o r b o t h ”?

Municipal leaders typically initiate with a fervent embrace the efforts to create major mobility infrastructure, anticipating that this strategy will entice the private sector to develop or redevelop adjacent lands and then invest in new businesses, and thus generate the public revenues needed to cope with the resulting growth in population and community needs. The stakes of realizing new mobility infrastructure have grown with the escalation of demands on municipal leaders to deliver programming of all kinds, while opportunities to raise public

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revenue or reduce their mandates are limited. Canada’s municipal governance has memorably been described as “hyper-fractionalized, quasi-subordination” (Andrew 1995), with cities juggling urgent responsibilities and increasing demands, yet lacking the political clout and financial resources to advance more than partial and provisional solutions. Following the 1979 abolition of Canada’s Ministry of State for Urban Affairs, Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver gained a degree of freedom to experiment with planning for their future mobility, but they lost the public sector partner that had the most fiscal capacity to support the necessary infrastructure investments (McAllister 2004; Wolfe 2003; Andrew, Graham, and Phillips 2002; Lightbody 1995; Isin 1992).  Canada’s withdrawal of federal urban engagement in the late twentieth century was intended to respect provincial jurisdiction over municipalities, which had been requested most strongly by Quebec (Boudreau 2003). In practice, however, provincial governments have often focused their investments in mobility beyond urban centres. Canadian municipalities have adapted to pursuing multiple, and some would say incompatible, development strategies simultaneously, responding to conflicting demands from urban and suburban citizens, as they strain to provide new mobility infrastructure that will be fiscally and politically acceptable. As will be shown by the mobility and financial data that we have assembled in the following two chapters, Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver were each able to juggle the implementation of their mobility visions to produce a mix of expressway and rapid-transit infrastructure during the second half of the twentieth century. And as we will explain more fully in our concluding chapter, this eclectic mixing of infrastructure designs and attributes was made possible by planners and political officials across multiple levels of government who were influenced by Canada’s institutionalized ambivalence and thus inclined toward equivocation about the kinds of urban mobility to prioritize. Although the rationale guiding these outcomes might appear enigmatic at first, especially when one compares the diversity of major mobility infrastructure that was created in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, we suggest that there is a common logic embedded within Canada’s genealogy of urban mobility infrastructure. The willingness to hedge bets on the future of mobility has situated Canada’s largest cities in a particular place among the world’s cities, as we will demonstrate in chapter 3. The question to keep in mind when delving into

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the details of how Canadians have created major mobility infrastructure in their big cities is whether the embrace of equivocation was a conscious strategy, an inadvertent response to the accumulated contradictions that arose from mediating between conflicting and incompatible demands for development, or a mix of these planning and policy tactics that defined some part of the Canadian approach to urban development under increasingly potent global instigation.

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3 Comparing Canadian Urban Mobility Patterns of Confluence, Divergence, and Specificity

The core proposition of this book is that a close examination of the historical development of major mobility infrastructure in Canada’s three largest cities can yield a better understanding of each city’s urban development in particular and reveal certain characteristics that shape big-city urbanism across Canada generally. To move beyond the popular clichés that are often invoked to describe Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, we have closely investigated and documented the major mobility development in each place so that we may appreciate the causal characteristics embedded in the infrastructure of these cities. Revealing the timing and, where possible, the sourcing of Canada’s urban investments in major mobility infrastructure is needed to uncover the global and local drivers of change in land use and metropolitan structure. Each of the cities displays some variation in mobility patterns, and each has taken a unique path to arrive at these outcomes. Thus, to understand better the contemporary contours of Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, we need to examine their locally articulated and contested relationships to globalization and how their global-city aspirations have been translated into the access to (or the constraints upon) the capital needed to realize costly transport infrastructure. In order to derive the most from the deep dive in chapter 4 into data on building major mobility in each city, we want to put the outcomes in perspective by showing the results of introducing specific expressways and rapid-transit infrastructure capacity. This chapter thus compares key indicators of urban mobility in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver to locate where these metropolitan areas currently sit relative to one another and to their global counterparts. We adopt the comparative framework for urban mobility analysis developed by

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Newman and Kenworthy (2015, 1989), Kenworthy and Laube (2001, 1999), and Kenworthy (2014a, 2014b, 2013). The resulting overview provides a perspective that enables a fuller appreciation of our findings in light of the historical evidence we have excavated and assembled. The sources and calculations that generated this evidence are explained fully in the appendix, which offers a data dictionary on the evidence underlying our analysis. Understanding the broader contours of each city’s transportation performance and its relationship to urban form and function will give the reader a better sense of how and why our findings about the interplay of the global and local forces that are unleashed in developing major mobility infrastructure actually matter. It is very important to note that the spatial and temporal parameters considered within this chapter differ from those presented in the following chapter’s historical analysis of major-mobility-infrastructure expenditure and construction. The data used in this chapter, and this chapter only, present a snapshot in time and geographical scope that is primarily centred upon the year 2006. This date does not match, and does not need to match, the temporal boundaries that structure our long-term historical analysis. By considering Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver at their recent metropolitan scale in this chapter – unlike the core urban focus adopted elsewhere in the book – we can effectively compare the mobility outcomes of these cities with those of metropolitan areas elsewhere in the world. These comparisons can help clarify our understanding on whether Canadian metropolitan areas have coalesced into an identifiable variant of global urban mobility or whether their within-group variation outweighs any similarities or uniformity that may exist among them. In other words, this ­comparison can either confirm or challenge the analytical findings that have been offered by Goldberg and Mercer (1986), Raad and Kenworthy (1998), and Perl and Kenworthy (2010). Aggregating a significant amount of transportation data enables us to offer a relevant frame for analyzing the unfolding processes that we describe and interrogate throughout our investigation. Viewing where each city resides recently will help us to interpret more clearly the historical experiences that we uncover elsewhere in the book. canadian urban mobility in perspective

Although they are more automobile dependent than counterpart cities in Europe and Asia, the Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver metropolitan areas each exhibit lower automobile use and higher

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reliance on sustainable transport options (e.g., bicycle, walking, public transit) than does any major US metropolitan area apart from the New York tri-state metropolitan area of twenty million people (Kenworthy and Laube 2001). Our examination of Canada’s position within the global constellation of urban mobility recognizes that researchers confront an inherent tension in compiling data on urban form and function on a national scale. Valuable insight must navigate between oversimplifying and homogenizing Canadian urbanism into a simplistic formula (e.g., the pursuit of “livability”) and abstruse over-specifying of unique and idiosyncratic attributes in each city. A multi-dimensional perspective should respect individual metropolitan area differences, while recognizing and elucidating the Canadian predilection for equivocation between competing urban development and mobility paradigms, which we proposed in chapter 1. This chapter thus seeks to understand where Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver stand in relation to each other and to other metropolitan areas around the globe, by enquiring whether Canadian metropolitan areas form a unique and identifiable group within the global urban-mobility context, with an evident core of internal coherence, or whether they exhibit sufficient and significant variation to prevent effective generalization about their character and function. To answer this question, we have made use of Kenworthy’s global cities database (Schiller and Kenworthy 2018; Newman and Kenworthy 2015) to compare and contrast the metropolitan areas of Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver with both smaller Canadian metropolitan areas and a sample of metropolitan areas from around the world, using key parameters that reflect urban development and mobility.1 For examples of such urban-scale comparison, see Kenworthy (2014a, 2014b, 2013) and Newman and Kenworthy (1999, 1989). The methodology used for these comparisons has been explained in detail in other publications (Kenworthy 2017) and would require too large an addition to the current work to be discussed in full here. Such extensive elaboration is unnecessary because the comparisons are not the core focus of the present work. Two methodological aspects that do need to be explained here to support the interpretation of the data are (1) how each of the primary variables used to calculate standardized variables (e.g., population and urbanized land area to ­calculate urban density) are defined and collected, and (2) an understanding of the geographic definitions used for each metropolitan region and its central business district (CBD ).

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For a detailed appreciation and definition of each primary variable used to calculate the standardized variables provided in this chapter, readers can refer to a methodology chapter written expressly for explaining the history and technical detail behind this global-cities research. In particular, readers are directed to two large tables in that chapter for definitions of the key primary variables (Kenworthy 2017, 51–8, tables 3.1 and 3.2). As explained in Kenworthy (2017), this research has both a long history and a global profile, with approximately two hundred publications resulting from it since 1980. The following statement expands a little further on this history and some methodological aspects of the research: This chapter gives a brief history of this global cities research, starting in the late 1970s up to the present day and outlined in six distinct phases. It then describes the methodology used to undertake the research, including definitions and approaches to a core set of primary variables … The definitions of all the ­primary data items and calculations of standardized variables from these data have been carefully controlled based on over 35 years of experience. For example, a 100-page (unpublished) technical manual was developed in 1998 for the [Millennium Cities Database], setting out clearly the definition of each of the 69 variables and exactly what data had to be collected and how to properly represent the variable. Detailed instructions were provided regarding possible pitfalls in collecting each item, and the likely range of sources of each data item. Where necessary, if the primary data item had to be compiled from many sub-­ components, such as the different modes and operators of public transport in a city, tables were included in the manual to help facilitate this. In most cases, the authors (Kenworthy and Laube 2001), collected original supporting source data from each city. (Kenworthy 2017, 47, 50) To understand the definitions of metropolitan regions and their C B Ds, readers can also refer to Kenworthy and Laube (1999) for a description of the geographic scope of each metropolitan area and its C B D. It provides an insight into the careful way in which these geographic matters have been approached over the years as this research has unfolded. Metropolitan area definitions are found on pages 27–32 of Kenworthy and Laube (1999), and the CBD of each of these cities is defined in table 2.3 on pages 35–37 of the same book.

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The comparative analysis of spatial dynamics and mobility infrastructure in cities around the world has been the focus of significant debate in the academic literature over many years. It emphasizes the influence of physical form, both in the configuration of land uses and in the provision of infrastructure, in shaping the mobility in and around a city (Watt and Ayres 1974). This perspective stands in contrast to the long-established socio-economic perspective on analyzing urban mobility (Alonso 1964) that identifies income and related measures of economic activity as consistent predictors of demand for travel and are thus reliable indicators for parsimonious explanations of urban transportation and development. More recently, researchers have been urged to move beyond conventional analytical paradigms to facilitate urban adaptation to global changes that are increasingly difficult to ignore: “The fundamental changes in the problems and priorities of urban planning due to energy scarcity and climate change will require a change in the philosophy and method of urban modelling” (Wegener 2013, 282). The authors who initiated a comparative analysis of automobile dependence have provided detailed answers to many questions and challenges posed regarding the usefulness and veracity of the results (Newman and Kenworthy 2011, 1992; Newman, Kenworthy, and Vintila 1995; Kenworthy and Newman 1994). Others have responded to criticism of the findings that physical supply of mobility infrastructure shapes both urban form and mobility, by offering independent validation of key aspects of the statistical foundation underlying such analysis (e.g., Evill 1995). More recent analysis has demonstrated the independent influence of major mobility infrastructure on urban transportation activity and system performance, using techniques such as dimensional analysis of the urban system (Cameron, Lyons, and Kenworthy 2004; Cameron, Kenworthy, and Lyons 2003) and structural equation modelling (McIntosh et al. 2014). This book cannot provide a thorough explanation of the many facets of these debates or a comprehensive assessment of them, nor is it the fundamental purpose of the present work to do so. However, it can be fairly and reasonably concluded that the major premises of this comparative research on cities and the quantitative basis behind it remain an important contribution to the urban planning and transport disciplines and the vexing problem of urban automobile dependence. Applying these insights to situate major mobility outcomes in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver will thus add value to our subsequent analysis.

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Table 3.1 therefore assembles a 2006 snapshot of twenty-seven pertinent standardized variables with data from Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, plus Calgary, Edmonton (2011 data), and Ottawa, to offer a perspective on how our sample relates to a wide range of Canadian urban mobility. The table also provides averages for each variable among the six Canadian cities. To facilitate international comparison, the table contains averages of each variable for a sample of ten large US metropolitan regions, four Australian metropolitan regions, twenty European metropolitan areas, and two high-income Asian metropolitan regions in 2005–6.2 To test the cohesion of the six Canadian metropolitan regions, each variable’s standard deviation was calculated and expressed as a percentage variation from the mean (see later figures 3.14 to 3.24). To begin this comparison, we examine two variables highlighted by Goldberg and Mercer (1986), which, as noted in chapter 2, have been the subject of ongoing debate. The data in table 3.1, measuring some twenty years beyond the work of Goldberg and Mercer, clearly confirm their finding that Canadian metropolitan regions are indeed denser and considerably more transit oriented than their southern neighbours. First of all, there is little difference between the average density of the six Canadian cities and that of the three largest cities explored in this book (24.6 versus 25.9 persons per ha, respectively), with the three largest cities being only slightly denser (5% more) than the six-city average. Also, the standard deviation on the urban density of the six Canadian cities is 4.4 persons per ha, representing an 18% variation from the mean. Finally, the six Canadian cities are 60% denser than the ten American cities (24.6 compared to 15.4 persons per ha). Figure 3.1 presents a graph illustrating the density of the six Canadian cities compared to the American cities’ average. To put this finding in context, figure 3.2 presents the urban density data for a slightly expanded group of thirteen American cities. It can be seen that only New York (19.2 per ha), San Francisco (19.8 per ha), and Los Angeles (27.6 per ha) insert themselves into the sequence of Canadian city densities (Edmonton being the lowest at 18.6 per ha). Los Angeles, however, is denser than all the Canadian cities, except Ottawa. The density data in table 3.1 also substantiate that Canadian cities are much denser than the Australian cities (76% higher). These data further demonstrate that the European cities, portrayed generally as very transit oriented and well developed, are almost twice as dense as the Canadian cities, and three times denser than American cities, while being nearly three-and-a-half times denser than Australian cities.

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%

USD 1995

Proportion of jobs in C BD

Metropolitan gross domestic product per capita

20.5

m/person

Length of freeway per person

0.282

4.5

m/1,000 persons

45.5

units/1,000 persons

Motorcycles per 1,000 units/1,000 persons persons

Passenger cars per 1,000 persons

26

632

Private transport supply (cars and motorcycles)

Total length of reserved public transport routes per 1,000 persons

Public Transport Infrastructure Indicators

m/person

Length of road per person

11.9%

10.4

18.6

2011

18

644

22.4

0.101

5.7

$36,713 $32,259

20.9%

12.0

Private Transport Infrastructure Indicators

Supply indicators

persons/ha

jobs/ha

Urban density

Job density

Units

Characteristics of the metropolitan area

2006

16

446

119.2

0.156

4.5

$26,815

17.8%

12.4

25.6

2006

6.4%

14.5

26.9

2006

11.0%

14.1

25.2

2006

12

542

33.6

0.187

8.7

8

485

80.1

0.089

4.7

10

506

55.5

0.069

4.7

$29,956 $33,103 $29,726

19.1%

17.5

30.8

2006

Calgary Edmonton Montreal Ottawa Toronto Vancouver

11.7%

13.7

25.9

2006

3 CAN

USA

8.2%

8.1

15.4

2005

AUS

12.7%

6.2

14.0

2006

EUR

18.3%

29.6

47.9

2005

ASIA

9.1%

113.3

217.3

2005

15

543

59.4

0.147

5.5

11

479

84.9

0.105

4.6

16

640

71.7

0.156

6.0

21

647

160.0

0.083

7.6

41

463

297.8

0.094

3.1

19

78

33.8

0.026

0.5

$31,429 $29,881 $44,455 $32,194 $38,683 $21,201

14.5%

13.5

24.6

2006

6 CAN

Table 3.1 A national and international comparison of Canadian cities on key indicators of transportation and land use.

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seat km/ person

km/h

Total public transport seat kilometres of ­service per capita

Overall average speed of public transport

%

%

* motorized public modes

* motorized private modes

77.3%

8.6%

14.1%

26.4

Passenger car kilometres per capita

v.km/person 8,362

2011

80.3%

8.9%

10.8%

21.8

2,166

54.4

1.27

45.6

5,901

Private Mobility Indicators (cars and motorcycles)

%

* non-motorized modes

Mode split of all trips

Mobility Indicators

v.km/person 52.5

Total public transport vehicle kilometres of service per capita

2,369

units/1,000 persons

0.97

50.1

Total public transport vehicles per 1,000 persons

Public Transport Supply and Service

Average road network km/h speed

Traffic Intensity Indicators

2006

5,333

71.3%

16.3%

12.5%

28.1

2,048

49.9

1.00

42.0

2006

6,911

72.1%

15.9%

12.0%

26.6

2,193

48.4

1.07

45.0

2006

5,020

78.4%

15.2%

6.3%

25.8

3,056

54.9

0.80

51.4

2006

6,971

77.8%

9.3%

12.9%

21.7

2,173

54.9

0.74

38.6

2006

Calgary Edmonton Montreal Ottawa Toronto Vancouver

6,416

76.2%

12.4%

11.4%

25.1

2,334

52.5

0.97

45.5

2006

6 CAN

5,775

75.8%

13.6%

10.6%

25.2

2,426

53.2

0.85

44.0

2006

3 CAN

USA

13,100

85.0%

5.5%

9.5%

27.3

1,874

39.2

0.76

50.4

2005

AUS

8,698

78.3%

7.5%

14.2%

33.0

4,077

58.9

0.93

42.8

2006

EUR

4,937

43.1%

22.4%

34.5%

29.8

6,126

107.5

1.51

34.3

2005

ASIA

1,333

27.9%

46.0%

26.1%

26.3

7,267

134.5

1.50

30.6

2005

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kg/person

256

0.16

0.228

ratio Ratio of segregated public transport infrastructure versus freeways

Car vehicle kilometres km/dollar of travel per dollar of GD P

0.183

0.22

0.48

2.3

159

42.4%

694

134

7,730

0.199

0.76

0.67

6.1

137

53.0%

1,122

206

6,453

0.231

0.18

0.59

4.4

101

49.7%

849

129

8,708

0.152

0.90

0.50

5.3

160

70.1%

1,125

154

6,290

0.234

0.81

0.56

5.3

169

54.8%

928

134

9,987

0.204

0.51

0.56

5.6

164

54.3%

975

148

8,368

0.195

0.82

0.58

5.6

156

59.3%

1,058

165

7,577

0.300

0.56

0.55

9.5

185

31.3%

571

67

18,703

0.272

1.98

0.78

6.2

144

36.8%

1,075

96

12,447

0.135

5.51

0.88

3.4

35

60.5%

2,234

386

6,817

0.060

1.42

0.86

3.8

34

121.2%

3,786

450

1,975

Source: Compiled by authors with global cities data adapted from Newman and Kenworthy (2015), Schiller and Kenworthy (2018), and Rinn (2012).

0.53

ratio

Ratio of public versus private transport speeds

Public/Private Transport Balance Indicators

Total transport deaths deaths/100K 10.2 per 100,000 people persons

Transport Fatalities Indicators

Total emissions per capita

Air Pollution Indicators

Transport Externalities Indicators

%

Public transport operating cost recovery

55.8%

p.km/person 1,130

Total public transport passenger kilometres per capita

131

boardings/ person

Total public transport boardings per capita

Public Transport Mobility Indicators

Passenger car passenger p.km/person 11,038 kilometres per capita

62

Big Moves 35.0 30.8

Urban density (persons per ha)

30.0

26.9

25.0

25.6

25.2 20.5

20.0

25.9

24.6 18.6

15.4

15.0 10.0 5.0

SA U

A N C 3

A N C 6

To ro nt o M on tr ea l Va nc ou ve r Ca lg ar y Ed m on to n

O tt a

w a

-

Figure 3.1  Urban density in six Canadian cities compared to the average for ten American cities Source: Compiled by authors with global cities data adapted from Newman and Kenworthy (2015), Schiller and Kenworthy (2018), and Rinn (2012).

Furthermore, the two Asian cities are in a class of their own in density (e.g., fourteen times denser than American cities and nearly nine times denser than Canadian cities). Figure 3.3 shows an example of why Canadian cities have higher densities than cities in the United States or Australia. The view shows the original Millennium SkyTrain line from a tower in Metrotown looking back towards the central area of Vancouver. The clustering of high density around stations amidst much lower density suburban development, plus the very high density core evident in the high-rise towers, are key contributors to Metropolitan Vancouver’s higher urban density. Figure 3.4 shows the very high density that has emerged at Queens Quay and Spadina Avenue stimulated by the Toronto L R T route, which is an enhanced form of street railway that was not included in our definition of rapid transit but nonetheless illustrates the synergy between rail-transit infrastructure and intensification of urban land development. Toronto has numerous such high-density development areas dotted throughout the GTA (e.g., North York), often linked to

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30.0

27.6

Urban density (persons per ha)

25.0 20.0 16.9 15.0 10.0

9.6

10.9 11.5

12.6 12.9

17.7

19.2

19.8

14.6 14.7

8.1

5.0

H

A tla nt ou a st o Ph n oe ni x Se at W tle as hi ng to Po n rtl a Sa nd n D ieg o D en ve r C hi N ew cag o O rl e a N ew ns Sa Y n or Fr k an c Lo is co s A ng el es

-

Figure 3.2  Urban density for thirteen large American cities in 2005 Source: Compiled by authors with global cities data adapted from Newman and Kenworthy (2015) and Schiller and Kenworthy (2018).

transit infrastructure, ranging from subways to regional railway stations, which play a role in the higher density of the region as a whole, notwithstanding the vast tracts of suburban development. Figure 3.5 shows some characteristic medium-density inner-city housing on the Island of Montreal. Such housing typologies cover significant areas of the island and help to account for the higher density of the Montreal region compared to that of American and Australian cities. The last and perhaps most paradoxical finding from these data – that the quintessential sprawling and automobile-oriented urban region of Los Angeles is actually the densest metropolitan region in the United States – leads into the next key comparison concerning transit use. This transit factor serves to further highlight the divergence of Canadian cities from their US neighbours, as well as the results of Canadian cities’ policy equivocation about going all the way in fully developing any one mode of transportation infrastructure. With an urban density of 27.6 per ha, Los Angeles compares to the  urban regions of Stockholm (25.7 per ha) and Copenhagen (29.2 per ha), so one might expect that Los Angeles could support a

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Figure 3.3  High urban densities in parts of the Vancouver region Joyce–Collingwood SkyTrain station is in the foreground, and the high-density core in the background.

Figure 3.4  High-density development adjacent to light rail transit at Spadina Avenue and Queens Quay along the Toronto waterfront

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robust public-transit system, as these two European urban regions do today. However, the similarities between Los Angeles and European cities begin and end with density, because the City of Angels has embraced an almost single-minded pursuit of expressway infrastructure to move people and goods. Starting in the late 1930s when Los Angeles began to tear out its extensive rail-based transit system, the city embarked on a monomodal restructuring of major mobility infrastructure that continued for over half a century (Yago 1984). Meanwhile, the European regions retained effective transit infrastructure, which they subsequently improved and expanded following the Second World War. Los Angeles only began to recreate the first fragments of its abandoned rail-transit infrastructure in the late 1980s. Likewise, but to a lesser extent than in Europe, Canadian cities also did not fully embrace an automotive-infrastructure trajectory and also invested in rapid transit beginning in the 1950s (see chapter 4).3 Table 3.1 shows that the six Canadian cities average 148 annual transit boardings per capita. Australian cities, by contrast, average just 96 boardings per capita. Figure 3.6 shows these data graphically and highlights the fact that even Ottawa, an urban region where public transit is provided almost entirely by bus (a significant constraint on transit ridership compared to that of cities with rail systems – see Kenworthy 2008), has almost twice the transit usage of an average large American city (129 compared to 67 boardings per capita). Canada’s three largest cities present an even higher average use at 165 per capita, while Los Angeles has just 68 boardings per capita (­figure 3.7). Furthermore, the American cities as a whole average 67 boardings per capita, making the six Canadian cities some 2.2 times higher in per capita transit use. As shown in figure 3.7, transit boardings of the Canadian cities only fall below those of the New York region, with its vast network of subway and surface commuter rail lines supporting 168 boardings per capita. But, even here, Montreal still eclipses New York with 23% higher transit use. The implications of these data are revealing. Montreal, the Canadian city that most embraced the expressway as a solution for meeting urban mobility needs during the automobile’s heyday of the 1950s and 1960s, and then launched a metro for Expo 67, has wound up with by far the highest transit use of all Canadian cities. It demonstrates that substandard outcomes are not an inevitable legacy of the equivocation explored throughout this book. In other words, while eagerly building expressways, Montreal proved to be equally

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Figure 3.5  An example of a prevalent medium-density housing typology in Montreal’s inner-city area

devoted in its ambition to construct rail rapid transit. This globalcity-­development strategy of fully building both expressways and rapid transit provided a backbone of major mobility infrastructure – segregated high-capacity, high-speed, urban-transportation rights of way – that is second to none in Canada. It also demonstrates dramatically the results of a Canadian city’s having simultaneously embraced major mobility infrastructures designed to serve both automobiles and transit at a time that no American municipality was placing similar bets on each side of future mobility alternatives. Table 3.1 shows that Montreal has some 119 metres of reservedtransit route per person (1.7 times higher than that of the average American city), while Toronto, the next highest, has 80 metres. Montreal also leads the Canadian cities in the percentage of daily trips undertaken on transit (16.3%), compared to the average for the six Canadian cities (12.4%), while also clearly eclipsing the American cities, which see a meagre 5.5% of their daily trips taken on transit. The aggregate quantitative evidence presented in this chapter supports our claims of a distinctive result arising from equivocation

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Annual transit boardings per capita

250 206 200 165

154

150

134

134

148 131

129

100 67 50

SA U

A N C 3

A N C 6

w a O tt a

M

on tr e

al To ro nt o Va nc ou ve r Ed m on to n Ca lg ar y

0

Figure 3.6  Annual transit boardings in Canadian cities compared to American cities, 2005–6. Source: Compiled by authors with global cities data adapted from Newman and Kenworthy (2015), Schiller and Kenworthy (2018), and Rinn (2012).

regarding Canadian cities’ land use and transport-policy priorities. On the one hand, Canadian cities as a group appear to cluster in a particular mobility niche that sets them apart from other urban areas. They sit between the very high automobile dependence of American and Australian cities and the strong transit orientation and lower car dependence of the more compact European cities. This middle ground of urban mobility has been attained in no small measure through equivocation over investing in any one mode of transport infrastructure. Although Canadian cities fall within an urban classification that we would label as being automobile oriented, their embrace of automobility appears less ardent than that of other cities within this category. For example, Canadian cities are denser than their American and Australian counterparts, having cultivated a greater acceptance of density, both in their traditional inner-city areas and in their suburban areas, which also tend to be on average denser than American and Australian suburbs.4

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Big Moves 180 168

Annual transit boardings per capita

160 140 120 103

100 80 68

109

73

60 40

32 17

20

38

39

19

st

D ieg o D en ve r A tla nt Lo a s A ng el es C hi ca Sa go n Fr an ci sc W o as hi ng to n N ew Y or k

Sa n

ou H

Ph

oe

ni

on

x

0

Figure 3.7  Annual transit boardings per capita in ten large American cities, 2005 Source: Compiled by authors with global cities data adapted from Newman and Kenworthy (2015) and Schiller and Kenworthy (2018).

On the other hand, there is significant national variation in Canadian urban density, with Ottawa, for example, having some 31 persons per ha, while Edmonton is developed at only 19 persons per ha. Within the three largest cities on which we focus, however, urban density is largely consistent (25.6, 26.9, and 25.2 persons per ha in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, respectively). The six Canadian cities, however, have a standard deviation of thirty transit trips per capita (or a 20% variation from the mean; see figure 3.22 later in this chapter) and range from a low of 129 boardings per capita in Ottawa up to 206 in Montreal. However, Montreal accounts for the bulk of the standard deviation on this factor, with figure 3.6 showing how transit use per person in the five other Canadian cities falls quite narrowly

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Figure 3.8  Montreal’s subway system, known as the Metro, a key enabler of the city’s leading transit use in North America

between 129 and 154 boardings per capita. By contrast, figure 3.7 shows the American cities with comparatively vast variations in their transit use, from a miniscule low of 17 boardings per capita in Phoenix up to 168 in New York, yielding a standard deviation of 48 boardings per capita, or a 72% variation on the mean (see figure 3.22). Figure 3.8 shows the Montreal Metro, one of the reasons Montreal enjoys the highest transit use of any metropolitan region in North America. Figure 3.9 captures Vancouver’s SkyTrain approaching the Main Street–Science World station and the clustering of high-density development that has happened in proximity to this station. Such transitoriented development around rapid-transit stations such as Edmonds, Metrotown, Joyce–Collingwood, and New Westminster help to explain Vancouver’s comparatively robust and growing transit use. So far we have considered where Canadian cities stand on urban density and transit use. Next we will assess their differences and similarities in other dimensions of land use and mobility choices, comparing them internationally using a suite of urban land-use and transportation

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Figure 3.9  Vancouver SkyTrain approaching Main Street–Science World station with associated higher density development

indicators. Each dimension of the data presented in table 3.1 is addressed sequentially, noting key points of difference and similarity. Employment Densities As with urban density, Canadian cities have higher employment densities than those prevailing in both the United States (8.1 jobs per ha) and Australia (6.2 jobs per ha). The six Canadian cities average 13.5 jobs per ha, while the three largest cities on which we focus reflect slightly denser employment at 13.7 jobs per ha. Variation amongst the six Canadian cities is relatively low on this indicator. Proportion of Jobs Located in the Central Business District When we measure centralization of employment location, the six Canadian cities have some 14.5% of their metropolitan employment located in city centres; the three largest cities have a lower figure of 11.7%. Meanwhile, American cities have a much smaller share of employment in

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city centres, at 8.2%, while Australian cities are also slightly less centralized than in Canada, at 12.7%. By contrast, the European cities still have some 18.3% of their jobs located in their city centres. As the journey to work is still a mobility function that can be fulfilled by public transit in Canadian cities, those cities that have centralized employment tend to do better in transit use than those that have decentralized, scattered jobs that require car access. An alternative to monocentric employment concentration that still enables mobility by transit is a polycentric configuration in which significant numbers of jobs and other activities are clustered in high-density, mixed-use subcentres, rather than scattered like salt and pepper across the landscape. On this factor we see a much greater variation between Canadian cities, ranging from a low of 6.4% of jobs located in Toronto’s CBD (though perhaps more in significant sub-centres serviced by transit, such as North York and Scarborough) to a 20.9% concentration of jobs in Calgary, a much more monocentric city. The standard deviation is a large 5.6%, or a 39% variation relative to the mean value for Canadian cities. This suggests that when it comes to employment distribution, there is no archetypal configuration of workplace locations in the Canadian city. Metropolitan GDP per Capita Gross domestic product (GDP ) offers a measure of the relative prosperity of cities. With all data normalized to real 1995 US dollars, we can compare the wealth of cities internationally. Canadian cities in 2006 averaged $31,429 in G D P per capita, roughly the same as Australian cities ($32,194), but notably poorer than American cities ($44,455) and European cities ($38,683). There is some variation between Canadian cities in wealth, with Montreal clearly being the poorest among the six cities ($26,815), and Calgary being the wealthiest ($36,713) when these data were assembled, most likely due to the oil and minerals boom in Alberta at that time. Edmonton was also high in income at $32,259. Statistically, though, Canadian cities’ GDP per capita only had a standard deviation of $3,399, or a 10.8% variation, from the mean, which is not large compared to some other factors such as urban density, transit trips per capita, and proportion of jobs in the C B D (18%, 20%, and 39% variation, respectively). From this data one can conclude that income is relatively equitably spread across Canadian cities, at least in terms of spatial distribution.

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Length of Road per Person Length of road is a measure of the total centreline length of all roads, from expressways down to residential streets; it does not measure lane lengths of roads. These road-length measures reveal that our sample of Canadian cities has the least overall amount of road infrastructure supplied outside of Europe (5.5 m per person, compared to 3.1 m for European cities), while the three largest cities averaged even lower at 4.6 metres per person, somewhat below the American and Australian cities. Variation in this factor amongst the six Canadian cities was 1.6 m per person, or 30% variation from the mean, which suggests some disparity among the balance between automobile and transitinfrastructure development priorities across Canadian cities. Length of Freeway per Person Expressway (freeway)5 provision is a potentially more telling factor than total road provision because expressways represent premiumpriced, high-capacity, and swiftly flowing road infrastructure and require high-profile, and often contested, policy decisions to implement. These choices are driven by factors and forces that extend beyond transport planning, and, as this book contends, the decisions around expressway construction are pivotal ones that shape a city’s future. It is critical to note that expressways are not an essential infrastructure for enabling automobility. This is borne out by the data on the six Canadian cities, which show that expressway provision varies considerably, from a high in Calgary of 0.282 m per capita to a low in the Vancouver region of 0.069 m per capita, with a standard deviation of 0.080 m per person or a very considerable 54% variation from the mean. Montreal ranks third in expressway provision behind Ottawa amongst the six cities (0.156 compared to 0.187 m per capita respectively). However, Montreal is very much the highest among the “Big Three” compared to Toronto with 0.089 and Vancouver with 0.069 m per capita. As evidenced by the analysis developed in this book, Montreal in the 1950s and 1960s very strongly embraced the American paradigm of expressway building, and, interestingly, by 2006 it had achieved an amount of expressway provision that was identical to that of the average American city. On average, Canadian cities, despite not

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Figure 3.10  A section of Montreal’s extensive expressway system passing through downtown

having a nationally funded expressway-building program, have only slightly less expressway provision than an average large American city has (0.147 compared to 0.156 m per capita), although the three largest Canadian cities average only 0.105 m per capita, which amounts to 33% less than the American urban average. Figure 3.10 shows part of Montreal’s relatively extensive expressway system as it passes under the Montreal Congress Centre in downtown Montreal. Figure 3.11 pictures a very high-capacity segment of Toronto’s expressway development legacy. Length of Reserved Public Transport Route per 1,000 Persons The length of reserved public transport route is a measure of all rights of way for transit vehicles that are fully separated and protected from road traffic (e.g., designated bus lanes and most rail lines, apart from some tram or L R T lines that are operated in mixed traffic). Here,

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Figure 3.11  A twelve-lane section of Toronto’s expressway infrastructure

Canadian cities vary enormously, and it can be said on this factor that there is definitely no “typical” Canadian city when it comes to the provision of rapid-transit infrastructure. This could be the result of an absence of a national program for supporting urban transit development, with associated standards and design requirements, as is found in the United States. Again, the provision of high-quality transit systems, and especially investment in rail rapid transit, is very much driven by project-specific policy in Canada, which arises from the politics and socio-economic issues prevalent in cities at any given time. On this factor we see a range in Canadian cities, from 22.4 m of exclusive-use transit infrastructure per 1,000 persons in Edmonton (which has only a small though growing LR T system) to 119.2 m per 1,000 persons in Montreal with its extensive subway system and significant suburban rail infrastructure. On average, Canadian cities have only 59.4 m per 1,000 persons on this measure, significantly behind even the American cities (71.7 m), the Australian cities (160.0 m) and the European cities (297.8 m). However, Canada’s three largest cities are much better at supplying exclusive-use transit infrastructure, with 84.9 m per 1,000 persons – a little more than the American cities. Not surprisingly, there is a large

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standard deviation of 35.4 m per person on this factor in Canadian cities, or some 60% variation around the mean. Ratio of Segregated Public Transport Infrastructure versus Freeways Taking the previous two major-mobility-infrastructure attributes a step further, we can combine them to measure the relative priority of high-quality transit infrastructure to high-quality road infrastructure. Here we see a very strong divergence amongst the Canadian cities, with an average ratio for the six cities of only 0.51, meaning that they possess only half as many transit reserved routes as expressways, mostly called freeways in other cities. However, the average ratio of the three largest cities is 0.82, demonstrating a generally more favourable history of investing in rapid transit, compared with expressways, thereby creating much more auspicious conditions for promoting reduced car dependence, as we will discuss. In fact, on this dimension, the gulf between Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver and Calgary, Edmonton, and Ottawa is striking, with the latter three having a ratio of only 0.19 (meaning only 19% as much reserved-transit infrastructure as expressways). The range in this factor overall is very large, with a low ratio of 0.16 in Calgary, up to a ratio of 0.90 in Toronto. This variable has the highest variation around the mean (70%) of all twenty-seven parameters in table 3.1 and shows the great diversity in the relationship between these two major mobility infrastructures among Canadian cities. American cities are fractionally better in this ratio with an average of 0.56, while Australian cities have virtually twice as much reservedtransit route as they do expressways, and the European cities have 5.5 times as much. The question of why the Canadian cities do so well in transit use, and better than Australian cities that have double the exclusive-transit infrastructure, for example, will be considered further once more factors have been examined. Vancouver in 2006 had a ratio of 0.81 reserved-transit route to expressway length, the second highest in Canada at the time and just behind Toronto at 0.90 (table 3.1). However, with the opening of the 19.2 km Canada Line in August 2009, which fell beyond the time frame of our data collection presented in chapter 4, this ratio now exceeds that of expressways. Figure 3.12 shows the Canada Line infrastructure as it approaches Vancouver International Airport.

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Figure 3.12  Canada Line rapid-transit infrastructure as it approaches Vancouver International Airport (opened in August 2009)

Passenger Cars per 1,000 Persons The measure of passenger cars per 1,000 persons highlights the level of car ownership in cities. Here we can say that Canadian cities form a distinct group internationally, with an average of 543 cars per 1,000 persons. The standard deviation for the six Canadian cities is 80 cars per 1,000 persons, which represents some 15% variation around the mean. The range from highest to lowest ­represents quite a variation, however, with Calgary having a high of 632 and Montreal a low of only 446 cars per 1,000 persons. Internationally, Canadian cities are significantly below their car-dependent neighbours in the United States, which average 640 cars per 1,000 persons, and the even more car-filled cities in Australia at 647 vehicles per person. Indeed, on this mobility dimension, Canadian cities are a little closer to the European average of 463 cars per 1,000 persons than they are to the US average. This data offers evidence suggesting that Montreal’s extensive rapid-transit infrastructure contributes to moderating urban car ownership, despite the city’s relatively high

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expressway provision. There is also likely to be an economic influence on Montreal’s low car ownership, given its low G D P per capita. Motorcycles per 1,000 Persons Motorcycles play an increasingly important role in urban mobility globally regardless of income levels, as congestion continues to grow and plague cities. The Canadian cities have low motorcycle ownership, averaging only 15 per 1,000 persons, and the three largest cities are all below Canada’s average, with just 11 motorcycles per 1,000 persons, possibly due to their better rapid-transit options. There is much variation on this type of vehicle ownership, ranging from just 8 motorcycles per 1,000 persons in Toronto to 26 in Calgary (with Edmonton also relatively high at 18 per 1,000 persons). The standard deviation is nearly 7 motorcycles per 1,000 persons, or some 43% variation around the mean. Relative to American cities, motorcycle ownership is on average about the same (16 in the US), while in the four Australian cities motorcycle ownership is 21, and in Europe it rises to 41 per 1,000 persons. Average Road Network Speed The average road network speed is the twenty-four hour, seven days per week average speed of travel on the road system in each city. Here there is not a huge difference between the Canadian cities and other automobile-dependent urban settings (45.5 km/h, 50.4 km/h, and 42.8 km/h in Canadian, American, and Australian cities, respectively). The variation within Canada is also small (the standard deviation is 4.8 km/h, or 11% variation around the mean). Traffic is slowest in Vancouver with 38.6 km/h, probably due to the near absence of expressways and the tight urban grid over much of the area, causing much stopping at intersections; motor vehicle traffic moves fastest in Toronto and Calgary. Montreal has the second-lowest average road speed among the six Canadian cities, notwithstanding its relatively high expressway provision. This suggests considerable variation in traffic speeds between urban expressways and the majority of the metropolitan road network, which resembles European conditions with their limited road space and denser development. The significance of this factor is discussed in a following section on the speed of public transport compared to the speed of road traffic.

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Public-Transport Vehicles per 1,000 Persons In the same way that one can measure the availability of cars and motorcycles, it is possible to consider the relative provision of the public-transport fleet. Each bus and rail carriage is counted as one vehicle, even though generally a rail carriage carries more people than a bus does. The Canadian cities on average have 0.97 or almost one public-transport vehicle for every 1,000 people, with a range from 0.74 in Vancouver to 1.27 in Edmonton. Some of this variation can probably be explained in terms of differences in transit’s share of public transport among the cities. Edmonton, which is the most bus-based of these Canadian cities, requires more vehicles to achieve its transit-service capacity, whereas its similarly sized neighbouring city, Calgary, has more light rail and 24% fewer vehicles per 1,000 persons. The standard deviation between the six cities is 0.19 vehicles, which represents almost a 20% variation compared to the mean. The provision of transit vehicles in Canadian cities is 28% higher than in American cities and 4% higher than in Australian cities, but it is 36% lower than in European cities. Public-Transport Vehicle Kilometres of Service per Capita The measure of public-transport vehicle kilometres of service per capita offers one indication of the supply of public-transport service, and here we see that the six Canadian cities have similar transit output, with an annual average of 52.5 km per person and a limited range from only 48.4 km in Ottawa to 54.9 km per person in both Vancouver and Toronto. The standard deviation is only 2.8 vehicle kilometres, or a 5% variation from the mean, and the three large cities have only fractionally higher service provision than the six cities do. This represents a strong uniformity across Canadian cities – they all provide a relatively consistent and reasonable level of transit service. American cities clearly have much lower transit service, with 39.2 km per person, while the Australian cities are similar to the Canadian cities at 58.9 km per person. Not unexpectedly, the European cities present a quantum jump up from all these groups of cities, with 107.5 vehicle kilometres of service per person, or basically double the Canadian level. Public-Transport Seat Kilometres of Service per Capita The measure of public-transport seat kilometres of service per capita takes into account the vehicle size by incorporating the number of

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seats in each vehicle. Such measurement begins to differentiate the Canadian cities owing to differences in rail provision, with an average for the six cities of 2,334 seat kilometres per capita, but a range from 2,048 in Montreal, the lowest, to 3,056 seat kilometres per person in Toronto. The difference between cities is more accentuated than with vehicle kilometres of service, with a variation from the mean of 16%. The three large Canadian cities have a slightly higher average on this parameter, with 2,426 seat kilometres per capita, owing to their rail systems. However, apart from the American cities, which have an average of only 1,874 seat kilometres per person, the Canadian cities have inferior service levels to both Australian cities (4,077) and European cities (6,126). Average Speed of Public Transport and Its Relative Speed Compared to Road Traffic The average speed of the public-transport systems is weighted by the passenger hours for each mode in order to calculate a valid average. The relative speed of public transport compared to the speed of road traffic is important because it is a measure of the time competitiveness of public transport in cities. Canadian cities all have relatively slow average public-transport speeds, which vary from a low of 21.7 km/h in Vancouver (probably owing to the considerable share of transit mobility that is provided by buses) to a high of 28.1 km/h in Montreal, which makes sense given the latter city’s extensive rapid-transit infrastructure. Vancouver also has the lowest road-traffic speed. The average for the six cities is 25.1 km/h, with a minimal variation around this mean of 11%. American cities average 27.3 km/h, Australian cities 33.0 km/h, and European cities 29.8 km/h. Of more significance, however, is the relative speed of transit, measured by a ratio of overall transit operating speed (all modes) to the average 24-7, road-traffic speed. In the six Canadian cities this ratio is quite poor at 0.56 and little better in the three large cities at 0.58. This means that cars travel at roughly twice the average speed of transit in Canadian cities. The American cities, however, are the worst by a very small margin with 0.55, while the Australian cities average 0.78, and the European cities 0.88. Differences in this factor within the six cities is not great, ranging from a high in Montreal of 0.67 to a low in Edmonton of 0.48 (12% variation from the mean).

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Mode Split of All Trips The mode split of all trips is represented in table 3.1 as three variables – the percentages of non-motorized modes, motorized public modes, and motorized private modes (principally cars and motorcycles). Here we see the automobile orientation of Canadian cities, with 76.2% of all daily trips taken by private motorized modes, compared to 12.4% by transit and 11.4% by walking and cycling. The three large cities are slightly less dominated by private motorized mobility (75.8%). The variation overall in the six cities on private motorized modes is the smallest of all the twenty-seven variables (4.8%), with a range from 71.3% in Montreal to 80.3% in Edmonton. Again, on this factor there is more similarity between Canadian cities than there is variation. Transit varies considerably in meeting travel demand across Canadian cities, with a range from 8.6% in Calgary to 16.3% in Montreal. The three large cities again fare a little better, with an average of 13.6% mobility being served by transit. The variation in this factor is quite high. Non-motorized mode usage ranges from a very low and somewhat surprising figure of 6.3% in Toronto to an unexpected high of 14.1% in Calgary. The variation between the six cities is moderate but not as high as with transit use. Compared to US cities, Canadian cities are less car oriented. American cities see 85.0% of daily trips being made by private motorized modes, a mere 5.5% taken by transit, and just 9.5% accomplished by walking and cycling. Australian cities are less skewed toward the automobile, with 78.3%, 7.5%, and 14.2% of daily trips, respectively. European cities are in a class of their own, having a remarkable 43.1% travel by private motorized modes, 22.4% by transit, and 34.5% by non-motorized modes. The two Asian cities are even more striking, with only 27.9% of travel made by private motorized modes, an enormous 46.0% of mobility accommodated on transit, and a healthy 26.1% of mobility made by non-motorized modes. Nearly threequarters of daily mobility needs are fulfilled by non-automobile modes in these two Asian cities. Passenger-Car Kilometres per Capita Passenger vehicle kilometres travelled (VKT) per capita, together with the following variable incorporating passenger vehicle occupancy, represent litmus tests for urban automobile dependence. The VKT per

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capita measures how extensively cars are used in cities and is therefore a more significant indicator than the previously noted car ownership figures. The six Canadian cities average 6,416 km per person annually, while the three large cities register a lower figure of 5,775 km per person. The range in values is moderate, representing a 19% variation around the mean (see figure 3.20), with a range from 5,020 km per capita in Toronto to 8,362 km in Calgary. On this factor, the Canadian cities clearly distinguish themselves internationally. American cities have 13,100 V K T per capita, the Australian cities almost 8,700 km, while the European cities have 4,937 per capita. In particular, the three large cities of Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver are much closer to European levels of car use than they are to their automobile-dependent counterparts in the United States and Australia, though they are very much higher than the two Asian cities, which only register 1,333 VKT per capita. Passenger-Car Passenger Kilometres per Capita Passenger-car passenger kilometres travelled (P K T ) per capita also measures car use, but it incorporates the occupancy factor, including of course the car driver. The patterns found here are similar to those for vehicle kilometres. Canadian cities average only 8,368 car PKT per capita (even lower in the three large cities, at 7,577), while American cities average 18,703, Australian cities 12,447, and European cities, clearly lower, 6,817 car PKT per capita. Again, Canadian cities stake out an area that is closer to the European cities than to either American or Australian cities. The variation among Canadian cities is slightly higher on this variable (22.8%; see later figure 3.21), and the range is from 6,290 car PK T per capita in Toronto to 11,038 in Calgary, representing a significant variation. The importance of this factor in the transportation sustainability of cities and the unique position of Canadian cities relative to their automobile-dependent cousins is highlighted in figure 3.13, which combines the car PKT per capita for the twenty individual cities in all three automobile-dependent countries. As can be seen, the Canadian cities form a unique group on the left of the graph. No Australian or American city intervenes in this sequence, so the Canadian cities comprise the six lowest car users among this group of twenty cities. Furthermore, the differences are sometimes staggering, such as the extremely high car use in cities such as Atlanta, Denver,

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Annual car passenger kilometres per capita

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Figure 3.13  Annual car-passenger kilometres per capita in twenty American, Australian, and Canadian cities, 2005–6 Source: Adapted from Schiller and Kenworthy (2018), Newman and Kenworthy (2015), and Rinn (2012).

and Houston compared to all the Canadian cities. Not unexpectedly, the two transit capitals in Australia and the United States (Sydney and New York) are also the lowest car users in their respective groups. Melbourne, the other transit-rich city in Australia, is also close to the highest car-using Canadian city, Calgary. Public-Transport Passenger Kilometres per Capita We have already discussed the important measure of transit use in terms of annual boardings per capita. Another way of measuring transit use is through passenger kilometres travelled (similar to car P K T just discussed). Here we see that the Canadian cities average 975 transit P K T per capita, and the three largest cities a little higher at 1,058 transit PKT per capita. Compared to the American cities with only 571, the Canadian cities appear healthy, though the figures are very close to the Australian average of 1,075 and less than half the European figure.

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Here we see the effect of the greater density of Canadian cities: generally shorter travel distances for transit users, hence lower P KT . Also, there is an associated physical-size effect, with Canadian cities being on average smaller than their Australian and American counterparts. These spatial factors are also important in helping explain the lower car use in Canadian cities. Canadian cities have some variation on this factor, ranging from a low of 694 transit P K T per capita in Edmonton to a high of 1,130 in Calgary, though Montreal has 1,122 and Toronto 1,125, so there is also some consistency. Overall, the standard deviation is 182 transit PK T per capita, which is a 19% variation around the mean. Public-Transport Operating-Cost Recovery The indicator of public-transport operating-cost recovery measures the extent to which fare-box revenues cover the operating costs of transit systems. It is an important item to include in our exploration of Canadian urban mobility because cost recovery is often the focus of political attacks on transit as a “waste of public money.” It is also an interesting item in that the six Canadian cities average 54.3% cost recovery, while the three larger ones recover 59.3%. This contrasts to the American cities, which recover only 31.3%, and the Australian cities, which recover an average of 36.8% of their transit costs from the fare-box. Canadian cities are also close to the European cities on this factor (60.5%). In some sense this result is to be expected, especially when one considers the generally higher transit use of the Canadian cities, but it is interesting that this activity is achieved with only a minimum of service provision relative to cities with somewhat higher usage. This means that Canadian cities generally make much more efficient use of the transit services being provided, especially in the three large cities, which in turn means a greater fare-box return for a given level of service. This greater usage intensity of transit services can be partly explained by the higher densities in Canadian cities, which mean that there are generally more people in a given area to use the transit services provided. The level of variation on this factor based on the standard deviation (see figure 3.23) averages 17% around the mean, and ranges from 42.4% in Edmonton and to 70.1% in Toronto.

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Transport Emissions per Capita Emissions from transportation sources are becoming increasingly recognized for their negative impacts on health and the environment. This variable considers the C O (carbon monoxide), V H C (volatile hydrocarbons), N O x (nitrogen oxides), and s o 2 (sulphur dioxide) from all modes of transportation in each city. In this factor, Canadian cities do not distinguish themselves globally, averaging 164 kg per capita for the six cities, and 156 kg for the three large cities. However, US cities average 185 kg per capita, and Australian cities 144 kg per capita; therefore, considering the large differences in other transportation factors between these cities, there is a degree of uniformity here. The European and Asian cities are dramatically different on this variable, averaging 35 kg and 34 kg per capita respectively due to lower car use and tighter emissionscontrol legislation. Canadian cities show considerable variation along this measure, with 101 kg per capita in Ottawa and 256 kg per capita in Calgary, which is much more than that in an average US city. The standard deviation is 51 kg or a 31% variation around the mean. Transport Deaths per 100,000 Persons The loss of life in urban transportation systems has been of concern for decades. This factor measures the total number of deaths from all transportation-related causes according to the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases codes (I C D 10, codes V01–V99). Canadian cities perform remarkably well on this measure, with an average of 5.6 deaths per 100,000 people (the same average for both the six and the three large cities). Although any loss of life is to be avoided at all costs, these figures compare favourably to the American cities, which have 9.5 deaths per 100,000 people, and the Australian cities with 6.2 deaths. They are, however, considerably higher than the less car-oriented European cities, with 3.4 deaths per 100,000, and even the two large Asian cities have a better result (3.8 per 100,000). There is a great variation within the Canadian cities, however, with Edmonton experiencing 2.3 deaths per 100,000 and Calgary 10.2, a very big difference for two cities that are in the same province and not very far apart. The standard deviation represents some 47% variation

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around the mean for the six cities. It must be remembered, however, that transport deaths do fluctuate from year to year, and, for example, one unusually large pileup on an expressway, or some other uncommon event, can push numbers up for that year. Transport deaths are probably better measured as a five-year average. Nevertheless, one can say that for a group of automobile-oriented cities, albeit less so than in the United States and Australia, these safety outcomes are a commendable result, though it is largely consistent with the other mobility characteristics already examined, such as lower car use and hence lower exposure to the possibility of car accidents. Car Vehicle Kilometres of Travel per Dollar of GDP Earned For urban wealth generation, the less car travel that must be undertaken to earn that wealth, the better a city performs in terms of economic efficiency. The six Canadian cities drive an average of 204 m to earn a dollar of GD P (1995 US dollars), and the three large cities travel even less at 195 m. American cities experience 47% more driving (300 m) for every dollar of their GDP. Australian cities drive 272 m (also a lot more than in Canada), while European cities only have 135 m of car driving per dollar of GDP, and the two Asian cities drive a meagre 60 m. The variation in this factor within the six cities in Canada is not great, ranging from 234 m in Vancouver (Ottawa and Calgary are almost the same with 231 m and 228 m), while Toronto only has 152 m. The standard variation is only 30 m, or 16% (see figure 3.24). Overall, one can conclude that on this factor, again Canadian cities distinguish themselves from other automobile-oriented cities, and that this is fairly consistent across the six cities. do canadian cities represent an identifiable c o n f i g u r at i o n o f   g l o b a l u r b a n m o b i l i t y ?

The answer to whether Canadian cities manifest a distinct urban mobility configuration, like so many explanations about the mysteries of life is, “it all depends.” This chapter has examined in some detail twenty-seven important variables that help describe and characterize urban land use and mobility around the globe. The data clearly demonstrate that on certain parameters one can see that Canadian cities do represent an identifiable and distinctive typology of city, especially

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when compared to the cities with which they are most often contrasted – the American and Australian cities. On these parameters, though there is some expected variation, there is also a high degree of consistency among the six Canadian cities examined. There are some parameters, however, such as road length per capita, transit speeds relative to road speeds, and transport emissions, on which Canadian cities do not distinguish themselves internationally, even if there is a high degree of internal consistency among them. Finally, there are those parameters where the variation between Canadian cities makes it highly problematic to suggest that Canadian cities form an identifiable and unique group compared to their peers. Some of these incoherent dimensions include transit deaths per capita, average road-network speed, and ratio of segregated transit infrastructure to expressways. Table 3.2 summarizes the results of this analysis by sorting each of the twenty-seven variables in table 3.1 into one of three categories: 1 Those variables on which Canadian cities apparently and obviously form a coherent and identifiable international grouping of cities 2 Those variables on which Canadian cities do not form a unique grouping, there being no significant or distinguishable differences between them and other automobile-dependent cities, even though they are internally quite similar 3 Variables where there is too much within-group variation to consider the Canadian cities a distinctive set The overall results show that on eleven of the twenty-seven variables, or 41%, Canadian cities can be deemed to form a distinctive group with sufficient within-group similarity to consider that they have much in common regarding those parameters. Put simply, Canadian cities distinguish themselves internationally as being denser, more transit oriented, and less car dependent in their key mobility metrics than typical automobile-oriented cities. They also perform better in recovering their transit operating costs from fare-box revenue, and they require less car travel to earn a dollar of G D P . This distinctiveness of the Canadian metropolitan areas in the first set of variables in table 3.2 is shown in figures 3.14 to 3.24, which plot the mean value of each variable for the American, Australian, Canadian, and European metropolitan areas, along with their respective standard deviations (the Asian group is left out because the two metropolitan

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Table 3.2 Categorization of the distinctive and disparate dimensions of Canadian urbanism based on a quantitative evaluation of twenty-seven key transport and land-use variables Variable

Attribute

C ategory 1 Urban density

Cana di a n C i t i e s A r e a Di s t i nc t G roup Denser than US and Australian cities

Job density Passenger cars per 1,000 persons Total transit seat kilometres of service per capita Overall average speed of transit systems % daily trips by transit

Denser than US and Australian cities Lower than US and Australian cities Better than US, inferior to Australian cities

Passenger car V KT per capita Passenger car PKT per capita Total transit boardings per capita Transit operating-cost recovery Car V KT per dollar of GDP C ategory 2 Metropolitan G DP per capita Length of road per capita Motorcycles per 1,000 persons Average road network speed Total transit vehicles per 1,000 persons Total transit vehicle km of service per capita % daily trips by non-motorized modes % daily trips by private motorized modes Total transit PKT per capita Total transport emissions per capita Ratio of transit speed to road traffic speed C ategory 3

Proportion of jobs in CBD Length of expressway per capita Length of reserved transit route per capita Total transport deaths per 100,000 Ratio of segregated transit to expressways

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Slowest of all city groups, low variation Much better than US and Australia, but a little varied Very much lower than US and Australia Very much lower than US and Australia Very much higher than US and Australia Strong cost recovery compared to US and Australia Quite low compared to US and Australia Cana di a n C i t i e s A r e N o t Di s t i nc t Globa l ly Similar to Australian cities Not very different to US cities Similar to US cities, strong variation Similar to US and Australian cities Not very different to the US or Australia Better than the US but not very different to Australia Unremarkable compared to US and Australian cities Very similar to Australia Very similar to Australia Unremarkable compared to US and Australian cities Similar to US cities Cana di a n C i t i e s Hav e S uf f i c i e nt Vari at i o n T hat T h e y L ac k N at i o n a l Coh e r e n c e Very varied on this factor within Canadian cities A big range of values on this factor A big range of values on this factor Very varied within the Canadian cities Greatest variation among Canadian cities of all factors

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Urban density (persons per ha)

70.0 60.0 50.0 40.0 30.0 20.0 10.0 0.0

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Figure 3.14  Mean urban densities in global cities, with their standard deviations, 2005–6. Source: Compiled by authors with global cities data adapted from Newman and Kenworthy (2015) and Schiller and Kenworthy (2018).

areas comprising it are not even close to any other city groupings on any variables, and their inclusion causes scaling problems in the graphs).6 In each of these figures the vertical line in the middle of the columns is an error bar representing ± 1 standard deviation. Figures 3.14 and 3.15 show clearly the uniqueness of the Canadian metropolitan areas in both population and job densities within this global sample. There is no overlap in the standard deviations with any other of the three groups. Figure 3.16 shows that car ownership is distinctly lower in Canadian urban areas than in their American and Australian counterparts. It also shows that while Canadian urban areas are higher in car ownership than in European urban areas, they do push more toward European norms, with some commonality in the standard deviations. This tendency of Canadian urbanism to approximate European urbanism in some respects has been examined in detail before (Newman and Kenworthy 2015; Raad and Kenworthy 1998). Figure 3.17 provides a measure of transit service (annual seat kilometres per person) and shows the relatively low transit-service provision in Canadian urban areas, certainly compared to those in Australia and Europe.

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45.0

Job density (jobs per ha)

40.0 35.0 30.0 25.0 20.0 15.0 10.0 5.0 0.0

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Figure 3.15  Mean job densities in global cities, with their standard deviations, 2005–6 Source: Compiled by authors with global cities data adapted from Newman and Kenworthy (2015) and Schiller and Kenworthy (2018).

800 700

Cars per 1,000 persons

600 500 400 300 200 100 0

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Figure 3.16  Car ownership in global cities, with their standard deviations, 2005–6 Source: Compiled by authors with global cities data adapted from Newman and Kenworthy (2015) and Schiller and Kenworthy (2018).

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Transit-seat km per person

8,000 7,000 6,000 5,000 4,000 3,000 2,000 1,000 0

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Figure 3.17  Transit-seat kilometres of service per person in global cities, with their standard deviations, 2005–6 Source: Compiled by authors with global cities data adapted from Newman and Kenworthy (2015) and Schiller and Kenworthy (2018).

Figure 3.18 demonstrates how the overall average speed of transit in Canadian urban areas is the slowest of all the groups, certainly compared to European urban areas and, for the most part, in Australia as well. The Canadian cities’ standard deviation is the tightest of all groups of cities, indicating a relatively consistent performance on this factor. Canadian urban areas are more like their American cousins on this factor, but they do have a slightly lower mean value, just above 25 km/h. As well, the lower bound in their standard deviation is less than that of the American cities, and the upper bound does not reach that of the American cities. Figure 3.19 depicts the modal split of total daily trips on transit. Canadian urban areas clearly distinguish themselves from the urban areas in Australia and the United States, with virtually no overlap in their standard deviations. While Canadian urban areas are obviously lower in transit modal split than European urban areas, we see that the upper bound of their standard deviations reaches well into the standard deviation range of European urban areas, providing further evidence of a greater transport affinity with Europe than with other New World metropolitan areas at least on some factors.

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Overall average speed of transit system (km/h)

40.0 35.0 30.0 25.0 20.0 15.0 10.0 5.0 0.0

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Figure 3.18  Transit-system average speeds in global cities, with their standard deviations, 2005–6 Source: Compiled by authors with global cities data adapted from Newman and Kenworthy (2015) and Schiller and Kenworthy (2018).

Percentage of total daily trips by transit

35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0%

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Figure 3.19  Percentage of total daily trips by transit in global cities, with their standard deviations, 2005–6 Source: Compiled by authors with global cities data adapted from Newman and Kenworthy (2015) and Schiller and Kenworthy (2018).

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Figures 3.20 and 3.21 provide measures of car use per person, the key indicators of automobile dependence in cities. The graphs clearly show the distinctly lower level of car use per person in Canadian urban areas compared to their equivalents in Australia and the United States. While Canadian urban areas are, unsurprisingly, higher in car use than European urban areas, the boundaries are a little blurred, with the lower bounds of the Canadian metropolitan areas’ standard deviations for both variables reaching well into the European range. Figure 3.22 provides a measure of transit use by showing the number of annual boardings per person in each group of cities. Again, Canadian urban areas sit between the low transit use in the United States and Australia and the very much higher transit use in Europe. The Canadian urban areas clearly have higher transit use than their American and Australian counterparts, though the lower bound of the Canadian urban areas’ standard deviation just touches the upper bound of urban areas in Australia. Conversely, the upper bound of the Canadian standard deviation also just reaches the lower bound of transit use in the European urban areas. On this variable, one can recognize the arguments in this book about Canadian equivocation, with Canadian urban areas spanning the best of the Australian and the worst of the European urban areas in annual transit use. Figure 3.23 shows the variation in transit-operating-cost recovery, with Canadian urban areas clearly doing much better than those in the United States and Australia and having almost no overlap in their standard deviations. Conversely, while Canadian transit-cost recovery is lower than the European, there is complete overlap in their respective standard deviation ranges. Figure 3.24 indicates the intensity of driving that is experienced in urban areas to earn one unit of GDP . Again, Canadian urban areas form an intermediate group between the intense automobile dependence of the American and Australian urban areas and the significantly lower automobile dependence in Europe. The standard deviations are for the most part separate between each grouping of urban areas, but the upper bound of the Canadian sample just penetrates the lower bound of the American and Australian samples. However, on a further eleven variables there is too much similarity with either American cities or Australian cities or both to recognize a distinctively Canadian character relating to urban mobility. For example, Canada’s cities are quite undifferentiated from other cities in their

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Passenger car km per person

16,000 14,000 12,000 10,000 8,000 6,000 4,000 2,000 0

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Figure 3.20  Car-vehicle kilometres travelled (V K T ) per capita in global cities, with their standard deviations, 2005–6

Passenger car passenger km per person

Source: Compiled by authors with global cities data adapted from Newman and Kenworthy (2015) and Schiller and Kenworthy (2018).

25,000 20,000 15,000 10,000 5,000 0

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Figure 3.21  Car-passenger kilometres (PKT) per capita in global cities, with their standard deviations, 2005–6 Source: Compiled by authors with global cities data adapted from Newman and Kenworthy (2015) and Schiller and Kenworthy (2018).

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Transit boardings per person

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Figure 3.22  Transit boardings per person in global cities, with their standard deviations, 2005–6 Source: Compiled by authors with global cities data adapted from Newman and Kenworthy (2015) and Schiller and Kenworthy (2018). 90%

Transit-operating-cost recovery

80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

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Figure 3.23  Transit-operating-cost recovery in global cities, with their standard deviations, 2005–6 Source: Compiled by authors with global cities data adapted from Newman and Kenworthy (2015) and Schiller and Kenworthy (2018).

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0.40

Car vkt per dollar of city gdp

0.35 0.30 0.25 0.20 0.15 0.10 0.05 0.00

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Figure 3.24  Car-vehicle kilometres travelled to earn one US dollar of gross domestic product in global cities, with their standard deviations, 2005–6 Source: Compiled by authors with global cities data adapted from Newman and Kenworthy (2015) and Schiller and Kenworthy (2018).

G D P per capita, their use of non-motorized modes, their transport emissions, and the speed of their transit systems relative to cars. Finally, there are five key variables where Canadian cities demonstrate little in common with each another. Canadian cities vary greatly in their degree of employment centralization in the CBDs of their cities, and they have a wide range in the quantity of expressway provision per capita as well as of reserved transit route per capita. The latter two are consistent with the arguments in this book about how and why transport infrastructure decisions are made through a distinctive and locally varied interplay of global and local forces. The biggest variation of all comes in the ratio of reserved-transit-route infrastructure to expressway infrastructure, which represents the key parameter of our examination on how global forces have engaged with local visions in shaping Canada’s biggest cities. Canadian cities also vary widely in the number of deaths caused by transport. In terms of the conceptual juxtaposition explained previously about the tension between oversimplifying and homogenizing Canadian cities into a single unique group of cities and respecting individual city differences, we can say that evidence exists for both understandings of urban life in Canada. Forces and conditions within Canadian cities

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clearly can and do lead to distinctive outcomes with respect to the kind of transport infrastructure that is built, such that there is no consistency among the Canadian cities in expressway- or transitinfrastructure provision. This variation supports the underlying thesis of this book that Canadian cities have had the opportunity to pursue their own development visions and strategies in response to changing global-city aspirations and influences. We can also find clear evidence, however, of Canadian equivocation over urban policy goals that led to investments catering to and promoting both automobile and transit mobility. But neither mode of major mobility infrastructure was deployed in a singular or absolutist way like the United States did with regard to its unequivocal embrace of urban expressways to serve the automobile. On some key attributes such as density of development (suburbs versus higher density living), car use, and transit use, Canadian cities find themselves forming a unique group that sits quite clearly between the extreme urban sprawl and automobile dependence of American and, to a lesser extent, Australian cities and the transit-oriented characteristics of European cities. This speaks to the idea that Canadian cities are “hybrid” in their nature and that their inner areas are quite transit oriented and often walkable, while their suburbs have grown almost as car dependent as those in Australia and the United States. In drawing some conclusions to this chapter, however, it is interesting to reflect further on whether Juri Pill’s characterization of Canadian urban development as “Vienna surrounded by Phoenix,” noted in chapter 2, represents a literal truth, or whether it was an evocative metaphor that exercised a degree of artistic licence that is at some odds with the comprehensive analysis we have presented in this chapter. This does not challenge at all the already ample evidence provided in this book showing that Canadian cities do equivocate over mobility and development policies and thus tread a path between their American and European counterparts. It is interesting to consider when and where the concept of “Vienna surrounded by Phoenix” offers a valid understanding of Canadian urbanism, and when it does not, what alternative notion might yield a more accurate understanding of the diversity in mobility and spatial development that has emerged from these data. Kenworthy and Laube (1999) present comprehensive data on mobility in Toronto, Phoenix, and Vienna in 1990–91, the same time that Pill’s statement was made, and these data are summarized in table 3.3.

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Table 3.3 Density factors of Vienna surrounded by Phoenix, 1990 Density factor (persons per ha)

Vienna

Phoenix

Toronto

Citywide

 68.3

10.5

41.5

Inner core Outer area

128.6  56.5

16.5 10.4

60.0 35.4

Source: Compiled by authors from data in Kenworthy and Laube (1999, 487, 515, and 519).

Their data show that the urban density of the whole Phoenix region in 1990 was 10.5 persons per ha and that its outer areas had 10.4 persons per ha, with its tiny “inner area” having 16.5 persons per ha. It essentially means that Phoenix is an automobile city par excellence with almost no typical or significant upwards density gradient towards the centre. Its urban form is flat and of extremely low density (even lower than the average US city density of 15.4 persons per ha in 2005). Phoenix by 2005 had reached 10.9 persons per ha (Newman and Kenworthy 2015). We also see that Vienna in 1990 had a relatively high density for the city as a whole (68.3 persons per ha; by 2005 it had 71.2 per ha) with a significant high-density inner area (128.6 persons per ha). Even Vienna’s outer area is of a higher density than the whole of metropolitan Toronto, and only a fraction less than the density of Toronto’s inner core. From these data we can conclude that Juri Pill’s characterization was generally accurate with its Vienna comparison. Toronto’s inner core was only a little less dense than the whole city of Vienna (60 compared to 68 persons per ha respectively), so in fact Toronto does have a Vienna-like heart to its region in terms of density. However, as pointed out earlier in this chapter, suburbs in Canada are not identical to those in the United States or Australia; they are denser. We see it here in that Toronto suburbs are much denser than anything that was built near Phoenix. By implying that the Toronto suburbs are like Phoenix, the statement does a significant disservice to the urban form of Toronto; in 1990 the outer suburbs of Metropolitan Toronto had 35.4 persons per ha, or were 3.4 times denser than the Phoenix region. It perpetuates the myth that Canadian suburbs are no different than their US neighbours, when in fact they are. Even if we take the entire Greater Toronto Area today, we see that its overall density is 26.9 persons per ha and therefore that Phoenix is a poor comparison to it (Newman and Kenworthy, 2015). The concept

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that Canada’s big cities embody a duality that juxtaposes the European city and the American suburb within a contiguous urban area thus turns out to be a metaphorical representation of diversity, rather than a literal depiction of reality. In summary, and comparatively speaking, Canadian cities are neither sprawling and car dependent nor compact and transit oriented, but they do appear to have reached either a “comfortable” or an “uncomfortable” compromise somewhere between these two  extremes, depending on one’s point of view. Perhaps surprisingly though, in 2006, for car ownership and car use, the Canadian cities leaned more to the European model. The Toronto region, for example, had car ownership of 485 per 1,000 persons, European cities averaged 463 per 1,000, and US cities 640 per 1,000. In car use, Toronto had 5,020 km per capita, European cities averaged 4,937 km, and US cities 13,100 km. As a result, one can say in an overall sense that Canadian cities are certainly better in terms of transport sustainability than either American or Australian cities. This suggests that compromise, equivocation, and balance may be an underappreciated approach to advancing urban sustainability, but that ambivalence needs to be understood within each individual city’s context and history. Having gained this perspective on where Canada’s big cities stand in relation to global experiences with urban mobility, we are now ready to delve deeply into the physical and fiscal context of each city’s major mobility infrastructure in the next chapter.

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4 Flows of Capital and Traffic

To understand how Canada’s three largest cities have reached their particular balances of community and mobility and been shaped by the effects of equivocation, it is necessary to track their respective relationships with the global flows of capital that help to shape cities. Canadian cities have always been deeply influenced by their global relationships, but the sources and drivers of those linkages have shifted considerably over time and unfolded on different timelines in each city. As Montreal was attempting to reshape itself into an international hub of commerce and culture via the hosting of mega-events (F. Martin 1979), the development of massive edifices, and the building of major mobility infrastructure (Germain and Rose 2000; Colcord 1987), it looked to Europe and the United States for inspiration. Those who were advocating and advancing these megaprojects anticipated that capital flows would follow their inauguration. This premise turned out to be largely erroneous. Instead, the rise of Toronto as a global node of trade, finance, and Canada’s corporate headquarters was first spurred by the threats of Quebec independence (Shearmur 2001; Germain and Rose 2000) and then fuelled by free trade, which demanded a deepening economic interdependence with the United States (Courchene 2001; Rice and Semple 1993). Toronto’s equivocal approach to developing expressway and rapid-transit infrastructure did not impede its rise as Canada’s “Alpha city” of global commerce and finance by the start of the twenty-first century. The subsequent emergence of Vancouver as a global focus for investment, real estate, and tourism was enabled by mega-event-fuelled displays of availability that raised its profile in Japan, Hong Kong,

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China, and other fast-growing nations around the Pacific Rim (Olds 1995; Semple and Green 1983). By rebranding itself as a port city and natural-resource conduit into becoming known as Canada’s Pacific gateway, Vancouver has sought and largely achieved a reputation as a stable and welcoming safe harbour in which to shelter vulnerable capital (Ley 2010; Germain and Rose 2000; Pomfret 1993; Easterbrook and Aitken 1988; Marr and Paterson 1980). Revealing the particular and shifting infrastructure agendas influenced by these international forces is an essential step in illuminating the local choices and impacts of global-capital-fuelled development in Canada’s three largest cities. These international linkages can also help elucidate the global migration flows that have shaped Canadian cities, a good part of which were physically built by immigrant labour. We submit that dynamics created by interaction between capital, labour, and infrastructure have yielded distinctive, yet connected, urban-development outcomes in Canada’s three largest cities. These cities can be more fully appreciated through an understanding of how that capital was assembled and on what terms it was leveraged to build major mobility infrastructure. There is a key but sometimes subtle distinction worth noting here. This book relies heavily on notions of global-city formation, a constellation of processes that describe the fluid and entangled connections between local places and global drivers of urban change such as the pursuit of capital. In an era defined by explosive technological innovation, neo-liberal deregulation and privatization, and exponentially increased financial flows across borders, cities across the globe have become increasingly dependent on investments from far beyond their regional and national borders. This, of course, has always been the case – globalization is nothing new – but this contemporary form of neo-liberal globalization has radically increased the velocity and intensity of global relationships. Economic elites in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver have always attempted to access distant investments in their urban-growth schemes, but spatial, informational, technological, and governmental constraints all used to inhibit their reach in ways that are no longer as constraining. Global-city aspiration is a close cousin of old-fashioned boosterism but accelerated and amplified in scope, scale, reach, and speed. There are no absolute distinctions to be made between global-city aspirations and traditional boosterism; they both describe attempts by local business and trade advocates to advance their city’s economic reputations

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and positions as far and as widely as possible. Global-city formations have thus become the entwined results of material, economic, and social restructuring. They synthesize the discursively aspirational dreams of elite world views with the aggressive branding and marketing in which all contemporary cities engage. There is no threshold where any particular aggrandizement process or promotional campaign transcends the definitional bounds of boosterism and becomes global-city aspirations, but certainly by the late twentieth century the tendency of civic officials and elites to embrace and welcome global capital into their city had become ubiquitous. This book was motivated by our curiosity about the fiscal and physical legacy of moving public and private vehicles through Canada’s biggest cities. We focused on the most costly and impactful means of vehicular and public passage – expressways and rapid-transit guideways – which we categorize as major mobility infrastructure. Understanding what went into the creation of such transformative infrastructure can expose powerful influences on the physical shape and socio-political configuration of a city. Our premise is that each city’s major mobility infrastructure can highlight an otherwise obscured interplay between global urban influences and local resistances, thus revealing spatial dynamics that shape politics and society over time. We believe that an awareness of the circuits of global capital that have at times inspired and at other times deterred transport-infrastructure development in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver will help uncover an important intergenerational legacy that influences urban form and function to this day. The questions of what constituted an urban core and how much was invested in building major high-capacity mobility infrastructure presented us with no small measurement challenge. One consequence of Canada’s jurisdictional configuration of urban governance, with provincial governments exercising considerable and disparate control over cities, alongside limited federal-government intervention, is that there is no national standardization for Canada’s urban-transportation-infrastructure data, particularly regarding finance. Since this major mobility infrastructure had not been assessed in any systematic fashion, there was neither an established structure nor a repository of data upon which to draw. We thus chose to focus on the foundational development of major mobility infrastructure during the twentieth century, extending the period to 2002 in order to capture a significant rapid-transit-infrastructure addition in Vancouver.

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At the turn of the twenty-first century the “bones” of major mobility infrastructure had been clearly laid out in Montreal and Toronto and were well along their development trajectory in Vancouver. After 2002, political-boundary shifting in Montreal’s municipal amalgamation and de-amalgamation compounded the already significant challenges of data assembly and analysis. We thus constructed a data set on the fiscal and physical dimensions of major mobility infrastructure in our three cases that has never been attempted by urban researchers. An extended description of the boundaries, methods, and sources lying behind this data set can be found in the appendix. Our temporal scale for analyzing major mobility infrastructure commences at the earliest year of investment in either expressways or rapid transit and ends on 1 January 2002.1 Montreal’s expressway investment began in 1955, and Toronto had started investing in both expressways and rapid transit in 1949. Vancouver was precocious in its major mobility investment, with private developers contributing to Canada’s earliest urban expressway infrastructure, the Stanley Park Causeway and Lions Gate Bridge, beginning in 1933. In any city where expressway and rapid-transit investment ceased before 2002, including spending on extension of existing infrastructures, the graphics presented show only expenditures to the latest relevant year (e.g., 1990 in the case of Montreal, and 1996 in the case of Toronto).2 In addition, and as needed, we provide separate discussions of some relevant expressway or rapid-transit spending that falls outside of our temporal framework of analysis, mostly in the notes. Once we had established the temporal boundaries for analysis, the challenge of dealing with political boundaries in each city came into sharper focus. These boundaries are not set in stone, having changed significantly in both Montreal and Toronto since the turn of the century. The most straightforward path, from a technical perspective, would have been to study the “urban cores” of each city as defined by non-political criteria, such as population density and land use. We also considered using physical boundaries (i.e., rivers, inlets, and lakes), historical development patterns, and/or common-sense cultural understandings of what constitutes the urban heart of each city. But politics cannot and should not be avoided when one explores the forces behind major mobility investments, and thus the effects of political boundaries do make a difference. The criteria that we have adopted are specified in this chapter and detailed in the appendix; they aim to recognize both the spatial and the governing attributes in the urban structure of each metropolitan area.

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The City of Montreal’s intricate boundaries, while not contiguous, underwent relatively minor changes before 2002. They represented the urban core of an expanding metropolitan region during the postwar decades. As the bulk of investment on major mobility infrastructure occurred in this core, we applied Montreal’s municipal borders as the boundary for data collected on its expressways. This study area is indicated in white in the map of Montreal and its surrounding municipalities presented in figure 4.1. Beyond the urban core there has been an unstable political flux since 1 January 2002, when the Quebec government imposed amalgamation across the entire island of Montreal, creating one city out of twentyeight former municipalities. This amalgamation only lasted four years and was then partly deconstructed into sixteen cities in 2006. Our data set avoids this jurisdictional flux and the associated disconnection of political accountability from administrative responsibility for major mobility infrastructure. After the de-amalgamation of 2006, the Metropolitan Transportation Agency (AM T ) retained responsibility for managing and planning public transport across the greater Montreal region, even in the municipalities that had left the integrated urban government (Government of Quebec 2015; Trent 2012). In Toronto, we collected major mobility infrastructure data within the municipal boundaries of what was once known as Metropolitan Toronto and today represents the space occupied by the City of Toronto. Here major mobility infrastructure was more closely tied to metropolitan-level planning and finance from its inception, spreading the investment in expressways and rapid transit beyond Toronto’s postwar boundary. The Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto was created in 1953. In 1966 “the City of Toronto and … 12 [adjacent] Towns, Townships and Villages were amalgamated into 6 municipalities – now the Cities of Toronto, Etobicoke, York, North York, and Scarborough and the Borough of East York” (Gartner 1991, 2), which became the constituent municipalities within Metropolitan Toronto. In 1998 this entity was abolished and replaced with the amalgamated City of Toronto (Government of Ontario 2015). Metropolitan Toronto’s boundary was thus a consistent and cohesive space within which to capture the development of major mobility infrastructure and its implications for Canada’s largest city. Toronto’s study area is depicted in figure 4.2. The City of Montreal’s and Metropolitan Toronto’s political boundaries provided effective demarcations of the appropriate space for assessing major-mobility-infrastructure development, but we needed

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Figure 4.1  Montreal and surrounding municipalities prior to amalgamation in 2002

to look beyond the City of Vancouver’s political boundary to create a comparable data set. To accommodate the longer temporal range of infrastructure construction, and the regional scope of urban development from an early (pre-war) time, we chose to follow other researchers in configuring our analysis of infrastructure data to extend across some of the established municipal boundaries within metropolitan Vancouver. For example, Tomalty (2002) justifies examining the Burrard Peninsula, comprising Vancouver, Burnaby, and New Westminster, as a common space to understand urban mobility planning better. Hutton (2011) similarly distinguishes the “inner municipalities” within metropolitan Vancouver when investigating economic development policy. Bunting, Walks, and Filion (2004) divide their analysis of metropolitan-housingdevelopment outcomes around Vancouver into inner-city, inner-suburb, outer-suburb, and exurb categories. We thus opted to assemble major-mobility-infrastructure data from Vancouver, Burnaby, and New Westminster to capture development in the urban core of Metro Vancouver, a regional level of government that was known until 2007 as the Greater Vancouver Regional District.

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Figure 4.2  Toronto and surrounding municipalities prior to 2002

“Newburncouver,” as this configuration could be abbreviated, represents the closest plausible analogue to both the City of Montreal’s urban mobility nexus at the core of its surrounding region and Metropolitan Toronto’s or the amalgamated City of Toronto’s comparable configuration as the nucleus of mobility within the Greater Toronto Area. Henceforth, we are referring to this area when we analyze major mobility development in “Vancouver.” This study area is illustrated in figure 4.3. These three areas for which we have assembled infrastructure data represent historically understood urban spaces. Each is a singular territorial unit that is shaped partly by waterways and partly by politics. Each of these spaces correlate closely to common-sense understandings of the urban core within their respective metropolitan area. There are certainly other spatial and temporal parameters we could have chosen to structure our data, choices that might have revealed different nuances regarding mobility and urban development across Canada, but we are confident that these three urban areas make for a comprehensible, comparable, and analogous context within which

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Figure 4.3  Vancouver core urban area and surrounding municipalities in 2002

to understand the interplay of global and local forces that are shaping Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. Once we had defined both the spatial and the temporal bounds that would frame our data collection, we embarked on a somewhat gruelling process of uncovering the evidence of the physical and financial attributes underlying major mobility infrastructure in each city. We were interested in determining when expressways and rapid-transit corridors were built in each urban core, how much money was spent on this infrastructure, and how much infrastructure was created from that investment. To identify physical quantities, we measured expressway infrastructure based upon the Transportation Association of Canada’s (n.d.) formal engineering definition, namely a roadway that provides priority to motor vehicles and possesses the following characteristics: grade separation, traffic volume, restricted access, and minimum traffic speed. These attributes, and their justification as criteria to focus on the urban mobility investment that can reveal significant characteristics of Canadian cities, have been laid out previously (Perl, Hern, and Kenworthy 2015, 94).

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To distinguish rapid-transit infrastructure from other types of transit infrastructure (e.g., streetcars), we formulated a definition that drew upon widely accepted industry and research standards. Within Metro Vancouver, TransLink (2016b) defined its rapid-transit service as “a type of high-capacity public transport that typically operates on an exclusive right-of-way.” More generally, Vuchic (2005) notes that rapid transit consists of electrically powered rail and has high capacity, reliability, and safety. Montreal’s expressways were measured using Google Earth’s line tool. A line was overlaid on the expressways following their routes within the municipal boundaries noted earlier. Each expressway was also divided into segments based upon width. These segments were used to identify the number of lanes present, again using Google Earth. Merge lanes were not included in the lane calculations. If a new lane came into existence between intersections, the start or end point of that lane was deemed to be the start or end of the segment. For those lanes that began or ended at an intersection, the midpoint of the intersection was used to define the start or the end of the segment. Determination of the number of lanes was completed by examining the satellite imagery provided within Google Earth that shows the lanes in use and allows for exclusion of the shoulders and collector lanes. Some expressway infrastructure beyond Montreal’s municipal boundary was included when municipal-level co-financing of such infrastructure was in evidence. Determining the physical length of rapid-transit infrastructure relied upon a mix of historical and contemporary sources. Measurements of the Montreal Metro infrastructure were undertaken in two stages. First, the City of Montreal’s (2013) Énoncé de L’intérêt patrimonial du Métro de Montréal was consulted to gather overall lengths of route segments. Following this, station-to-station lengths were calculated to validate the data, using Google Maps. We have included all Metro routes that were operational before 2002. The vast majority of this rapid-transit infrastructure was built within Montreal’s municipal boundary. Unlike the expressways, which were used for both urban and suburban travel, Montreal’s rapid transit was designed to move people who were starting or ending their trips within the urban core. Thus, the whole of the Metro network’s infrastructure had core urban impacts, even when it was located outside the city’s boundary. The expressway and rapid-transit infrastructure that were analyzed are shown on the map in figure 4.4.

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Figure 4.4  Montreal expressway and rapid-transit infrastructure as analyzed in this study

In Toronto, rapid-transit line lengths were determined from 2013 TTC Operating Statistics (Toronto Transit Commission 2013b). Our definition of rapid transit excluded the Harbourfront LRT infrastructure because of its multiple level crossings with city streets, but included the Scarborough rapid transit, which operates on an elevated guideway similar to that of Vancouver’s SkyTrain. To identify the stages of rapid-transit construction, we confirmed the start and terminus stations for each phase, using Transit Toronto’s online history (Bow 2016a, 2016b, 2015a, 2015b) cross-referenced with news reports in the local media. Opening dates of rapid-transit lines and their subsequent extensions were then confirmed via the TTC’s website (Toronto Transit Commission 2015b). Toronto’s expressway and rapid-transit infrastructure is presented in figure 4.5. In Vancouver, Burnaby, and New Westminster, rapid-transit-­ infrastructure measurements were taken using Google Earth’s line tool. A line was overlaid along the SkyTrain routes to key stations

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Figure 4.5  Toronto expressway and rapid-transit infrastructure as analyzed in this study

(e.g., Waterfront, New Westminster, Columbia) to determine the length of each route based on physical location. The resulting rapid-transit infrastructure, along with the urban core’s expressway infrastructure, is depicted in figure 4.6. Our goal has been to create an apples-to-apples data set of major mobility infrastructure and expenditure that can be used to compare the three cities and thereby test our hypotheses. An understanding of when this infrastructure was inserted into the urban fabric of Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver and of how much was spent on its construction is necessary for contextualizing these investments. The data allow for a better comprehension of the mobility-infrastructure legacy and its implications for each city’s development. That comprehension in turn yields a foundation upon which to theorize what the building of major mobility improvements into Canadian cities both reflects and enables in their engagement of global circuits of capital. To advance that analysis, we now consider the results of our data

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Figure 4.6  Vancouver expressway and rapid-transit infrastructure as analyzed in this study

collection in each city, moving from east to west as we have done throughout this volume. m o n t r e a l ’ s t r a n s p o rtat i o n - i n f r a s t r u c t u r e d e v e l o p m e n t a n d c a p i ta l e x p e n d i t u r e s

In 1955, Montreal commenced expressway construction, but the first segment of infrastructure (5.3 km) did not open until 1958. Montreal’s construction of rapid-transit infrastructure began later, with the first expenditures occurring in 1962, followed by the opening of an initial network (17.9 km) in 1966. Figure 4.7 illustrates the periodic expansion of Montreal’s expressway and rapid-transit infrastructure by length from 1955 to 1990. In the year 1990, spending on the linear expansion of expressways within the municipality of Montreal ceased, and this infrastructure reached a network length of 60.9 km. Further linear extensions of expressways within Montreal’s urban core have not occurred to the date of this book’s publication. By 1990 the

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1971

1970

1969

1968

Expressways

1976

1975

1974

1973

Rapid Transit

1980

1979

1978

1977

1972

1967

1966

1965

1964

1963

1962

1961

1960

1959

1958

1957

1956

1955

Total cumulative system length (km)

Source: Created from data assembled in the appendix.

Figure 4.7  Comparison of expressway- and rapid-transit-infrastructure length in Montreal, 1955–90

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

1990

1989

1988

1987

1986

1985

1984

1983

1982

1981

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rapid-transit network had reached a total length of 60.7 km, covering an almost identical distance to that of the urban expressways, and no further rapid-transit extensions occurred until 2007, when the network grew by 5.2 km to 65.9 km. Although this post-millennial expansion is outside the scope of our analysis, it is worth noting that capital expenditure on the extension of rapid-transit infrastructure in and beyond Montreal continued from 1991 to 2011. Figure 4.7 is most revealing when compared with Toronto’s corresponding data shown in figure 4.11. Although Montreal lagged Toronto by eight years in initiating rapid-transit development, we see a steady growth of this infrastructure’s extension, so that by 1988 the rapid transit of the two cities essentially provided the same linear coverage. Toronto shows a diminishing gap between the rapid-transitnetwork length and the expressway length, and that gap has not closed to this day (despite no additions having been made to Toronto’s expressway length since 1977). Interestingly, the two figures show that by the 1990s both cities had built similar rapid-transit networks – 64.9 km in Toronto and 60.7 km in Montreal (with Montreal reaching 65.9 km by 2007). However, expressway length in Metropolitan Toronto, by the time that extensions had ceased in 1977, was 109 km, and in the core urban area of Montreal, as defined earlier in this chapter, expressways had amounted to only 61 km by 1987. In this year Montreal ceased extending expressways within its municipal boundary. One reason for the similarity in rapid-transit-infrastructure output may relate to urban form. Dense, mixed-use urban communities require effective and extensive rapid-transit systems to support their economic and social development. Both Montreal’s and Toronto’s core areas being analyzed here qualify as dense and mixed-use communities that rely upon rapid transit to maintain an efficient flow of mobility. However, densities historically have been higher in the core of Montreal, as shown by Kenworthy and Laube (1999), at 74.3 and 64.1 persons per ha in 1981 and 1991, respectively. This compares with the core of Toronto’s 56.6 and 60.0 persons per ha density in 1981 and 1991, respectively. On this basis, with Montreal being more compact than Toronto’s urban core, Montreal’s rapid-transit-infrastructure length appears more proportional in relation to the length of its urban expressways because higher densities tend to require greater transit capacity to meet adequately the demand for mobility within a concentrated space.3

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m o n t r e a l ’ s e x p e n d i t u r e o n e x p r e s s way s and rapid transit

Expressways Figure 4.8 shows Montreal’s capital expenditure for expressway infrastructure over the thirty-six-year period from 1955, when spending began, to 1990, when it ceased. Although expressway upgrading and maintenance expenditures certainly continued beyond 1990, we have chosen to examine the creation of expressway and rapid-transit infrastructure rather than delve into their incremental upgrading. Both the decision to build and the effects of creating wholly new, major mobility infrastructure have a greater impact on and reveal more of the global and local interaction in Canada’s urban development. The total amount expended during this 36-year period was $4.51 billion (all dollar figures are adjusted to 2014 Canadian), or very close to Toronto’s total spending of $4.65 billion on its expressway network over thirty-five years. The notable difference is that Toronto built 109 km of expressway infrastructure with its investment, and Montreal built only 61 km for almost the same amount. The data show relatively modest expressway expenditures between 1955 and 1964, averaging some $80 million per annum. The first 14.1 km, or 23% of Montreal’s eventual urban expressway network, was built during these years, accounting for 18% of the total expenditure on expressway infrastructure in this region. However, from 1965 to 1967, spending surged to average over $382 million per year in the run up to Expo 67. In 1968 and 1969, spending then fell away to reach levels comparable to those of the 1950s and early 1960s, only to then surge again between 1970 and 1974, averaging $292 million per year during the five years leading up to Montreal’s hosting of the 1976 Summer Olympics. Then, from 1975 until 1990, Montreal’s investment in new expressways essentially flatlined, with occasional short upticks, but averaging below the investment level of the 1950s and 1960s ($50 million per annum). In retrospect, the heyday of investment in Montreal’s expressway infrastructure occurred during the ten years from 1965 to 1974. This decade accounted for over 64% of the total investment during the thirty-six years of urban expressway development, between 1955 and 1990. During this period, expressway length grew by 43.9 km from 14.3 km to 58.2 km, amounting to 72% of all the expressway routes

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$450,000,000

Annual investment spending (2014 CAD)

$400,000,000 $350,000,000 $300,000,000 $250,000,000 $200,000,000 $150,000,000 $100,000,000

$0

1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990

$50,000,000

Figure 4.8  Annual investment spending on extending expressways in Montreal, 1955–90 Source: Created from data assembled in the appendix.

that have ever been built in the urban core. The post-1974 investment amounts to 18% of Montreal’s expressway-infrastructure spending, but this investment added just 2.7 km in length to the network. Rapid Transit The complementary story of rapid-transit spending in Montreal’s urban core from 1955 to 1990 is provided in figure 4.9, which reveals a total investment of $7.94 billion, again adjusted to 2014 Canadian dollars. The picture here over time is relatively straightforward. Investment commenced with a six-year initiative that ran from 1962 to 1967. This initial investment in Metro construction peaked in 1965 with a $526 million expenditure and totalled $1.5 billion over that six-year period. This spending pattern reflects a flurry of capital deployed to complete the Metro’s construction in time for the Expo 67 mega-event.

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$600,000,000 $500,000,000 $400,000,000 $300,000,000 $200,000,000 $100,000,000 $0

1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990

Annual investment spending (2014 CAD)

$700,000,000

Figure 4.9  Annual investment spending on extending rapid transit in Montreal, 1955–90 Source: Created from data assembled in the appendix.

During the six years preceding Expo 67, spending on expressways in Montreal was $1.4 billion, or almost the same total as rapid-transit investment. Here we can see a fiscal balancing act on major mobility infrastructure that supports our contention regarding the Canadian practice of policy equivocation in urban mobility investments. In this case the need to hedge bets on the future of the automobile in cities was addressed in a very even-handed way. Then, beginning very modestly in 1970, we see two decades of expanding investment in rapid transit, peaking in 1977 just after Montreal’s second global mega-event (the 1976 Olympics) with over $622 million in annual expenditure. Spending on rapid-transit infrastructure then declined each year until 1982, after which there was a further mini-peak of spending in 1987 at $319 million. Overview of Expressway and Rapid-Transit Investment Spending Figure 4.10 provides a summary of the expressway and rapid-transit spending in Montreal. It clearly shows that Montreal’s overall peak in expressway spending occurred between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s (1965 to 1974). It also shows how expressway spending

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during this decade significantly surpassed spending on rapid transit, unlike the years from 1962 to 1967 when they were roughly equal. Figure 4.10 reveals a similar investment pattern to Toronto’s, in that expressways enjoyed a relatively short period of fiscal favour in the urban core of Montreal for a decade following the launch of highspeed and high-capacity infrastructure to facilitate urban automobility, and rapid-transit-infrastructure investment occurred more or less continuously throughout the 1962–90 period.4 This suggests that rapid transit has proven to be a more sustainable investment focus, likely because its physical impacts and effects on the urban fabric have proven to be more compatible with the aspirations and achievements of Montreal, at least since the 1980s. t o r o n t o ’ s t r a n s p o rtat i o n - i n f r a s t r u c t u r e d e v e l o p m e n t a n d c a p i ta l e x p e n d i t u r e s

Toronto’s expressway and rapid-transit development began in the 1950s, as shown in figure 4.11. Almost immediately, expressways eclipsed the length of rapid-transit infrastructure by a very large margin. In 1956 Toronto’s urban expressways were almost seven times longer than the city’s rapid-transit infrastructure despite, and perhaps because of, an extensive streetcar network that was already in operation. While many other North American cities abandoned their streetcars, Toronto became the largest street-railway operator on the continent, a distinction that it holds to date. Streetcars operating in mixed traffic, however, usually offer anything but rapid transit. Since then the gap has diminished progressively, so that by 1963 the expressway infrastructure was just over five times longer than the rapid-transit infrastructure, falling to a bit over three-and-a-half times longer by 1966 and two-and-a-half times by 1968, as new sections of rapid-transit infrastructure began to outpace the linear extension of expressways. By 1980 the urban expressway network had extended twice the length of Toronto’s rapid-transit system, and in 1996 expressways were only about 1.7 times longer than rapid transit. As shown in figure 4.11, after a strong start in the building of expressways within Metropolitan Toronto’s boundaries, linear extension of this infrastructure ceased in 1977, while rapid-transit-infrastructure length continued to grow. Based on these infrastructure-expansion data, it could be suggested that within the core of the Greater Toronto Area, as represented by

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$2,000,000,000

$1,500,000,000

$1,000,000,000

Expressways

1990

1985-89

1980-84

1975-79

1970-74

1965-69

$0

1060-64

$500,000,000

1955-59

Five-yearly rolling major mobility investment (2014 CAD)

$2,500,000,000

Rapid Transit

Figure 4.10  Montreal’s rolling five-year total investment spending on extending expressways and rapid transit, 1955–90 Source: Created from data assembled in the appendix.

what was once Metropolitan Toronto and is now the City of Toronto, there has been a gradual but demonstrable prioritization of rapid transit over expressways as an infrastructure-investment priority. Since 1977, when Toronto’s expressway network reached 109 km, through to 2002 the expressway length in this area has remained the same, compared to ongoing modest expansion of the rapid-transit routes from almost 65 km in 1996 to just under 72 km by 2002 (putting expressways at only 1.5 times longer than the transit system, down from almost 7.0 times in the 1950s).5 t o r o n t o ’ s e x p e n d i t u r e o n e x p r e s s way s and rapid transit

Expressways When one compares the patterns of capital expenditures on expressway infrastructure and rapid-transit infrastructure, this trend of a growing priority toward transit infrastructure over expressways in the urban

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Source: Created from data assembled in the appendix.

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

Expressways Rapid Transit

Figure 4.11  Total system-length development of expressways and rapid transit in Toronto, 1949–96

Total cumulative system length (km)

1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996



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Annual investment spending (2014 CAD)

$350,000,000 $300,000,000 $250,000,000 $200,000,000 $150,000,000 $100,000,000

1977

1976

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1971 1972

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1967

1966

1965

1964

1963

1961 1962

1960

1959

1958

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1956

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1951 1952

1950

$0

1949

$50,000,000

Figure 4.12  Annual capital expenditure on expressways in Toronto, 1949–77 Source: Created from data assembled in the appendix.

core becomes more apparent. Figures 4.12 and 4.13 present the results of our aggregation of investment on expanding the linear extent of Toronto’s expressway and rapid-transit infrastructure, respectively. In figure 4.12 we see that Toronto’s investment in the linear expansion of expressways spans a period of twenty-nine years, commencing in the late 1940s and ending in 1977, within the City of Toronto’s current boundaries. The pattern shows annual expressway expenditure peaking in 1963 at $321 million. Most of the spending (68%) occurs over a twelve-year period, between 1960 and 1971, or about 40% of the time period in which urban expressway length was growing. Basically, investment in the linear expansion of Toronto’s expressways began slowly in 1949, built up to a peak in 1963, and then fell away quite steadily until 1974, followed by a little revival between 1975 and 1977. As in Montreal and Vancouver, these figures exclude additional spending that would have occurred on upgrading (e.g. widening) and maintenance of existing expressways. Rapid Transit Rapid-transit investment within the boundaries of today’s City of Toronto presents a more complex and nuanced picture, compared

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Annual investment spending (2014 CAD)

Source: Created from data assembled in the appendix.

Figure 4.13  Annual capital expenditure on extending rapid transit in Toronto, 1949–96

$0

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with public spending on expressways. In figure 4.13, instead of a singular normal distribution, we see a recurring pattern of almost normally distributed investment cycles, which grow, peak, and then decline based on decisions to proceed with and then complete individual rapid-transit-infrastructure projects. This reflects the difference between pursuing expressway-infrastructure development through a program that was fiscally integrated with the Province of Ontario’s transportation spending from its inception, and treating rapid-transitinfrastructure development as a series of one-off projects with different exogenous triggers and with limited fiscal coherence. The first cycle of rapid-transit-infrastructure spending unfolded from 1949 to 1967, with the highest spending occurring between 1961 and 1967. This cycle peaked in 1964 and 1965, when between $800 million and over $900 million (in 2014 dollars) was spent annually. This transit-investment level was very much higher than the peak expressway spending per annum shown in figure 4.12, which reached only $321 million. We then see another cycle begin in 1968 and run through 1973, with infrastructure expenditure peaking in 1972 at $531 million. In 1974 another spending cycle commenced, which ran through 1980, peaking in 1977 with an expenditure of $922 million. Finally, one can see what appears to be a more irregular and extended spending cycle commencing in 1981 and continuing to 1996 when rapid-transit-infrastructure spending for extensions to the network to be opened by 1 January 2002 ceased.6 The 1981 to 1996 rapid-transit-spending cycle peaks in 1984 with $543 million, followed by two additional mini-peaks in 1986 and 1987 ($494 million and $452 million, respectively). Investment then quite systematically tapers off to almost nothing by the mid-1990s. Overview of Expressway and Rapid-Transit Investment Spending A simplified picture of the investment in expressways and rapid transit in Toronto from 1949 to 1998 is shown in figure 4.14, which presents rolling five-year expenditure totals. va n c o u v e r ’ s t r a n s p o rtat i o n - i n f r a s t r u c t u r e d e v e l o p m e n t a n d c a p i ta l e x p e n d i t u r e s

Vancouver’s urban core, as previously discussed, has been defined for the purposes of our analysis as the space within the combined

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$2,000,000,000

$1,500,000,000

$1,000,000,000

Expressways

1994-98

1989-93

1984-88

1979-83

1974-78

1969-73

1964-68

1959-63

$0

1954-58

$500,000,000

1949-53

Five-yearly rolling major mobility investment (2014 CAD)

$2,500,000,000

Rapid Transit

Figure 4.14  Toronto rolling five-year total investment spending on expressways and rapid transit, 1949–98 Source: Created from data assembled in the appendix.

municipal boundaries of Vancouver, Burnaby, and New Westminster. The City of Vancouver maintains the highest global profile within this area, embodying the downtown core and the celebrated Stanley Park. The cities of Burnaby and New Westminster form an extension of relatively dense and mixed-use development with high density found in their regional town centres (e.g., Metrotown, downtown New Westminster), which collectively represent the most mature urban development in the metropolitan area known as the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. In 2015 these three municipalities had a combined population of 976,870, and by 2017 they had crossed the one million population threshold. This compares to the City of Toronto, an urban core within the Greater Toronto Area, with a population of around 2.8 million, and Montreal’s urban core with a population of about 1.6 million. The definition of Vancouver, as adopted here, contains the core of growing mobility ambitions through development of rapid-transit infrastructure, mostly comprising elevated SkyTrain light metro guideways.

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Overall Development Figure 4.15 presents the physical development of both the expressway and the rapid-transit infrastructure in Vancouver’s urban core. The first point to note is that Vancouver had an early start in building Canada’s first urban expressway infrastructure – a limited access roadway to the privately financed Lions Gate Bridge. As is shown in figure 4.16, spending on this expressway actually commenced in 1933, long before Toronto and Montreal initiated their expressways. The goal motivating this investment was to overcome the urban development constraint posed by Vancouver’s physical geography, in which a prime parcel of developable land in West Vancouver was physically separated by Burrard Inlet from Stanley Park, the West End, and the downtown business district. To connect these spaces, in 1938 the Lions Gate Bridge and accompanying approach road through Stanley Park were opened as an expressway section totalling 3.99 km within Vancouver’s boundaries. Vancouver’s early adoption of high-speed and high-capacity automobile infrastructure is perhaps surprising for a city that is well known for having eschewed expressways during the postwar highway-building boom. But this early expressway adoption resembles a similar timing in the transit metropolis of Stockholm (Cervero 1998), which also in 1938 opened what is today called Slussen, a massive asphalt-and-concrete interchange dedicated to bridging its problematic island geography and to enabling early automobile access to Sweden’s largest urban core. Slussen’s expressway junction is now fading away, assisted by active demolition, and is being rebuilt as a combined smaller traffic artery and a transit and non-motorized mobility–oriented area and plaza.7 The Lions Gate section of expressway, together with the Oak Street Bridge spanning the Fraser River into Richmond (1.65 km), the second Narrows Bridge as part of Highway 1 (1.3 km) near the central city, and the vestiges of a longer central-city expressway route that included the soon-to-be-demolished Dunsmuir and Georgia Viaducts (1.2 km in length) (Farmer and Perl 2018) have constituted the City of Vancouver’s share of urban expressway infrastructure within the urban core. As will be shown, expressway extensions that followed from 1964 occurred in the adjoining municipalities of Burnaby and New Westminster.

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We see in figure 4.15, which covers all of Vancouver, Burnaby, and New Westminster, that the total amount of expressway infrastructure built in the urban core by 2002 was just 21.61 km. If we take the current population of this area, we see that the per capita availability of expressway infrastructure is a meagre 0.022 m per person. While this urban core has double the expressway infrastructure of that found solely within the City of Vancouver, it is still seven times less than that in US cities and over four times lower than that in European cities (Newman and Kenworthy 2015). The construction of expressways in the urban-core area of Vancouver ceased in 1992 with the opening of the Cassiar Connector tunnel, and, as figure 4.15 shows, their network length remained unchanged for twenty-seven years at 19.3 km, from 1964 to 1991. This is about the same period in which global dynamics were encouraging the growth of expressways in Toronto and Montreal. Vancouver’s global-city aspirations and their influence on mobility infrastructure were clearly operating along a different timeline. Not only was expressway development dormant in and around Vancouver from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, but rapid-transit infrastructure only arrived in 1985 with the opening of the first 21 km of the SkyTrain line in conjunction with Vancouver’s first global megaevent, Expo 86. It is notable that the urban region’s first rapid-transit infrastructure linked Vancouver with Burnaby and New Westminster, just as the postwar expressway development had done. And with the Expo Line’s inauguration of rapid-transit infrastructure in 1986, the rapid-transit-network length in Vancouver suddenly became very close to the expressway-network length within the same municipal boundaries (exceeding it slightly, as shown in figure 4.15), offering further evidence of the effects of Canadian policy equivocation on the development of urban mobility. Only a few years later, in 1992, there was a small addition to Vancouver’s expressway network that made the respective expresswayand rapid-transit-network lengths identical to each other. However, ten years later, in 2002, through further construction, rapid transit in Vancouver’s urban core had attained almost double the length of expressway infrastructure.8 Generally, one can say that within Vancouver’s core boundaries the development of major mobility infrastructure shifted to focus on rapid transit in synchronization with the greater global focus on and integration with the city’s economic development.

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Total cumulative system length (km)

Expressways

Rapid Transit

Source: Created from data assembled in the appendix.

Figure 4.15  Total system-length development of expressways and rapid transit in the Vancouver urban core (cities of Vancouver, Burnaby, and New Westminster), 1956–2002

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

45

1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002

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In the wider metropolitan region surrounding the urban core, which will be considered in our concluding chapter, expressway infrastructure remained predominant, and twenty-first-century investments in building mobility infrastructure have continued to favour automobility. Thus, the urban ambivalence and policy equivocation that we have identified as a defining factor in Canada’s approach to the development of major mobility infrastructure within cities has been borne out over both a longer time frame and wider spatial horizons across the Vancouver metropolitan region, as compared to Montreal and Toronto where such dynamics arose earlier, through global influences that were initially focused within Vancouver’s urban core. As Vancouver became an increasingly global city following Expo 86, and through its expanded ties to the Pacific Rim, beginning with Hong Kong in the 1990s, its reputation by the 2000s had grown into that of a premier safe harbour for investment. This financial attraction was matched by a growing recognition of the city’s exceedingly livable environment. These attributes fuelled the Vancouver urban region’s attraction of capital – mainly in the form of real estate investments. The resulting increases in land and housing values have accelerated suburban development. Such development occurred largely beyond the extent of the rapid-transit infrastructure, contributing to heavy congestion on the existing expressway network. Pressures to maintain capacity for both urban and suburban mobility continue to foster the policy equivocation on what infrastructure to prioritize throughout the metropolitan region. va n c o u v e r ’ s e x p e n d i t u r e o n e x p r e s s way s and transit

Expressways Figure 4.16 illustrates the evidence of Vancouver’s minimal investment in urban expressway building. After six years of public and private investment in building the Lions Gate Bridge and the expressway through Stanley Park between 1933 and 1938, which peaked at $100 million in 1937,9 the urban core had a two-decade hiatus in any major mobility investment. Vancouver’s initial spurt in infrastructure spending thus produced the highest peak of capital spending on expressway infrastructure during the nearly seventy years of development for which we have data, up to 2002. The next

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$100,000,000 $80,000,000 $60,000,000 $40,000,000

1992

1991

1990

1989

1965

1964

1963

1962

1961

1960

1959

1958

1957

1956

1955

1939

1938

1937

1936

1935

$0

1934

$20,000,000

1933

Annual investment spending (2014 CAD)

$120,000,000

Figure 4.16  Annual capital expenditure on extending expressways in the Vancouver urban core (cities of Vancouver, Burnaby, and New Westminster), 1933–92 Source: Created from data assembled in the appendix.

wave of expressway spending occupied a period of nine years of continuous investment between 1956 and 1964. During this time, the short but costly water crossings of Oak Street Bridge and Second Narrows Bridge were completed. In the first period, the 1930s, expenditure totalled $139.3 million, and in the second wave that amount was doubled, to $278.4 million. The only other short period of expressway expenditure was during the three years from 1990 to 1992 when a total of $185 million was expended on building the Cassiar Connector.10 As with its physical outputs, the financial inputs to expressway spending in Vancouver look very different from those in the core areas of Toronto and Montreal. The data reveal that only $602.9 million have been spent over seventy years on extending expressways across Vancouver’s urban core, or an average of only $8.6 million per annum. By contrast, in Toronto over the thirty-five years between 1949 and 1983 some $4.6 billion were spent on expressways, at a rate of $133.0 million per year, or over fifteen times more, when the population by 2013 was not even three times higher in Toronto than in Vancouver. Similarly, Montreal spent at the rate of $125.2 million per year on expressways, or nearly fourteen times more than in Vancouver, when the population in Montreal by 2013 was only 1.7 times higher than in Vancouver.

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The far greater intensity of spending on expressways in Montreal and Toronto reflects the period when their global ambitions and engagement emerged and the more favourable attitudes toward urban automobility that prevailed during those times. By the time Vancouver aspired to be a node in the network of global cities during the 1980s, the tide had begun to turn. If the car was not yet unwelcome in most cities, the social destruction and degradation of the urban fabric that was required to insert high-capacity and high-speed road infrastructure had become apparent and was not welcomed. Cities that sought big increases in the capacity to move people were now embracing rapid transit, which is reflected in the investment data presented in the next section. The expressway-building enthusiasm that was found in so many cities during the 1960s largely bypassed Vancouver. Rapid Transit Figure 4.17 presents the annual expenditure on rapid-transit infrastructure across urban Vancouver from 1980 to 2002. As discussed previously, there was no rapid-transit investment until 1981 when the urban region launched construction of the first SkyTrain line (the Expo Line). Similarly to Montreal, but not Toronto, this commitment to a new mobility mode was made in anticipation of the global stage that Vancouver would occupy during Expo 86. The expenditure was thus highly concentrated during the 1983–85 period in preparation for a fixed date of the global mega-event. Spending reached a peak of $1.394 billion in the year 1985, some thirteen times higher than the peak in expressway spending that was reached in 1937. In the period from 1981 to 1989, a total of $3.444 billion was spent on rapid-transit infrastructure within the urban core area. This decade’s spending was already almost five times more than what had been spent on expressways over seventy years. In a fiscal pattern not unlike that associated with expressway infrastructure, Vancouver’s core experienced a rapid-transit-spending hiatus from 1990 to 1998, although rapid-transit infrastructure was extended outside the urban core across the Fraser River into Surrey. Then, over a period of four years from 1999 to 2002, significant spending on rapid-transit infrastructure went into building the Millennium SkyTrain line, accumulating an expenditure of $2.015 billion (with a peak in 2001 of $1.099 billion for the year). At that point (2002), the

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$1,200,000,000 $1,000,000,000 $800,000,000 $600,000,000 $400,000,000

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1990

1989

1988

1987

1986

1985

1984

1983

1982

$0

1981

$200,000,000

1980

Annual investment spending (2014 CAD)

$1,400,000,000

Figure 4.17  Annual capital expenditure on rapid transit in Vancouver’s urban core (cities of Vancouver, Burnaby, and New Westminster), 1980–2002 Source: Created from data assembled in the appendix.

rapid-transit length in Vancouver’s urban core had reached 41.53 km, or virtually double the expressway network. It is worth noting that after 2002 Vancouver built the Canada Line to Vancouver International Airport (and suburban Richmond), spurred by another global mega-event, the 2010 Winter Olympics. This added a further 9.28 km of rapid transit within the urban core, with spending occurring between 2003 and 2009, outside the period of this core comparative analysis of transport-infrastructure projects. The cost of the project attributable to the 9.28 km section within the City of Vancouver over those seven years was estimated to be $0.991 billion, again significantly more than was spent on expressways in the urban core over seventy years. In summary, one can say unequivocally that more has been invested in rapid-transit infrastructure than in the expressways serving the urban core in and around Vancouver. This urban mobility priority is reflected in both infrastructure length and spending patterns. During the ascent of Vancouver’s significant global engagement, which lagged Montreal and Toronto, having only begun in the mid-1980s, rapidtransit spending has gained priority in the allocation of scarce capital for major mobility infrastructure.

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Overview of Expressway and Rapid-Transit Investment Spending Figure 4.18 presents a combined summary of the comparative levels and timing of expressway- and rapid-transit-infrastructure spending in Vancouver’s urban core, by expressing these amounts as five-year rolling averages. The graph clearly illustrates the magnitude of difference between expressway- and rapid-transit-infrastructure spending. It also highlights the very uneven and disparate nature of the timing for such spending. In addition, it underscores the fact that rapid transit within Vancouver’s urban core has become the predominant recipient of spending on new mobility infrastructure in the period of Vancouver’s growing level of globalization since the mid-1980s. w h o pa i d f o r w h at a n d w h e n

The preceding sections have given an overview of the development of the expressway and rapid-transit networks in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver and of the amount of money spent in pursuit of their respective goals for major-mobility-infrastructure development. However, the sources of the capital also deserve attention. This section therefore expands on the previous analysis by presenting data on the relative levels of spending from different sources for both expressways and rapid transit. It concludes with an overview of the relative levels of spending on expressways and rapid transit in the three cities during the entire period of analysis, as shown in figure 4.34. For each city we present five graphs (figures 4.19 to 4.33), indicating •

•

•

•

•

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annual investment spending on linear extensions of expressways by the source of funds over the duration of our data set; percentage of investment contributions from the different funding sources for expressways in each year; annual investment spending on linear extensions of rapid transit by the source of funds over the duration of our data set; percentage of investment contributions from the different funding sources for rapid transit in each year; and percentage of total investment spending on expressways and rapid transit each year over the duration of our data set.

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Five-yearly rolling major mobility investment (2014 CAD)

$3,500,000,000 $3,000,000,000 $2,500,000,000 $2,000,000,000 $1,500,000,000 $1,000,000,000

Expressways

1998-02

1993-97

1988-92

1983-87

1978-82

1973-77

1968-72

1963-67

1958-62

1953-57

1948-52

1943-47

1938-42

$0

1933-37

$500,000,000

Rapid Transit

Figure 4.18  Vancouver’s urban-core rolling five-year total investment spending on extending expressways and on rapid transit, 1933–2002 Source: Created from data assembled in the appendix.

Montreal Figure 4.19 reveals that the municipal government was the initial source of capital for major mobility infrastructure in Montreal, Canada’s most globalized city, at the start of its expressway construction. Two years later the Quebec government initiated modest capital contributions toward expressways, and Ottawa began making capital contributions to expressways in 1961, following an accord for the federal funding of the Trans-Canada Highway in Quebec. Montreal’s first wave of expressway investment was thus an example of bottom-up public finance that was very much dominated by local government. The next surge of expressway investment was closely tied to the Expo 67 global mega-event. In this apogee in the trajectory of Montreal’s global-city aspiration the expressway-infrastructure finance had a pattern like no other seen before or since in Canada. In the mid1960s all three levels of government contributed sizable sums of capital to expand Montreal’s expressways. Following Expo 67, expressway

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investment fell off quickly but then rebounded with a short burst of federal and provincial funding. The early 1970s were transitional years for Montreal’s primacy as Canada’s corporate and financial centre, and the additional capital from Ottawa and Quebec may have been motivated by the goal of reinforcing the global-city attributes that were ebbing away from the city during that period. By 1971, however, local funding of expressway expansion within Montreal had ceased, and by 1972 federal spending on Montreal’s expressway infrastructure had also come to an end. For the next eighteen years the Quebec government spent relatively modest annual amounts on incremental expansions of expressway infrastructure within Montreal, after which the growth of expressway infrastructure ended. Figure 4.20 reveals that Montreal’s cycle of expressway funding moved from predominantly local sourcing of capital to exclusively provincial capital investment. Along the way the most balanced levels of investment in urban expressways coincided with Montreal’s most active (and effective) pursuit of global-city aspiration, to be the site of Expo 67, a simultaneous celebration of Canada’s centenary and Montreal’s global presence on the world stage. When a commemoration of nation building, a manifestation of provincial modernity, and an embrace of modern urban elegance could all be aligned, then each level of government was moved to advance the capital for building expressways. Such a fiscal alignment came together very rarely in Canada during the twentieth century. In figure 4.21 we see another example of bottom-up initiative in capital expenditure, on Montreal’s rapid-transit infrastructure. The first wave of capital that inaugurated rapid transit in Montreal came from municipal government, which financed this investment through borrowing during the 1960s. During the 1970s Quebec’s provincial government took over responsibility for financing rapid transit, through both direct expenditure and fiscal transfers to Montreal’s public transport agency. By the 1990s the Province had taken on full fiscal responsibility for rapid-transit-infrastructure development within Montreal, an onus that continues to this day. When considering figure 4.22, one can discern three phases of capital flowing into Montreal’s rapid-transit development. Even more than in the case of expressways, Montreal’s launch of rapid transit depended on an infusion of local capital into infrastructure. All the funds needed to build the first stage of Montreal’s Metro in time for Expo 67 came from municipal sources. Issuing municipal bonds for rapid-transit

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1969

1968

1967

1966

1965

Federal Funding

1975

1974

1973

1972

1971

1970

Provincial Funding

1964

1963

1962

1961

1960

1959

1958

1957

1956

1955

Annual investment spending (2014 CAD)

Source: Created from data assembled in the appendix.

1981

1980

1979

1977

1976

Municipal Funding

1978

Figure 4.19  Annual investment spending on expressways in Montreal by source of funds, 1955–90

$0

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1990

1989

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1968

1967

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1965

Federal Funding

1974

1973

1972

1971

1970

Provincial Funding

1964

1963

1962

1961

1960

1959

1958

1957

1956

1955

Percentage of total expressway investment spending

Source: Created from data assembled in the appendix.

1980

1978

1977

1976

Municipal Funding

1979

1975

Figure 4.20  Percentage of all expressway investment spending in Montreal from all sources, 1955–90

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30%

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100%

1990

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1970

1969

1968

1967

Provincial Funding

1965

1964

1963

1962

1961

1960

1959

1958

1957

1956

1955

Annual investment spending (2014 CAD)

Source: Created from data assembled in the appendix.

1980

1979

1977

1976

1975

1974

Transit Agency Funding

1978

1973

1972

1966

Figure 4.21  Annual investment spending on rapid transit in Montreal by source of funds, 1955–90

$0

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infrastructure enabled Montreal to join Toronto, and other globalizing cities, in providing rapid transit among its urban mobility options during the 1960s. A second phase of rapid-transit investment occurred during the 1970s, centred around the 1976 Olympics. In this larger flow of capital the Quebec government supported local governments by making an increasing share of contributions to rapid-transit infrastructure. By the third phase of capital investment in Montreal’s rapid transit, the Government of Quebec directly funded all capital for rapid-transit infrastructure, closing this cycle of development as the exclusive supporter of urban rapid-transit infrastructure. Finally, when one examines the relationship between investment in expressway and rapid-transit infrastructure as portrayed in figure 4.23, the policy equivocation that is a noted Canadian characteristic is seen to be prevalent within Quebec. Montreal began investing in expressways as its sole mode of major mobility infrastructure. After six years, however, when local opposition to the burdens imposed by such infrastructure was growing, and the opportunities for global engagement in Expo 67 were on the agenda, the municipality again led in channelling capital into rapid transit as a major mobility alternative to the expressway. After the close of Montreal’s first global mega-event, provincial funding swung the pendulum of major-mobility-infrastructure investment back to expressways. During the 1970s the capital directed toward rapid transit began to grow again, becoming predominant by the 1980s. Thus, during the apex of total capital expenditure on major mobility infrastructure, Montreal’s priorities oscillated back and forth between expressways and rapid transit, to eventually produce Canada’s most balanced network lengths of both types within a twentieth-century city. Toronto The flow of capital into Toronto’s expressway infrastructure appears different from the patterns seen in Montreal and Vancouver. The Government of Ontario was the sole source of funding when expressway building commenced in 1949, as seen in figure 4.24. Ontario remained an ongoing and significant contributor of capital to Toronto’s expressway building, and municipal government provided increasing investment levels during the 1950s, particularly after the creation of Metropolitan Toronto in 1954. Metropolitan Toronto enacted a

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Figure 4.22  Percentage of all rapid-transit investment spending in Montreal from all sources, 1955–90

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Figure 4.23  Percentage of total investment spending between expressways and rapid transit in Montreal, 1955–90

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Annual investment spending (2014 CAD)

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Figure 4.24  Annual investment spending on expressways in Metropolitan Toronto by source of funds, 1949–77 (1977 being the last year of spending on linear extensions) Source: Created from data assembled in the appendix.

two-mill property surtax in 1957. White (2016, 21) identified that this levy “ended up primarily providing capital for the TTC subway expansion” along the Bloor-Danforth corridor. In the 1960s, municipal and provincial governments shared expressway funding at roughly equal levels. Third parties such as Canadian National Railways, a Canadian public enterprise, and Transport Canada’s grade-crossing-relocation fund contributed to construction projects that separated motor-vehicle traffic from railway infrastructure by eliminating level crossings. In the mid-1970s, municipalinvestment flows to expressway infrastructure ebbed a bit but then picked up in the final period of expressway construction within Toronto’s current boundaries. Unlike Montreal, there was never any direct federal spending on Toronto’s expressways, aside from paying for certain railway-grade-crossing removals. Figure 4.25 illustrates that the Government of Ontario played the largest role in funding Toronto’s expressway infrastructure. This provincial primacy is what one would expect in a “second city” where global dynamics picked up mainly after the era of urban expressway

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Figure 4.25  Percentage of all expressway investment spending in Metropolitan Toronto from all sources, 1949–77 (1977 being the last year of spending on linear extensions) Source: Created from data assembled in the appendix.

building had drawn to a close. When capital was being directed into building Toronto’s expressways, the goals for that infrastructure differed little from the prevailing objectives in Ontario’s other cities – for example, Ottawa, London, and Windsor. In other words, there was no particular focus on meeting a unique type or level of urban-mobility needs because Toronto was identified as a prospective node in global economic and social networks. As seen in figure 4.26, Toronto’s rapid-transit funding originated with public investment that was shared by the City and its transit agency, the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC). As discussed in chapter 2, the TTC had accumulated a significant reserve fund, equivalent to over $160 million in the purchasing power of the investments recorded here.

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Source: Created from data assembled in the appendix.

Figure 4.26  Annual investment spending on rapid transit in Metropolitan Toronto by source of funds, 1949–96

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This cache of capital, which had accumulated due to the exogenous effects of wartime economic activity on local mobility, was under public management and could thus be tapped for new rapid-transit infrastructure. These funds flowed into the Yonge subway line, along with capital borrowed by the City of Toronto and financed by committing future T T C revenues to repayment. Once this initial wave of local investment had built Canada’s first urban rapid transit, the next round of expansion occurred with regional and provincial investment added to the fiscal mix. Over time, the share of funds provided by the T T C declined because that agency lacked an ongoing surplus to devote to capital spending. Municipal contributions, fuelled increasingly by provincial transfers to the metropolitan level of government, became the predominant source of capital for building Toronto’s rapid transit in the twentieth century. This temporal shift to funding rapid transit through provincial resources, both directly and through metropolitan government, is also apparent in figure 4.27. The pattern of Toronto’s capital-investment flows into major mobility infrastructure that is revealed in figure 4.28 offers further evidence of the influence of policy equivocation on Canada’s urban expressway and rapid-transit development. While both expressways and rapid transit were funded starting in 1949, the balance of capital flows initially favoured rapid transit, albeit for a short time. Following the opening of the Yonge subway line, infrastructurecapital flows shifted entirely to expressways during the remainder of the 1950s. During the 1960s one can see a shift in the flow of capital back to rapid transit, followed by an abrupt swing toward spending on expressways at the end of the decade. Almost as quickly as expressway spending took precedence in 1967 and 1968, it began to decline in 1969 in relation to rapid-transit investment. A smaller oscillation echoed this shift to expressways again in the late 1970s, after which time the capital flows were entirely directed toward rapid-transit expansion in Toronto. While equivocation appears to have tapered off, it accompanied the decline in overall spending on the expansion of major mobility infrastructure within Toronto’s current boundaries. Vancouver The investment in major mobility infrastructure that was made within the Burrard Peninsula (recalling that our data set encompasses the

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Percentage of total rapid-transit investment spending

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Source: Created from data assembled in the appendix.

Figure 4.27  Percentage of all rapid-transit investment spending in Metropolitan Toronto from all sources, 1949–96

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Source: Created from data assembled in the appendix.

Figure 4.28  Percentage of total investment spending between expressways and rapid transit in Metropolitan Toronto, 1949–96

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municipal boundaries of Vancouver, Burnaby, and New Westminster) illustrates both a precocious pursuit of global capital and a postponed embrace of infrastructure investment and highlights the intervals during which Vancouver was most engaged in global-city-development dynamics. Figure 4.29 reveals these dynamics in the flow of capital into expressways. Between 1933 and 1938 Canada’s earliest publicprivate partnership in major mobility infrastructure funded the Lions Gate Bridge and the expressway’s standard-approach route through Stanley Park. Both Vancouver and the Guinness family’s holding companies paid for these developments. The private investment that went into the Lions Gate Bridge is noted as “Other Funding.” Then, from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, the Trans-Canada Highway infrastructure was funded by the Province. For a brief period in the early 1990s a third wave of provincial investment funded the small, but relatively expensive, creation of the Cassiar Connector infrastructure on Vancouver’s eastern border. Figure 4.30 reveals that Canada’s earliest major mobility infrastructure was supported by a significant flow of private capital, noted as “Other Funding,” and that this happened when precocious global-city-development dynamics were evident. The balance of capital that flowed into Vancouver’s expressway infrastructure came entirely from the Province of British Columbia, and, as we have noted elsewhere, it was the long dearth of such capital between 1965 and 1989 that corresponded with Vancouver’s eschewing inner-city-expressway expansion during the era that every other North American city extended such major mobility infrastructure. In figure 4.31, one can see that the origins of investment expenditure on Vancouver’s rapid-transit infrastructure began with direct provincial investment in 1981, which was then channelled through a provincially owned public enterprise (British Columbia Rapid Transit Company Ltd.) as a means of incurring debt for an entity that was only indirectly linked to the provincial government’s public accounts. This first wave of rapid-transit investment corresponded to Vancouver’s second era of global-city development aspirations, centred on the Expo 86 mega-event, which announced that the region was open for business as a destination for foreign direct investment in real-estate development. The initial route’s name, the Expo Line, reflects this linkage. A subsequent pulse of investment occurred at the turn of the century to fund the region’s second rapid-transit infrastructure, the Millennium Line. In this second round of rapid-transit development, the capital was provided directly by the Province of British Columbia.

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Figure 4.29  Annual investment spending on expressways in Vancouver by source of funds, 1933–93 Source: Created from data assembled in the appendix.

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Figure 4.30  Percentage of all expressway investment spending in Vancouver from all sources, 1933–93 Source: Created from data assembled in the appendix.

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Annual investment spending (2014 CAD)

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Figure 4.31  Annual investment spending on rapid transit in Vancouver by source of funds, 1980–2002 Source: Created from data assembled in the appendix.

Figure a4.32 shows the percentage contributions to rapid-transitinfrastructure spending in Vancouver from 1980 to 2002. Figure 4.33 also reveals evidence of policy equivocation in the funding of Vancouver’s major mobility infrastructure, albeit a distinctive variant compared to that of Montreal and of Toronto. Vancouver has never seen multimodal development of its major mobility infrastructure. Capital has gone entirely into expressways or rapid transit at any given time. This fiscal bifurcation is unique among Canadian cities. In the first half of the twentieth century, capital flowed to the initiation and expansion of Vancouver’s expressways. Then, in the early 1980s, capital flows shifted entirely to fund Vancouver’s first rapidtransit line. Once the Expo Line had been completed, capital shifted back to fund expressway extension for a brief period, after which it shifted again to fund the second rapid-transit line. In Vancouver, equivocation meant switching between one mode of major mobility infrastructure and another, during different time periods. Figure 4.34 is a cumulative summary graphic that shows the respective proportions of all money spent on expressway and rapid-transitsystem lengthening across the three cities, as defined in this book,

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Figure 4.32  Percentage of all rapid-transit investment spending in Vancouver from all sources, 1980–2002 Source: Created from data assembled in the appendix.

during the time periods under consideration. Naturally, the magnitude of the respective total expenditures on expressways and rapid transit in each city depends on many different factors. For example, expenditures in early periods of lower environmental standards would reduce the costs relative to building the same infrastructure today. Construction techniques, such as tunnelling versus elevated construction, also have an effect. These considerations make comparisons of total expenditure in different cities over such a long period open to different interpretations, which should be borne in mind when assessing or using the data here. Nevertheless, the data reveal clearly that Montreal spent the most on expressways as a proportion of total expressway plus rapid-transit spending, Toronto was next, and, conversely, Vancouver spent proportionately the most on rapid transit. In all three cities, however, the data show that rapid transit has received the lion’s share of capital invested in major mobility infrastructure over time (the least was 64% in Montreal), which further supports the understanding that an absence of a national expresswaybuilding program enabled a greater orientation by sub-national governments toward rapid-transit in Canadian cities compared to US

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Figure 4.33  Percentage of total investment spending between expressways and rapid transit in Vancouver, 1933–2002

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Figure 4.34  Spending split between expressways and rapid transit for Montreal (1955–90), Toronto (1949–96), and Vancouver (1933–2002) Source: Created from data assembled in the appendix.

cities, as discussed in chapter 3. This proportionately higher spending on rapid transit in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver is consistent with the much higher transit use per capita in Canadian cities than in either US or Australian cities, and with their lower car use due to a lower priority toward expressway spending in all three cities over decades and, of course, due to a greater capacity to choose rapid transit for travel because of the provision of these systems. canada’s major urban mobility investments in perspective

The financial data that we have assembled offer a “bottom-line” portrait of Canada’s twentieth-century investment in developing urban mobility for its three largest cities. Despite the approximations and assumptions that were necessary to estimate what was spent on major mobility infrastructure, the resulting figures offer the most complete perspective on such investment that has ever been brought together in a single source. With this portrait of public spending now before us, we offer several observations on what these fiscal features can reveal in the aggregate.

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First, it becomes clear that global development agendas and opportunities have made a difference in what was spent on major mobility infrastructure in cities, when it was spent, and how it was spent. Vancouver’s early embrace of a major foreign investment in real-estate development was inextricably linked to the Guinness family’s precocious partnership with the British Columbia government for expressway infrastructure to enable automotive access to their British Properties district through Stanley Park and over the Lions Gate Bridge. Montreal’s two signature global mega-events, the 1967 Expo and the 1976 Olympics, also channelled public investment into both expressways and rapid transit that would otherwise have been much less concentrated, if such investment would have occurred at all. Expo 86 launched rapid-transit-infrastructure investments in the Lower Mainland’s urban core of New Westminster, Burnaby, and Vancouver. And Toronto’s limited global aspirations during the era in which its major mobility infrastructure was inaugurated are reflected in the more incremental and episodic investment pattern, with oscillation between expressway and rapid-transit funding. The financial evidence reveals that Canadian cities were open to a wide range of influences on their major mobility priorities, which yielded unique and asynchronous investment patterns, because there was no enduring program to guide and support urban infrastructure under the auspices of a national government. In this relatively open fiscal space, cities negotiated the funding they could get from public and private sources, and they advanced mobility designs and technologies that reflected aspirations that were not only home grown but also linked to larger ambitions. When cities sought to accelerate their global engagement, they (more often than not) embraced megaevents as a means of displaying their attractiveness to investors. This global demonstration of availability for local economic investment was never tied to just one mode of transportation, in the way that national highway programs tilted the supply of major mobility infrastructure in the United States, for example. But the pursuit of global capital was not the only force at work in shaping urban Canada’s major mobility investments. The second dynamic that is revealed by our major-mobility-­ investment data is the influence of local visions and actions to preserve and renew community in the face of the disruption and dislocation that accompany the expressway component of infrastructure development. In each city, neighbourhoods that were threatened by expressway infrastructure organized and advanced alternative visions to

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automobile-dominated urban mobility. While the outcomes of expressway resistance varied in particular projects, with those tied to megaevents proving the most impervious to dissent, the trend toward investment in rapid-transit infrastructure in each urban region reflects a realization by local officials that expressways would never be able to grow large enough to meet the mobility needs of dense and dynamic inner cities. The fiscal costs of expressway infrastructure were compounded by a political price that was exacted by the local communities that vigorously resisted the physical and social burdens imposed on them by such disruptive infrastructure. Canada’s big cities thus embraced policy equivocation over mobility as a means to reconcile their global ambitions with local preferences and priorities for more efficient and less burdensome major mobility infrastructure. The result was a cumulative investment in rapid transit that eclipsed the investment in urban expressways, a unique outcome by twentieth-century North American standards of automobile-­oriented urbanism. While many of the citizens contributing to this urban-mobility balance by resisting expressways may have had a narrower objective in mind, their efforts created an important counterweight to the global forces converging in Canada’s urban centres. To more fully assess the influence of these community voices, we turn to examining the local movements that engaged global mobility agendas in Canadian cities in the next chapter. This investigation will expose and consider implications of the ideas that influenced the financial patterns identified in each city.

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5 Globalized Agendas Confront Local Priorities

Transfusions of global capital into big urban-development projects have been typically met with citizen protest and resistance at the community level, particularly when citizens see concentrated burdens and immediate costs arising from such investment. Transportationinfrastructure plans and projects tend to trigger intense mobilization and activism by citizens because of the significant expenditures they require, the concentration of new or newly manifested ills (e.g., noise, pollution, disruption, and disconnection from surrounding places), and the fact that transportation is a highly visible, everyday influence on how citizens experience the public realm. In this chapter we reconsider the saga of how Canada’s three largest cities created their major mobility infrastructure during the twentieth century, by adopting a street-level perspective that highlights the input of the people who would be most affected by that infrastructure. Almost everyone living in a city has strongly held opinions about transportation-infrastructure planning and performance. Residents tend to evaluate transportation options at two levels. First, there is a general perception about whether the urban transportation system is meeting their mobility needs in an affordable and efficient manner. Second, there are specific reactions to mobility’s impacts on one’s community, which can include parking issues, road traffic, noise, pollution, and severance from adjacent places through the barriers created by elevated expressways or railways. Many people think that, just like managing a restaurant or coaching a sports team, they can plan transportation as well as the professionals do, if not better. And because people experience directly the effects of transportation-planning

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decisions on a daily basis, this personal experience often informs sophisticated and fervently held positions. Popular perspective thus sets the stage for political conflicts over major mobility infrastructure, some of which have precipitated defining moments in city histories. Such disputes have punctuated the urban-development trajectories in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver as each city has seen pitched battles over expressways, the outcomes of which have yielded an enduring legacy. Debates over rapid-transit infrastructure have been less consistent, but no less significant, in their outcomes. Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver each have dense networks of neighbourhood organizations and local institutions that tend to be suspicious of the agendas and priorities that are imported along with the inflows of global capital. These networks resist both the political and the physical intrusions of the associated infrastructure, especially when projects are planned from above, which was the twentiethcentury norm for major mobility. Such resistance does not lend itself to simple categorization. As we have discovered, local communities engage with major mobility plans in ways that are asymmetrical and inconsistent. The results of these interactions are critical, however, because the outcomes reflect and reveal the historically and geographically specific circumstances of each city’s reconciliation of community and mobility. Canada’s three largest cities display distinctive patterns of local organizing, influenced by myriad local and exogenous factors (Lee 2007; Wellman 2006; Ley 1994, 1988, 1977; Kaplan 1982; Nowlan and Nowlan 1970). The civic visions that have been forged under the pressure generated by local power confronting global capital in each urban region have become foundational narratives. These stories continue to help explain the development of Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, but each story has to be carefully contextualized within particular regional histories and specific attributes of globalcity-­development strategies. The distinctive kinds of resistance engendered by each challenge from a local community against major mobility infrastructure reveal simultaneously both commonalities and differences. Close study of community responses to even a single development proposal uncovers multiple layers of neighbourhood organization, social movements, and protest actions that are typically diverse, surprisingly nuanced, and not easily reconciled. Large-scale development

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proposals stimulate responses from multiple perspectives with contending political and economic priorities. It is clear, however, that along the axes of development that we are exploring in this book – centred on each city’s episodes of building major mobility infrastructure – disputes about investment, community impacts, and subsequent land-use repercussions have elicited distinctive responses in each of Canada’s three largest cities. Our attempt to clarify these histories has focused on understanding how the global-city aspirations of Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver were pursued, as evidenced by their major mobility infrastructural development over time. Montreal’s urban expressway and rapid-transit networks were extensive due to the opportunities to attract large infusions of capital for global-city building. Provincial and federal governments were leveraged to invest heavily by the commitment to host global mega-events, and investors bought Montreal’s municipal debt to support the local share of these costly infrastructure projects. Toronto’s global-city vision was more constrained during the twentieth century due to the city’s moderate ability and willingness to engage international circuits of capital for meeting the costs of expressway and rapid-transit infrastructure. Vancouver’s urban expressway ambitions were abandoned earlier than anywhere else in Canada, and were subsequently embraced in outer suburbs, due to the lack of legitimacy and capital that could be mustered for the extensive expressway infrastructure within the urban core that is typically associated with global cities. Vancouver’s urban development has since been tied to a discordant and asymmetric combination of rapid-transit infrastructure and suburban expressways, yielding sprawl punctuated by development clusters around transit nodes. Each of these transportation trajectories offers evidence that urban social movements were able to mobilize and challenge inner-city expressway plans, as well as rapid-transit schemes, in certain times and places. Although community resistance to urban expressways has been a constant in Canadian history, the magnitude of capital that could be mobilized to build expressways has been variable. We thus want to caution against reading our findings as a judgment on the effectiveness of expressway resistance and/or community-socialcapital formation in Canada’s three largest cities. Rather, there is ample evidence to demonstrate that Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver each mounted commensurate resistance to inner-city-expressway initiatives. The resulting confrontations reveal more about the variation in

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global-city formation than they illustrate variance in modes of community organization. A closer examination and contextualization of how community has confronted capital in each city is thus needed. the influence of urban social movements on major mobility projects

Implicit in evaluating the alternative visions of urban development that are generated within local communities is the suggestion that social movements, protests, and grassroots activism can be measured objectively and thus be effectively compared. This is a famously tricky and contentious idea that triggers vibrant responses (Luders 2010; Giugni 1999; Tarrow 1998; Banaszak 1996; Tilly 1978; Piven and Cloward 1977; Gamson 1975; Brill 1971). There is often a subsumed narrative that if social movements succeed in achieving their stated goals, it is because they are able to marshal adequate strength for the task or tasks they have set, halting a particular development, preserving a particular area, gaining representation, forcing a resignation, or changing a policy. The logical conclusion might therefore be that strong movements are successful, and unsuccessful movements must have been, or are, weaker. Such a simplistic formulation clearly does not explain the full range of real world experiences, conceptually or empirically. There are powerful social movements that have “failed” at certain goals but have had immense influence, often times “succeeding” in unpredictable, tangential, and uncharted ways. One example might be the Occupy movement, which has had undeniable influences on global narratives regarding inequality, capital accumulation, and poverty. But it is difficult to point to many substantive “victories” attributable to this movement, even though it dominated media coverage in North America and Europe for months and attracted millions of people to rallies and occupations across the continent (Chou 2015; Piven 2014). Conversely there are innumerable examples of small, focused protests and actions achieving significant and visible results. Consider, for example, whistle-blower revelations about financial or military secrets in which a tiny number of informants (even one, in the case of Edward Snowden) can shift the course of history. Or note backroom political protests executed by a few well-connected dissenting individuals that can often create stunning reversals or transformations of policy, largely out of public view and with little popular support or even awareness.

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There are also significant challenges in sorting out the influence of causation versus correlation that arise in the search for the ultimate effects of social movements. Consider the possibility that the goals of a highly visible movement might be achieved but without clarity about the effect of any particular mobilization on the outcome. It may be that a movement sees its aims achieved, but the changes might have been already underway or realized through different methods. Some popular movements might be tagging onto or following significant kinds of other work that had been percolating for years. Or, in other circumstances, a movement might be successful, but it is near impossible to disaggregate constituent parts of that mobilization to ascertain the aspects that really mattered (The Economist 2011; Smithey 2009; Bernstein 2003; Schumaker 1991; Mirowsky and Ross 1981; Lipsky 1970). It seems fair to conclude that there are numerous and varied factors to consider when assessing the strength of any movement and that societal impact also depends upon scale and context (Engler 2011; G. Davis et al. 2005; Andrews 1997; Button 1989). A protest of a thousand people in a small town, for example, will be perceived differently than a thousand people gathering in a large metropolis. The political milieus need to be considered as well. A thousand-person protest in a Canadian city is a far cry from a similarly sized gathering in the city of an authoritarian regime where any protest could result in imprisonment, torture, and worse. The forces that compel a thousand people to publicly demonstrate are very different in disparate political contexts. Thus there arise the questions of whether social movements can ever be measured precisely and objectively, whether their “success” can ever be quantitatively confirmed, and, if so, what might possibly be measured to determine that success. Should verified numbers of people attending marches or events be a valid measure? Would letters to the editor be useful data? Can submissions to public forums be taken into account? Does the number of people arrested at demonstrations matter to this assessment? And what would one make of the media coverage of mobilization efforts? There are many other possible metrics, and each throws up questions and problems, especially in historical assessments. Some suggest that even the attempt to quantify, measure, and compare relative levels of social-movement strength is wrong headed in its intention and damages popular and grassroots activism by trying to fix or freeze such dynamic efforts within a quantitative taxonomy (McAdam 1999;

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Giugni 1998; Tarrow 1998; J. Jenkins and Klandermans 1995; Frey, Dietz, and Kalof 1992). These qualms have not prevented other researchers from engaging the challenges of social-movement measurement. The sociological sub-field that is often described as “social movement impact theory” tends to root itself in two foundational texts from the 1970s: The Strategy of Social Protest by William Gamson (1975) and Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed and Why They Fail by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward (1977). Both books attempted to classify various levels and tactics of social movement successes or failures, and each had a significant impact on the mass-scaled civil-rights, environmental, peace, and social-justice movements that were emerging from the legacies of organizing in the 1960s and early 1970s. Each of these texts has generated considerable scholarship and debate around the impacts of particular strategic approaches: disruption versus moderation, violence versus civil disobedience versus non-violence, protest versus lobbying, and structured organizations versus organic, agile movements. Each of these debates both reflects and defines the ideological tendencies of observers and becomes entangled with historically contingent parameters of success, which are vigorously contested in and of themselves. In contrast, for example, to Piven and Cloward’s findings that disruptive, disorganized, and aggressive (even violent) tactics tend to find the most significant successes, others like Gamson and Giugni have argued that more moderate, instrumentalist strategies produce far more impactful outcomes (Giugni 1999; Kriesi 1995; Cortright 1991; Gamson 1975). These kinds of debates rely on contingent and politicized definitions of success that also require critical appraisal. There are fundamental value differences underlying the question of whether the goals of social movements are or should be specific policy changes, regime displacements, shifts in larger cultural and social attitudes, and/or personal changes in participants. Any definitions of success or failure, or of impacts, have to first embrace or reject the deeper values that inform the competing goals to which these movements could aspire. There is also a wide range of interpretation found in the socialmovement literature regarding the intended versus unintended consequences of community mobilization (Suh 2014; A. Martin 2008; Tarrow 1998). Some mobilizations are presented as clearly successful in altering policy, but these accounts of community influence on policy

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can miss the less positive repercussions that emerge over time. A germane example can be seen in the aftermath of the victory over official planning that Vancouver’s Chinatown and Strathcona residents achieved by halting an expressway that would have dissected their neighbourhood. As Henry Yu (2015) has pointed out, four decades later the effects of community preservation from preventing the intrusion of this infrastructure enabled a more insidious form of exploitation. Much of the neighbourhood that was “saved” from penetration and permanent disruption by an expressway has become thoroughly gentrified and prohibitively expensive for any low- or moderateincome descendants of the broad-based, multiracial, progressive coalition that successfully blocked the expressway. Meanwhile, the only major affordable low-income dwellings in the neighbourhood can be found in the public housing that was built on surplus land that had been bulldozed for the unbuilt expressway (Yu 2015). It might be argued that the original protests were a success and that the more recent displacements have other causes requiring their own responses. Similarly, although Toronto’s highway-resistance movements substantially halted the intrusion of the Spadina Expressway into the city’s core, it can be argued that the region’s autocentric approach to mobility development was not changed overall. Instead, the resources planned for Toronto’s expressway building were just shifted to routes beyond the urban core such as Highway 401, which vies for the heaviest expressway-traffic volume in North America (U.S. Department of Transportation 2014). Conversely, although its protests did not halt expressway construction through the heart of the city, Montreal retains a distinctly compact, walkable character in many of its central districts, a character that predated the expressways. Furthermore, Montreal boasts one of North America’s best-used rapid-transit systems, which relied upon the same megaproject capital flows that fuelled the expressway construction. These experiences suggest that measuring social movements and their impacts is complicated, contested, and slippery territory. We concur with Giugni’s (1999) suggestion that a more fruitful approach is to look beyond directly linking social-movement activities with change outcomes and instead seek to understand “the conditions and circumstances of their occurrence … If social movements are conceived of as rational, political efforts aimed at social change, the political conditions of the occurrence of certain changes become central to the analysis of social movement outcomes” (xxviii).

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We have found that revisiting the narratives about inner-city-expressway protest movements in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver following several decades of development can shed a new light on both the historical conditions and the community circumstances that yielded such divergent outcomes. What constitutes success is a socially constructed, contingent, and contestable idea, and one that relies on a broadly historicized set of understandings. Making sense of the mobility evolution in Canada’s three biggest urban regions requires considering the legacy of those inner-city social movements that resisted expressway expansion and its associated embrace of global capital. The social movements resisting urban expressways in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver exhibit both similarities and divergences from one another, and the analytical leverage that each story provides is contingent on understanding the specific historical conditions and the specific global-city formations in each place. In some ways the successes and failures of community mobilizations in each city can be understood in temporal terms. For example, Vancouver’s expressway resistance arose at exactly the right moment in the city’s growth, before global-city processes re-emerged as a decisive influence on policy – but that is not all of it. Gauging the impact of social movements on any given set of municipal policy decisions requires a more nuanced, historicized, and narrative analysis. Montreal Montreal enjoys an international reputation for urban savoir faire, which embraces the mobility provided by both an extensive network of inner-city expressways and a network of four underground rapidtransit lines, known as the Metro. While Montreal’s reputation has certainly been shaped by the vicissitudes of Canada’s anglophonefrancophone relations amid the ebb and flow of Quebec nationalism, it is also clear that the city’s ability, and agility, in building major mobility infrastructure has made a significant contribution to its urban identity. Although the extent and the speedy construction of Montreal’s expressways might suggest that there was little citizen opposition to such infrastructure, this assumption is unwarranted. Montreal offers abundant evidence of community mobilization, but the expresswayresistance efforts were confronted by both a greater determination on the part of government to build and a more constrained capacity to

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challenge expressway construction than activists experienced in either Toronto or Vancouver. These countervailing factors, which have been previously discussed, included the provincial and federal governments’ willingness to contribute significant financial resources toward expressway infrastructure; a local government with an ambitious international agenda of building a “world-class” city; a powerful and long-serving mayor who was skilled in steamrolling opposition; public enthusiasm for ambitious municipal construction projects through the 1970s; and the hosting of two global mega-events – Expo 67 and the 1976 Summer Olympics – less than a decade apart. Before the capital and corporate flight prompted by the threats and violence accompanying Quebec’s sovereignty struggle had undercut Montreal’s position as Canada’s economic nexus, local resistance to expressway-construction plans was confronted by claims that Quebec’s rightful economic and political ambitions depended upon having a global city as the province’s metropolis, with all the attendant infrastructure to support fully a francophone and Quebecois resurgence. Expressways were not just providing urban transportation; to many across Quebec, they were also the route to a new national destination. The Montreal expressway conflicts and the attendant debates over the city’s global-city aspirations were thus in tension with a much larger anti-colonial cultural and nationalist campaign that found no equivalent in Toronto or Vancouver (Gilbert and Poitras 2015; Hamel and Jouve 2008). In some ways, it is possible to read Montreal citizens’ resistance to urban expressways as a “failure” because that infrastructure came to be almost completely built out, certainly more so than in Toronto or Vancouver. We suggest, however, that owing to the unique contours that local opponents faced in Montreal, the community pushback took different routes, and although expressway resistance failed by most measures, its impacts were and are being felt in other significant ways. Reflecting the policy equivocation that has been a feature of both English- and French-Canadian city building, the political responses to expressway opponents took the form of compensatory policies, which have paid considerable dividends over time. For example, Montreal’s rapid-transit infrastructure was expanded in tandem with expressways, perhaps more vigorously than it would have without the extensive expressway building. Alongside the demolition and

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destruction of inner-city housing for new expressways, several heritage sites in the urban core – including Old Montreal – were preserved, and a number of walkable core communities were nurtured. These ameliorations left Montrealers with much better urban outcomes than would the typical North American approach of urban expressway expansion coupled with public-transport disinvestment and inner-city decay. With valued urban spaces spared from the physical impacts of expressway construction, at least some of Montreal’s communities were preserved after the expressway infrastructure was rerouted or concealed within tunnels. Montreal’s contemporary urban livability may thus owe a good deal to the resistance against expressway building, which, while not stopping construction, did temper infrastructure’s impacts (Robinson 2012; Germain and Rose 2000; Whelan 1991; Filion 1988). As early as 1945, Montreal urban planners and politicians had identified inner-city traffic congestion as a key problem and presumed that the solution was to add more mobility infrastructure. The planners were eagerly commissioning studies into the efficacy of a massive, elevated east–west expressway cutting across the island. In 1948 these plans were unveiled and presented to the citizenry as the typical panacea for urban challenges: “Montréal is keeping pace with leading American cities, which have recognized the necessity of rapid and free flowing traffic thoroughfares, in order to relieve congestion and avoid its harmful consequences of mounting accident tolls, great losses in depreciated property values, interference with business expansion forcing decentralization, costly delays in transportation and, in some cases, the spreading of blight” (cited in D. Robinson 2012, 236). The plan argued that an expressway would not just relieve congestion and increase mobility, but, by being inserted into poor neighbourhoods and blighted areas, the infrastructure would also create significant opportunities for civic regeneration and urban renewal. Moreover, planners argued that a major expressway would knit together the whole city, allow for easy access into and out of the core, and integrate the city better with Quebec’s growing highway network. These claims failed to persuade those holding the public purse strings, however, and for the next decade expressway plans stagnated in the face of increasingly vocal demands for the preservation of urban heritage along Montreal’s waterfront. The case for community protection was articulated by both city staff and a patchwork of citizens and

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neighbourhood groups. These critiques fomented public apprehension and press opposition but never fully coalesced into a movement against the expressway, in part because the funding necessary to realize planned infrastructure was never assembled (Kaplan 1982). City elites remained convinced of the need for an urban expressway, however, and the region’s population growth, combined with rising competition from Toronto as a financial centre within Canada, meant that the interest in launching major mobility infrastructure persisted. Various configurations of municipal agencies and business groups continued to present new studies and formal calls for an expressway until the early 1960s when Mayor Jean Drapeau linked his monumental strategy for global-city development with the first wave of Quebec nationalism that called for government-led change to unlock new opportunity for francophones. His haughty claim was that, while rival Toronto might someday become Canada’s “Milan,” Montreal would always remain the nation’s “Rome.” And Rome was known around the world for its monuments. Drapeau embraced a frenetic series of projets de grandeur that were intended to shape Montreal into a first-tier global city in the modernist mould. A palatial performing arts centre, known as Place des Arts, a massive exhibition centre named Place Bonaventure, corporate office towers like Place Ville-Marie, and a giant Olympic stadium all required major mobility infrastructure in the form of both inner-city expressways and a rapid-transit network (Hamel and Jouve 2008; Paul 2004; McRoberts 1993; McKenna and Purcell 1980). The second factor propelling the capital flows needed to realize Mayor Drapeau’s initiative was the Quebec government’s 1963 decision to fast-track expressway development in and around Montreal. The planned network included a circular belt around the downtown core and a rerouted section of the Trans-Canada Highway that would run through the city. A third impetus, which was spurred significantly by the upcoming Expo 67 in Montreal, came from the provincial and federal governments’ reaching of a cost-sharing agreement on the expressway’s substantial price tag. The $175 million plans for the north–south, fifteen-mile, six-lane route included a mostly elevated riverside expressway, a tunnel-bridge combination across the St Lawrence connecting Longueuil with Mercier–Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, and a link to the planned east–west expressway. The road, according to the plan, would transition between ground level, elevated, and depressed “as required.” The budget

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breakdown indicated $100 million of provincial financing, $40 million of federal financing, and $35 million of municipal financing. Federal Minister of Public Works Jean-Paul Deschatelets (1963–65) was careful to note that the project qualified for federal funding through the Trans-Canada Highway Act because it was designated as part of that highway (D. Robinson 2012, 251). Once the financing had come together, expressway development moved ahead with alacrity. The route was finalized within three months, and expropriations began almost immediately thereafter. Complaints from the residential neighbourhoods in the expressway’s path were dismissed, given the urgency of preparing for a world’s fair. The velocity of the Trans-Canada project created a wake that pulled in and accelerated the completion of the other expressway-network components including the Bonaventure Expressway, which opened in 1965; the Turcot Interchange; and the Décarie Expressway, which opened just days before the exposition did. The city embarked simultaneously on a massive construction of the city’s road network – widening, extending, separating, and improving – and between 1961 and 1967 “road improvements consumed roughly half the city’s capital expenditures” (Kaplan 1982, 425). The long-hoped-for east–west expressway was the one project that was delayed, with the promise that it would be completed after Expo 67. It was also only after Expo 67 that Montreal’s expressway resistance coalesced into a movement that was united by opposition to the destruction of the low-income housing standing in the path of the new infrastructure. The Housing and Urban Renewal Committee, an alliance of clergy, academics, neighbourhood groups, municipal politicians, and preservationists – co-chaired by Joseph Baker, a prominent and active architecture professor at McGill University – formed to resist expropriations. The construction of the Trans-Canada Highway extension began in 1969, and expropriations for the east-west expressway started along the waterfront, both of which threatened the loss of thousands of homes. A groundswell of opposition emerged to resist the post-Expo expressway projects, arguing that the repercussions of additional expressways would be deleterious to the city’s social fabric and that the money should be redirected to other public works such as housing, sewers, hospitals, and rapid transit. Throughout 1969 and 1970, the protests against expropriation and relocation grew. One primary locus of resistance was the Lower Westmount Citizens’ Committee,

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representing a low-income francophone community that faced considerable displacement. Many of these civic activists appealed directly to provincial and federal officials. The criticism began to have an effect, which became most visible when the leader of the Parti Québécois, René Lévesque, publically opposed the waterfront expressway. By 1970, labour, socialist, anarchist, and nationalist groups were broadly condemning the loss of housing to expressways. In 1971 the Common Front Against the Highway formed, with a core membership of fourteen high-profile unions, citizens’ organizations, and church groups. The Common Front soon grew into a coalition of more than fifty groups, organizing marches, blockades, legal action, press barrages, and political lobbying and sharing tactics and ideas with Toronto’s expressway-opposition umbrella, Stop Spadina, Save Our City Coordinating Committee (SSSOCCC). By mid-1971 the expressway conflict had even provoked a rhetorical battle in the provincial legislature, when the opposition Parti Québécois claimed that urban expressway expansion was part of an intentional strategy to divert attention from ongoing FLQ and Quebec nationalism crises (Germain and Rose 2000; Kaplan 1982; Leo 1977). Through all these protests, and despite a burgeoning base of opposition, expressway construction continued. The Trans-Canada Highway extension opened in 1972, with plans targeting completion of all urban expressways in 1974. Construction proceeded steadily, requiring waves of home relocations and demolitions. However, it was met with growing protest – in forms ranging from journalistic exposés of cost overruns, to legal challenges, to public demonstrations. Opponents were emboldened by Ontario Premier Davis’s cancelling of the Spadina Expressway in 1971, and, although Montreal’s expressway supporters claimed that the situations were incomparable, it appeared that the tide was shifting. There was a growing consensus that the huge financial commitment demanded to fully build Montreal’s expressways could be better spent on other public works, notably rapid transit. Even orthodox urban planners were voicing concerns about the loss of primarily low-income housing. Further extension of the east–west expressway was aborted when the Parti Québécois prevailed in the 1976 provincial election, and shortly after forming a government, it cancelled additional expressway construction. The east–west thoroughfare was “downgraded to an arterial route prior to the Jacques-Cartier Bridge, thus saving several francophone districts on the north end of the Island of Montréal from

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the road” (D. Robinson 2012, 303). This decision effectively closed the city’s chapter of major expressway-expansion efforts. Although Montreal’s early and aggressive push saw much of the planned network realized, the combination of sustained and broadbased opposition, an eventual withdrawal of provincial financing, the city’s mounting budget problems, and a change in provincial-­ government transportation priorities brought Montreal’s expressway megaproject era to a close before the final segment of the planned network could be completed. The end of Montreal’s inner-city-­ expressway program happened at approximately the same time as Toronto and Vancouver gave up on their efforts, although Montreal had achieved the largest urban network in Canada by the time that the building of inner-city expressways had fallen out of favour. Toronto Toronto shares an international reputation as a livable and adroitly planned city with Montreal and Vancouver. Its status rests on a perceived balance of mobility options, a commitment to urban density, and a significant array of walkable, complete communities within the city’s core. This reputation has been attained, in no small part, through initiatives that emerged following the citizen resistance that stymied highway and urban renewal plans for construction of a complete expressway network that would have spatially transformed the urban core to inhibit much of today’s denser, mixed-use redevelopment. While Toronto’s expressway resistance differed from Montreal’s and Vancouver’s in both the composition and the motivation of activists, the outcome shared important similarities that can offer insight into the nature and meaning of community resistance to global development ambitions. All three cities saw expressway projects in their core cancelled or curtailed to some degree, followed by a redeployment of expressway building in the urban periphery where there were few, if any, people to protest the impending impacts. Unlike in Montreal and Vancouver, however, in Toronto the most visible and effective opposition came from a predominantly middle-class population whose gentrifying neighbourhoods were directly threatened by plans for the Spadina Expressway. Just as in Vancouver, the factor that prevented expressway completion was a lack of capital. But, unlike Vancouver’s, Toronto’s fiscal constraint hinged on a highly public reversal of policy by a new

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premier. Thus a double dosage of elitism can be seen in Toronto’s approach to terminating urban expressway construction. Elites within the community articulated the case against urban expressways. Their success in making this case then opened a window to change the policy agenda, which governing elites then used to establish a new direction for Toronto’s major mobility development. Toronto’s community protests are rooted in Canada’s postwar attempts to embrace modernism in urban design and emulate America’s expansion of inner- and intra-city expressway infrastructure. By 1943 the City of Toronto’s planning board had already drafted an expressway network plan that would open up the whole city region to high-speed automobile travel. In 1953 a regional government tier was launched with a mandate to plan, build, and maintain the municipal infrastructure needed to keep up with rapid growth. Metropolitan Toronto would fully pay for all infrastructure construction, except for roads, whose cost would be split evenly with the Province of Ontario. This metropolitan governance structure created the conditions for an entrenched and divisive split between the City of Toronto and its surrounding municipalities, where suburban development was in full swing (Sewell 2009). The city was growing swiftly, but metropolitan Toronto’s suburbs were expanding even faster, and the combined increase added urgency to plans for an inner-city expressway grid that could enable full-scale metropolitan automobility. In 1954, Metropolitan Toronto revamped the transportation plan, and expressway construction began. The expressway plan was reworked and expanded in 1959 and then again in 1966. The Gardiner Expressway (initially called the Lakeshore Expressway), running along Toronto’s southern edge, was opened in 1958 and extended in 1962 and again in 1964. The Don Valley Expressway, running more or less north–south through Toronto’s eastern core and eventually connecting the Gardiner Expressway and Highway 401, was opened in 1961. Toronto’s first two expressways were part of a plan that called for a web of motorways to enable high-speed automobile travel across the whole city. The Crosstown Expressway would cut east–west through the inner city, mostly parallel to the Gardiner Expressway, and then the Spadina Expressway would run north from the Gardiner Expressway through the western core, to complete an expressway grid. Unlike the Gardiner and Don Valley Expressways, the Crosstown and Spadina Expressways would have to pass through and disrupt densely settled neighbourhoods. The Crosstown Expressway, which

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would have cut directly into the wealthy Rosedale neighbourhood, faded in and out of Metropolitan Toronto’s transportation plans; sometimes it was quietly buried, at other times it was not mentioned at all, and sometimes it was highly qualified. The Spadina Expressway, however, would have to pass through some slightly less upscale communities and thus emerged as the locus of an intensifying debate on building expressway infrastructure in the urban core. Several attributes moved Spadina Expressway ahead of the Crosstown Expressway as a priority. First, and similarly to what happened in Vancouver, the Spadina Expressway was linked to an ambitious real estate development, the Yorkdale Plaza shopping centre. Yorkdale Plaza’s proponents claimed in 1961 that the shopping centre would generate $1 million ($7.9 million in 2014 dollars) in annual tax revenues (Leo 1977, 31), and thus persuaded public officials to fund an interchange between Highway 401 and the future Spadina Expressway that would also serve their property. The Yorkdale development scheme demonstrated how significant capital flows into suburban land development can motivate and advance urban expressway plans, even in the face of community opposition. The Yorkdale Plaza development was first conceived by the T. Eaton Company in the mid-1950s. In 1958, after purchasing forty acres of undeveloped land adjacent to Highway 401 at Dufferin Street, the company invited Simpson’s, a rival department store chain, to join it in creating a shopping centre. The mall was opened in 1964 with over 1.2 million square feet of shops, briefly making it the biggest indoor mall in the world. “Yorkdale was developed by Trizec Corp. Ltd., the real estate firm founded when New York mogul William Zeckendorf Sr.’s Webb and Knapp ran out of money building Place Ville Marie in Montreal and Zeckendorf’s British lenders were brought in as partners to avoid foreclosure. Based in Montreal in the 1960s, Trizec would become one of North America’s largest real estate firms. Yorkdale, along with the Halifax Shopping Centre, and Burnaby’s Brentwood Shopping Centre, was among its earliest projects” (Plummer 2012). Metropolitan Toronto’s close vote approving the Spadina Expressway was justified by some as necessary to enable the Yorkdale development. After forty-five separate ratepayers groups had made presentations to Metropolitan Toronto Council opposing the plan, Metropolitan Toronto’s chairman, Fred Gardiner, gave a stirring appeal to build the infrastructure, and then he cast the deciding vote

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to approve Spadina Expressway’s initial phase, the northern segment linking to Highway 401. Chairman Gardiner urged Metropolitan Toronto to build expressways in synchronization with commercial development, stating, “Construction should start as soon as Eaton’s and Simpson’s begin construction of their new North York stores to handle the volume of traffic those two stores will create” (Nowlan and Nowlan 1970, 71). Metropolitan Toronto’s infrastructure commitment satisfied the Yorkdale developers, who began construction soon after the expressway construction had been approved (D. Robinson 2012; Sewell 2009; Osbaldeston 2008; Leo 1977; Sewell 1972; Nowlan and Nowlan 1970). The second reason that the Spadina Expressway became a political flashpoint was that its burdens and benefits exacerbated the emerging centre-periphery tensions across the Metropolitan Toronto area. Suburban communities competed against the city of Toronto over virtually every municipal development decision, the subject of transportation being among the most contentious. Opposition to the Spadina Expressway was widely critiqued by suburban politicians as a move by elitist urban residents to restrict entry to the city by their less-fortunate and spatially dispersed counterparts. As John Sewell (1993, 179) wrote, the fight “pitted one kind of vision about the city against another, a battle between suburban and city values … political lines were more toughly drawn than the city had seen for many decades. The line seemed to run between supporters of the old city and new.” While Toronto’s suburban housing and shopping centres were being built in green fields, the urban core was being gentrified by a cohort of middle-class professionals who were increasingly attracted to city living. David Ley (1994, 56) identified those who were renewing neighbourhoods such as Cabbagetown, the Annex, and Yorkville as the “new cultural class.” Presaging Richard Florida’s invocation of the bourgeois creative class as a vanguard in restoring urban livability, Ley identified these citizens as a social force for changing the character of the inner city. Toronto’s new cultural class comprised highly educated and well-paid professionals who were working in the public and the private sector. They could afford to refurbish the inner city’s older housing stock and were attracted to the charm and “authenticity” of Victorian-era homes. Toronto’s new cultural class was thus on a collision course with the suburban pressure to reallocate and reshape urban space for access by automobile.

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For most transportation planners and municipal politicians, especially those representing suburban constituencies, the Spadina Expressway represented continuity in the advance of automobility (D. Robinson 2012), but for many city residents, including but not limited to the gentrifiers, it posed an existential threat. At the same time that citizen groups were actively organizing to stop the Spadina Expressway within the city of Toronto, there were opposite efforts by suburban ratepayers’ groups in the northern suburban neighbourhoods of Bathurst-Lawrence and Downsview seeking to extend expressway infrastructure into the urban core (D. Robinson 2012, 31). While suburbanites and their municipal representatives saw expressways as a natural means to move vehicles throughout all of metropolitan Toronto, urban residents could not understand where all the cars and trucks would go if expressways delivered them into the city’s heart. Official plans implied that the Spadina, like any other expressway, would move an already existing and inevitable volume of cars more efficiently than the street grid would. But for those who lived at the receiving end of this traffic pipeline, there was no plausible explanation of how the city would handle the considerable volume of anticipated traffic after it had disgorged into the centre, with all the traffic’s attendant pollution, congestion, and noise (Sewell 1993; Leo 1977; Nowlan and Nowlan 1970). The Spadina Expressway’s planned route also required immediate destruction of the urban fabric, well before any promised mobility benefits might arise. Both the Gardiner and the Don Valley Expressways had been built mostly through industrial areas and green space – parts of the city with few residents – and thus there was little to disrupt before the traffic began flowing. The Spadina Expressway, however, would penetrate the heart of Ley’s new cultural-class territory, disrupting well-established neighbourhoods like the Annex, Chinatown, Kensington Market, and Forest Hill. Once the Spadina Expressway’s construction had been approved in 1962, inner-city opposition started to intensify. But construction began in the northern suburbs where support was solid, and disruption of the established community was minimal. By 1964, Spadina’s first segment was opened, along with the Yorkdale Shopping Centre. In that same year Metropolitan Toronto released an official transportation plan proposing a range of options for expressway coverage. In 1966 Metropolitan Toronto endorsed the development of a mix of rapid-transit and expressway infrastructure in a “balanced” plan

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that still included the full Spadina and Crosstown Expressways. The second segment of the Spadina Expressway was completed to Eglinton Avenue by 1969, bringing expressway infrastructure to the edge of well-established affluent Toronto communities and, just as importantly, depleting the budget that had been allocated by Metropolitan Toronto and the Province of Ontario for building urban expressway infrastructure. In October 1969, with inner-city expressway construction imminent, a new oppositional coalition emerged. The Stop Spadina, Save Our City Coordinating Committee (S S S O C C C ) embarked on both lobbying and large-scale political and community mobilizing to prevent the expressway’s penetration into the city of Toronto. It allied with the recently formed Confederation of Residents’ and Ratepayers’ Associations (C O R R A ) to advocate an urban agenda that would conserve the space and the places valued by inner-city ratepayers, students, academics, and local businesses (Magnusson 1983). Prior expressway opposition had been mounted by neighbourhood-scale organizations with limited professional experience and political influence. This new alliance elevated resistance against Toronto’s accommodation of suburban automobility and embrace of widespread high-rise tower development. S S S O C C C and C O R R A insisted upon a wholesale redesign of the planning process in order to embrace transparency, citizen participation, and a set of transportation and land-use priorities that would meet local needs as defined within the community. In the spirit of the times, the SSSOCCC deployed vibrant, performative, and energetic organizing tactics, which were both ambitious and radical compared with prior expressway protests. These efforts attracted growing participation, with an estimated 1,500 members by 1970. The demographic composition of the coalition, however, diverged from that of both Montreal’s and Vancouver’s expressway opposition, comprising a large proportion of middle-class and highly educated participants. As Robinson characterized S S S O C C C , “the group’s members were primarily middle-class professionals and many lived in the proposed path of the highway. Chairman Alan Powell was a sociology professor at the University of Toronto, and other key members held similar positions. David Nowlan, for example, was an economics professor at York University, John Sewell was a Toronto Alderman and later served as the Mayor of Toronto, and Colin Vaughan was an architect” (D. Robinson 2012, 35).

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When the Globe and Mail reported on S S S O CCC, its elitism was featured, with a reporter noting, “There are no labour leaders on the leadership rolls, and few working-class people in the general ranks … most of the group’s spokesmen have British or American accents … their use of the word city in their ‘Save our City’ slogan smacks of arrogance or selfishness to suburbanites; that too many leading members sound elitely [sic] upper middle class” (MacKenzie 1970). SSSOCCC’s leaders were also media savvy, and their mobilizations consistently captured public attention through creative actions that included celebrity deployment at protest events. Prominent Torontonians who were recruited to appear at anti-expressway happenings included Pierre Berton, Marshal McLuhan, University of Toronto president Claude Bissell, and Jane Jacobs. The coalition was not just sophisticated and media fluent; it was also politically adept. In the run-up to the 1969 municipal election, for example, the coalition resisted the temptation (advocated by some of its members) to intervene and endorse anti-expressway candidates. Such a campaign could have turned the election into a referendum on urban expressways, with a loss cementing the fate of inner-city neighbourhoods in Spadina’s path. Instead of concentrating on local politics, the committee broadened the scope of its opposition to challenge the financial extravagance of building expressway infrastructure in the urban core. Attacking the Spadina project on this vulnerability expanded the scope of policy actors to include Ontario’s provincial government, which shared the cost of expressway infrastructure with Metropolitan Toronto. This economic campaign against Spadina was waged in parallel with the political campaign by bringing the issue before the Ontario Municipal Board and the Ontario Cabinet. In 1971 an entity calling itself the Spadina Review Corporation, which was allied with S S S O C C C , raised $56,000 to engage an eminent attorney, John Robinette, to argue the fiscal case against the expressway within Ontario’s municipal oversight bureaucracy. Anticipating that the economic issues would, in any case, end up before Cabinet, the committee began to simultaneously lobby provincial politicians (Leo 1977, 36). Already by 1969 the first two phases of Spadina Expressway construction had consumed the allocated budget of $79 million, and Metropolitan Toronto had to request permission from the Ontario Municipal Board for additional borrowing to meet its share of further expenditures. When that request was granted, SSSOCCC immediately appealed the decision, which stopped the loans from being executed,

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and thus halted expressway construction within Toronto at least temporarily. While the bureaucratic appeal process was grinding along, a provincial election was called in 1971, introducing a political leverage point that SSO C C C did not hesitate to seize upon. Ontario’s Conservative party had governed the province since 1943 and sought to extend its reign through a leadership change. The strategy of party renewal through bringing in the next generation of political leaders carried the day, with forty-two-year-old William Davis being elected leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives and thus becoming premier of Ontario. One way for Davis to demonstrate his suitability to the electorate would be to change an unpopular government policy, and S S S O C C C had succeeded in making the Spadina Expressway a visibly unpopular policy. Facing demonstrated cost overruns and criticism of wasteful public expenditure on the expressway, vocal and visible grassroots opposition to community destruction, and pointed criticism from the urban elite, Davis made an executive decision to cancel the project. Ontario’s new premier did this with maximum visibility, announcing the decision himself in a speech to the provincial parliament, where he famously declared: “Cities were built for people and not cars. If we are building a transportation system to serve the automobile, the Spadina Expressway would be a good place to start. But if we are building a transportation system to serve people, the Spadina Expressway is a good place to stop” (Sewell 1993, 179–80). As with any major policy change, there are a multitude of theories, concepts, and explanatory frameworks available to explain Toronto’s expressway abnegation. The particular blend of rationales that different observers have highlighted over the ensuing decades is always conditional and can be advanced through recursive re-examination. There are many reasons the Spadina Expressway was cancelled, leaving Toronto with a uniquely truncated, half-built urban expressway infrastructure. These reasons include an awakening to issues of pollution and larger ecological degradation, a renewed interest in citizen participation in community planning, growing awareness of the urban impacts of automobility, urban-suburban conflicts over the costs and benefits of reshaping the inner city, and a successful rapid-transit alternative. It is also clear, however, that the particular constitution of Toronto’s citizen resistance – whose vanguard featured a wellheeled, highly educated class of civic reformers protecting both established and gentrifying middle-class neighbourhoods – was critical in

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the way the expressway-construction machine was derailed much earlier along its path into the city centre than in many other Canadian urban areas and in almost all North American cities beyond Canada. But here we would also highlight the financial issues at play. As Danielle Robinson (2012, 21) notes, “citizen activists upheld the cancellation as a landmark victory for progressive reformers. In reality, the defeat of the Spadina Expressway was due both to the growing costs associated with the scheme and the protests that dominated the public discourse, and the cancellation did not mark a lasting turn away from autocentric planning.” We submit that expressway opponents in Toronto succeeded in stopping Spadina, and subsequent attempts to introduce similar infrastructure into Toronto’s core, by closing the financial tap on expressways. They could accomplish this because Toronto had not yet outgrown its self-defined status as Canada’s “second city.” Nor had the city (quite) crossed the threshold of being Canada’s corporate and financial gateway to the globe, as occurred soon after the Spadina Expressway was cancelled. With Toronto lacking the global-city identity that was proudly displayed by Montreal, it proved much easier to make the case against monumental infrastructure and lavish public expenditure on reshaping the inner city. A sophisticated and determined local opposition rescaled Toronto’s mobility-infrastructure investment at a time that such downsizing remained possible – the era before global linkages and capital flows took Toronto to another place in its global-city-development dynamics. Vancouver Vancouver energetically cultivates a reputation as one of the world’s most attractive and livable (if deeply unaffordable) cities. “Vancouverism” is widely lauded (nowhere more than within its own environs) as a benchmark for wise land-use decisions, innovative building typologies, effective multi-modal transit planning, and high-density urban residential core neighbourhoods (Punter 2003). Central to Vancouver’s urban identity is the apparent absence of an inner-city expressway, but, as noted previously, the Stanley Park Causeway represents a miniature expressway that is well hidden within one of the city’s iconic green spaces. Unlike those of all other major cities in North America, Vancouver’s urban planning regimes over the past four decades have been allowed a unique freedom of redevelopment without the physical

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or environmental burden of major expressway infrastructure. Planners have taken advantage of this opportunity to build more pedestrianand bike-friendly neighbourhoods, with complementary infrastructure features such as a seawall along the water’s edge that has turned into a greenway for walking and cycling around the city. The now-foundational narrative of Vancouver’s urban renaissance suggests that a broad-based, multi-ethnic group of Chinatown and Strathcona residents and small-business owners coalesced to oppose the agenda of global development capital that was being advanced by some civic elites. This elitist urban-renewal agenda embraced a modernist restructuring of the downtown as a single-purpose business centre connected to residential suburbs by newly built expressways. Community opposition succeeded in thwarting such schemes (aside from the completion of two viaducts, which have since been orphaned), and after that victory no expressways have been built within Vancouver. Over the subsequent four decades since Vancouver’s expressway met its Waterloo in Strathcona, the city has grown immensely, the downtown core has been redeveloped substantially, alternative road and transit infrastructure has been built, and a post-modern urban vision has become entrenched. The idea of building urban expressways is now highly unfashionable and the opportunity to build any expressway within the city of Vancouver has long passed. It is more than a coincidence that the alternative values and vision of community activists in Vancouver that proved to be influential both locally and globally coalesced at about the same time that the modernist plan for a spatially, functionally, and socially segregated metropolitan area included the launch of an urban expressway. Vancouver was influenced by the same social and demographic change drivers that had catalyzed anti-establishment protests and policy reform campaigns in cities throughout North America and Western Europe during the 1960s, but Vancouver’s resistance to the modernist urban-renewal ethos yielded distinctive results. Vancouver in the 1960s and 1970s was marked by a particular counter-cultural milieu that was linked closely to an ecological awareness. This distinctive subculture mobilized specific kinds of political engagement, the results of which have yielded legacies that continue to influence thinking and action in the city. Anti-expressway protests and demonstrations helped amalgamate the understanding of advancing social change through direct community action within a defensive politics focused on preserving ecological integrity.

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Greenpeace was founded in Vancouver in 1970 and soon made a name for itself at the vanguard of environmental non-governmental organizations that were working to expose, critique, and avert the worst excesses of modernity (e.g., the development of nuclear weapons, the eradication of endangered species, and the destruction of natural habitats). The genesis of such an organization inspired by pacifist and ecological paradigms within a city that was neither at war nor heavily despoiled by environmental degradation might seem paradoxical, but, upon closer inspection, Canada’s changing urban dynamics during the 1960s made Vancouver a fertile incubator for such innovative thinking. Zelko (2004) points out that Canada’s immigration policy in the 1960s privileged well-educated and highly skilled young migrants who were fluent in English or French. This profile aligned closely with a subset of the US population that risked losing (or not obtaining) draft deferments and then facing military induction and deployment to Vietnam. These young Americans entered a community in which alternative visions and unconventional values were nurtured by Vancouver’s particular urban attributes. Zelko notes that “Vancouver had become a countercultural Mecca. Hippies, yippies, New Leftists, and various alternative lifestylers from throughout Canada, as well as the United States, flocked there to enjoy its relatively mild climate, its spectacular surrounds, and its cheap and abundant stock of innercity housing” (2004, 216). Although Greenpeace has become associated with dramatic images of protest in remote natural settings, it originated within a distinctly urban space that fostered interaction among environmentalists, anti-war activists, and alternative-lifestyle seekers. These dissenters from the status quo not only encountered one another in Vancouver but also learned from the resident-led efforts to oppose the urban redevelopment inspired by modernist growthmachine principles. David Ley (1981) highlighted a broader value shift that supported this political realignment. While Vancouver was spawning both local and global protest movements, some citizens organized a traditional vehicle for political change, a new civic party, The Electors Action Movement (TEAM). Between 1968 and 1976 TEAM won enough votes to obtain growing representation on the city council. Once TEAM held a majority during the 1970s, Vancouver officially broke with previous urban mobility and development policies and rejected both expressways and the spatial segregation they encouraged.

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The new mayors and councillors, who served between 1968 and 1976, had different backgrounds than their predecessors had. Whereas the vast majority of previous councillors and mayors had been business people, the TEAM councillors were professionals. Ley (1980, 249) notes that on the 1972 Vancouver council, where T E AM held sway, half of the councillors were university professors. Part of the narrative explaining Vancouver’s rejection of an innercity expressway draws upon what is now a civic legend about the everyday people who saved the city from itself. Not surprisingly, virtually every politician or civic actor from that period who is alive today takes credit for some role in the drama. It is impossible now to find anyone in Vancouver who will admit to having ever favoured expressway construction or modernist urban renewal. Nor will any Vancouver citizen of a certain age confess to not having been “at the barricades” of the anti-expressway protests. That story has been so widely appropriated that it rings true as a foundational Vancouver narrative. Rightfully so: the courage, creativity, and success of the local resistance should be celebrated. The lack of an expressway bisecting the city core is central to Vancouver’s particular blend of deep unaffordability and neighbourhood character, and that flexibility is the envy of many urbanists and most real estate speculators far and wide. But, while citizen opposition in Strathcona and Chinatown was unequivocally well organized and effective (Lee 2007), we suggest here that an additional necessary condition for Vancouver’s particular outcome was the retardation of its integration with global financial networks and the level of global-city formation at the time of the expressway conflict. In Vancouver the local networks of social protest and activism were more developed than the global networks of financial investment and corporate leadership when expressway infrastructure was on the urban development menu. Vancouver’s anti-expressway and anti-blight-removal activists were as creative and persistent as the city’s administration was conventional and conservative during the 1960s. Importantly, however, even in the 1970s Vancouver was not integrated into the global circuits of capital that could muster the requisite levels of infrastructure funding and political support. This absence of influence by global capital is a key factor in understanding why Vancouver’s proposed expressway was never built while Montreal’s was essentially fully realized and Toronto’s network was halfway completed. As Christopher Leo (1977, 43) concluded, “from the viewpoint of Vancouver’s expressway

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backers, anti-expressway groups were, if anything, a somewhat less galling obstacle than was the pinch of finance.” Ever since Harland Bartholomew was hired by the Vancouver Town Planning Commission to write the city’s first official plan in 1926, elites had dreamed of remaking their city and advancing under a more rational, master-planned, and capital-friendly regime. Bartholomew’s firm issued a plan in 1928, revised it in 1929, and then wrote several follow-up reports between 1944 and 1948 (E. McDonald 2008; Berelowitz 2005). However, during these decades Vancouver showed little sign of being transformed from a peripheral port city with little international significance and modest global linkages. Although the Bartholomew planning recommendations certainly influenced the design and development of the city, there was never sufficient capital to advance substantially its proposed major reconstructions. Just as with the Lions Gate Bridge, which was constructed with Guinness money, the new city hall, when it was erected in 1936, had to be entirely financed with civic debt, most of it held by private corporations (Harcourt and Cameron 2007). As the 1950s drew to a close, both the momentum of America’s interstate-highway-building program and a natural resource boom emboldened aspirations for intensifying Vancouver’s mobility infrastructure. New attempts were initiated to redevelop the urban core and connect it with growing suburbs from West Vancouver to Surrey by means of an inner-city expressway network. In consultation with federal and provincial transportation departments and with considerable engagement by business leaders and developers, the City commissioned studies to lay the groundwork for investment in major mobility infrastructure. Starting with the 1959 Study on Highway Planning, continuing with 1962 and 1964 reports on expressway options, and culminating in a series of 1967 highway plans, a whole range of infrastructure possibilities was analyzed. By the end of this exercise, planners had designed a modified hub-and-spoke network that would bring both north–south and east–west expressways together in the city core; they would then run along the city waterfront and span Burrard Inlet via a third crossing (in addition to the already existing Ironworkers Memorial and Lions Gate Bridges) (Berelowitz 2005; Leo 1977). As the studies accumulated and public debate over their recommendations intensified, the Vancouver Sun lamented that by 1967 all the studies had “cost more than $1 million without a single

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mile of recommended roadways and bridges being built” (Leo 1977, 43). But this complaint was not entirely justified. The city did undertake substantial preparatory efforts to realize expressway construction and in 1958 froze property assessments and banned home improvements in the Strathcona neighbourhood (Harcourt and Cameron 2007). The southern flank of Strathcona was targeted for renewal and for the expressway’s route that would displace many residents. In 1959 the first ten acres of housing was razed. Then, between 1961 and 1967, in the first two official phases of the expressway project, 3,300 people were relocated and fifty-seven acres of land were cleared. In 1970 the historically Black community of Hogan’s Alley was destroyed to make room for expressway on-ramps, and in 1972 the Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts were completed as the first components of expressway infrastructure to reach the downtown peninsula (Harcourt and Cameron 2007; Lee 2007; Berelowitz 2005; Leo 1977; Vancouver Urban Research Group 1972). This considerable effort to restructure Strathcona was driven by a vision of urban automobility drawn from the paradigm unfolding across North America. Those aspirations articulated modernist ideals and their prescription for generating wealth by redeveloping mixeduse urban lands into a metropolitan centre of commerce, finance, and management. Attempts to prepare for this future were “responding to the growth of white-collar jobs and driven by the closely interlocking relationship between the business elite, the banks, the development industry, aldermen, and bureaucrats … The development industry, downtown business interests, growth-oriented civic officials and aldermen, and Commissioner Sutton Brown all agreed that further development of downtown depended on new freeway access” (Punter 2003, 21). Strathcona stood in the way of this future, both physically (blocking access to the downtown peninsula) and socially (as a space of alternative urban values resisting dominant, white, and modernist visions of the city). Jo-Anne Lee (2007) wrote: Strathcona was an affront to notions of rational order and its destruction could be justified in the name of efficient transportation systems and regulated development. It represented the­ absolute antithesis of rational planning, efficient land use, and middle-class respectability. With its mixed commercial, industrial

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and residential land use, the neighbourhood was perceived as chaotic, crowded and dilapidated. Its ethnically diverse, ­heterogeneous population of families, elderly single men living communally, and single, transient, working-class males, was a blot on the high-minded designs of planners in their quest to build a family residential community and institute rational ­planning technologies. Armed dually with a mandate to improve the physical condition of the neighbourhood and simultaneously uplift the social condition of its residents, planners and policy makers saw urban renewal very much as an exercise in urban sanitation, rescue and redistribution; an exercise that assumed the universal desirability of a prescribed middle-class standard of living. (Lee 2007, 392–3) In 1962 Mayor Bill Rathie’s election slogan was “Let’s get Vancouver moving again!” (Harcourt and Cameron 2007), and by the mid1960s there was significant new office-tower construction in the downtown peninsula, and there was clearly room for much more. The proposed expressway was to run through Strathcona, down Carrall Street, and then along the waterfront at least to the foot of Granville Street where the ominously titled Project 200 skyscraper office block was located. Project 200 was an audacious redevelopment proposal led by Marathon Realty, the real estate subsidiary of Canadian Pacific Railway, in partnership with Third Properties Ltd., a subsidiary of Grosvenor-Laing Development, an “international real estate and development giant based in England” (Vancouver Urban Research Group 1972). A bevy of other major interests, both local and international, were implicated in the development, including the nearby Woodward’s and Simpson-Sears department stores. Project 200 would have been the largest commercial development in Canada at that time, comprising twenty buildings ranging from twenty to sixty storeys in height that were spread over eight blocks of prime waterfront land. Hotels, department stores, offices, and apartments were envisioned to occupy the air rights rising above the waterfront expressway (Punter 2003; Pendakur 1972; Vancouver Urban Research Group 1972). The biggest constraint on this ambitious scheme was the capital required to finance expressway building. It has been claimed that Vancouver’s expressway planning was influenced more by tactical manoeuvring to secure financial sponsorship than by strategic thinking

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about desirable new development patterns (Punter 2003, 24). The City lacked the capacity to fund a waterfront expressway on its own and thus throughout the 1960s engaged in long-running, inconclusive, and contentious negotiations with various federal and provincial departments, while also trying to leverage funds from private developers, primarily the Project 200 group. At one point in 1969 the City issued a temporary approval for the expressway on the basis of the City paying 54% of the infrastructure costs, the federal government (highly aspirationally) contributing 18%, and Project 200 partners covering the balance (Vancouver Urban Research Group 1972). Vancouver’s expressway-financing approach was unorthodox. Private developers had rarely paid for expressway infrastructure elsewhere in North America. With the generous federal government’s highway funding in the United States they did not have to, but private infrastructure investment was not new to Vancouver. The Lions Gate Bridge crossing of Burrard Inlet had been funded entirely by the Guinness family, who had been persuaded by local entrepreneur Alfred Taylor to purchase huge tracts of land in West Vancouver. As noted earlier, that bridge opened up access to what became known as the British Properties, and the required city-wide plebiscite that approved the construction was paid for by Taylor himself (Woods 2012). The federal government was open to the idea of funding a third Burrard Inlet crossing to link to the federally funded Trans-Canada Highway running along the North Shore, but Ottawa balked at the prospect of contributing to any expressway construction within Vancouver city limits. Their reluctance was in part because private developers were seen as well positioned to pay for the infrastructure that would benefit them immensely (Leo 1977). Vancouver’s elites scrambled through the 1960s, articulating one haphazard infrastructure planning effort after another. Various expressway configurations were put forth, but each initiative was stymied by insufficient financing. Downtown mega-developments like Project 200 depended on the expressway’s being built, but the capital that could have been mobilized in anticipation of such profits remained aloof. The resources needed to secure approvals for infrastructure construction thus remained elusive. The City’s planning department was poorly organized and hampered by colonial mindsets and methods (Harcourt and Cameron 2007). The revanchist planning regime, combined with fragmented decision making, multiple competing agendas, and a lack of viable financing opportunities, contributed to

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the highway proposals’ being “very vulnerable to the political attack which was launched by irate citizen’s groups” (Leo 1977, 45). As soon as demolitions in Strathcona began in the late 1950s, a sustained and fluid coalition of actors including Chinatown business people, Strathcona residents, neighbourhood groups, civic activists, community political leaders, and a few progressive planners organized against the displacement, renewal, and “slum-clearance” plans. As Jo-Anne Lee (2007) has examined in detail, the coalitions, strategies, and tactics that resisted the urban renewal schemes, expressway construction, and displacement took on uniquely creative contours. Strathcona is often represented as the residential annex of Chinatown, but as Lee (2007) demonstrates, the neighbourhood was far more complex and nuanced. The embrace by municipal officials of the urban renewal and slum-clearance schemes for Strathcona was justified by racialized, modernist, and master-planning ideals that devalued the organic, diverse, and asystematically developed neighbourhood that was full of people who failed to measure up to middleclass norms. Lee (2007) claims that narratives of Vancouver’s resistance to expressway and slum-clearance schemes overlook the integration of gendered resistance, immigrant community organization, and mainstream political activism that was forged by the Strathcona Property Owners and Tenants Association (SP O T A). SPOTA’s unique blend of ethnic cultural forms and mainstream institutional practice and discourse not only became key strategies in organizing this multi-ethnic, multi-lingual neighbourhood, but it was crucial for the leveraging [of] their own forms of relational power to influence political actors outside the community. This clever deployment of everyday social practices, hospitality and food traditions that Canadians of mainly Chinese and Italian backgrounds traditionally used for cultivating kinship relations and forging social ties, melded with traditional political lobbying practices and transformed a heretofore relatively powerless ­community group into one that was hugely influential. (Lee 2007, 364–5) Many researchers and commentators have subsequently noted the culturally and organizationally hybridized character of grassroots Vancouver resistance to urban renewal initiatives and linked its effectiveness to the specific kinds of oppositional tactics deployed (Wai

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2016; Fong 2016). The expressway resistance in Vancouver was fiercely creative, nuanced, and resilient. It was also sufficiently effective to drive the mayor, Tom Campbell, to famously exclaim in frustration that the expressway project was being sabotaged by “Maoists, Communists, pinkies, left wingers, and hamburgers [his term for people without a university degree]” (Gutstein 1975, 165). Vancouver’s local community forged a synthesis of local knowledge and global awareness that yielded a powerful alternative to the vision of modernist growth-machine thinking that had sought to rationalize and aggrandize urban space and function. By 1972 the waterfront expressway was effectively dead, and in subsequent years the city’s rapid development of a very different model of mixed use in the downtown core closed that door permanently, pushing further aggressive highway construction to the margins of Vancouver’s urbanized area. Like in Montreal and Toronto, local resistance was innovative, determined, and powerful, but the failure of local Vancouver growth-machine advocates to sufficiently leverage globalized linkages or to enlist higher levels of government in financing gave the local resistance the room it needed to successfully thwart expressway construction. o u t c o m e s o f i n n e r - c i t y r e s i s ta n c e to global-city mobility designs

The local outcries and uprisings against the global mobility agenda for reshaping urban cores in Canada’s three largest cities yielded both intended and unintended consequences that influence life both in and around Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver to this day and will continue to do so well into the future. In different ways and with distinct results, the mix of mobility within each urban core was either dialled down or distributed differently than the plans and proposals for globally aligned mega-projects in major mobility had expected. Flows of motor vehicles through the city centre were constrained, either by a slowing down of the speed of traffic or by a shift of a portion of that traffic from roads to rapid transit. This rebalancing of passage had a direct impact on the kinds of places that large Canadian city centres could and did become. For already established city dwellers, including many of the activists who had stood up against urban expressway development in the 1970s, the results enabled a golden age of better place making.

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Inner-city neighbourhoods that would have been burdened with noise, pollution, safety risks, and other negative impacts of the increasing automotive traffic channelled into them by expressways were given a new lease on life. Urban community development thus took a different turn, away from the modernist specialization in commercial and corporate functions that were linked to residential peripheries (often located well beyond urban boundaries) by high-speed expressways, which was seen across most US metropolitan areas that had been fully penetrated by interstate highways. The effects of urban core redevelopment into dense, mixed-use districts that would become known as “complete communities” have been far from an unmitigated blessing, though. Gentrification and displacement have consumed those neighbourhoods not blighted by excessive traffic burdens. The new urbanist development that was enabled around rapid-transit stations added to opportunities for living well in the inner city, primarily for those who could afford it. At the same time as the Canadian inner city was being recast as a valued and valuable commodity, another trajectory of mobility and development was unfolding in the farmland and the green fields adjacent to the urban cores. The pressure to build new places – from residential subdivisions to strip malls and shopping plazas at lower costs, and with higher profits – did not stop when expressways were cancelled or truncated. Nor did all the urban development capital flock to projects that were adjacent to rapid-transit stations. While the inner city did see a different development trajectory once the mix of expressways and rapid transit had been pointed away from automobile domination, some global capital also moved beyond the gentrifying and upscaling inner-city communities and sought different options and opportunities along the periphery of Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. As will be explored in our concluding chapter, major Canadian suburbs – or Canaburbs, as we have labelled them – have unveiled their own mix of mobility and development in relation to and in reaction to what transpired in the urban core. We are certain that community activists in these three cities did not intend that their expressway opposition and protest would contribute to the reshaping of distant green fields and farmlands in places like Laval, Mississauga, and Surrey. But, as will become apparent when we look beyond the inner city, the unintended consequences of equivocating on major mobility infrastructure in the inner city have had profound effects on the shape and substance of life in the Canaburbs,

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areas in which far greater numbers of Canadians can now be found than in the inner city. The story of building Canada’s cities was thus transformed by equivocation over urban expressways and rapid transit, not just in the inner city but also in the peripheral regions that are now home to millions of Canadians. The reverberations of these mobility and spatial dynamics will shape the future of Canadian urbanism just as surely as the decisions about starting and stopping expressways and rapid transit shaped Canada’s urban cores in the late twentieth century. It is to this temporal frontier of spatial possibilities that we turn in our concluding chapter.

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6 Canaburbs and the Future of Urban Equivocation

Canadians are often caricatured, from near and far, for their cultural predilection toward equivocation, overt displays of conciliatory sociability, and inordinate efforts to avoid conflict. Sometimes the characterization of Canadians as inveterate and inoffensive compromisers obscures more than it highlights, especially when considering its colonialist and racist treatment of Indigenous peoples, but such attitudes are institutionally evident in inevitable conflicts over the space for, and the place of, major mobility infrastructure in any major city. As documented in our findings, Canada’s three largest urban regions have each exhibited notable evidence of equivocation when planning and paying for their major mobility infrastructure. The cities we have examined in preceding chapters reveal a shared attribute of accommodating contradictory visions of urban mobility by adopting disparate policies in an attempt to satisfy clashing constituencies, but as a result the policies cumulatively embed disjointed logics of mobility and land use into Canada’s urban fabric. As we have traced the histories, contours, and implications of expressway and rapid-transit development in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, policy equivocation and its irregular spatial legacy have emerged as the most commonly shared characteristic of building major mobility infrastructure in the heart of Canada’s largest cities. The logic of policy equivocation has become a defining characteristic, perhaps the sole characteristic that is commonly shared, in the consistent and extended display of ambivalence by these three Canadian cities toward urban mobility goals. Once a major

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infrastructure project has been launched, public officials typically change course and initiate alternative actions that can satisfy some who are opposed to the impacts of new infrastructure. This strategy is reflected in the major-mobility-infrastructure outcomes and their influence on development in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver throughout the twentieth century. After examining the evidence presented in the preceding chapters, we have concluded that to fully appreciate the particular outcomes in Canada’s three largest cities, one has to understand how their pursuit of global capital at particular historical moments affected the equivocating goals and priorities for developing their major mobility infrastructure. We have shown how both the timing and the scope of development in each city was influenced by the ability (or the inability) to leverage globalized circuits of capital at critical junctures; success in this regard led to the creation of major mobility infrastructure with historically embedded attributes. As the planning decisions for major mobility infrastructure accumulated over time in each city, notable countermeasures to adjust the relationship between automobiles and transit and to ameliorate heavy burdens on core communities yielded distinctive transportation and urban outcomes. The resulting mix of expressways and rapid transit present a tangible legacy of the community resistance to major mobility infrastructure, as expressed through government initiatives to either defer to or placate citizens’ mobilization against megaprojects. It is thus tempting to conclude that Vancouver’s, Toronto’s, and Montreal’s development can be understood as an outcome of a tendency toward equivocation that has accreted into an ambivalence about how to shape urban mobility. We are highly suspicious of relying too heavily on a cultural narrative that presumes that endogenous values drive policy-making. Instead we propose that the kinds of equivocation that have characterized Canada’s development in its three largest cities is due to both policy openness to accommodation and the collisions between global agendas and local beliefs, community values, and civic identities. Viewed through these lenses, it may well be that each city has attained its recognized urban achievements and ongoing failures ­specifically because of the ability to accommodate and thus navigate the contestation of interests in and beliefs about mobility. This

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underappreciated dimension of Canadian policy capacity was first recognized by Carolyn Tuohy, who suggested: What appears distinctive about Canadian institutions is their extraordinary capacity to embody conflicting principles within structures ambiguous enough to allow for ad hoc accommodations over time – what I have called Canada’s “institutional ambivalence.” It is this capacity that has generated the moderation and compromise that have become virtually a Canadian ­stereotype, and that have also made it possible for the Canadian system to tolerate profound underlying tensions … What distinguishes the Canadian policy process … is its ­quintessential ambivalence, ambivalence about the appropriate roles of the state and the market, about national and regional conceptions of political community, and about individualist and collectivist conceptions of rights and responsibilities. (Tuohy 1992, xvii, 4) Tuohy interpreted Canadian policy-making as having the capacity to legitimize competing principles by placing a high value on accommodation and creating the space for disparate beliefs to simultaneously inform policy. With the evidence now laid out of what funds were allocated, when they were pledged, and how they were spent, it becomes apparent that Canada’s three largest cities have relied upon this pragmatic approach to attain their current heterogeneity in major mobility infrastructure and its consequent land-use influences and impacts. The influence of such equivocation in the urban core has hardly been confined within municipal boundaries, however. Urban growth dynamics, including major-mobility-infrastructure development, in Canada’s three largest cities has also had very important suburban and regional implications and repercussions (Keil 2013; Urbaniuk 2013; Harris 1998; Charbonneau et al. 1994). The major mobility infrastructure within an urban core is intimately enmeshed with transportation throughout the surrounding urban region, and infrastructure decisions within a city have a material impact on the surrounding municipalities long into the future. The equivocation within the three large cities that we have uncovered has also affected their peripheries. Montreal’s enthusiastic embrace of urban expressways connecting to routes that serve the

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Island of Montreal and beyond was offset by a full build-out of its Metro network and the preservation of many walkable inner-city neighbourhoods that paralleled the creation of an automobile-­ dependent suburbia. Toronto’s stutteringly cautious expressway building was mirrored by an intermittent expansion of rapid-transit infrastructure, and then echoed and amplified by a more ambitious expressway-construction program beyond the city’s expanding edge. Vancouver’s rejection of all but the most vestigial inner-city expressway building and the city’s embrace of rapid transit were followed by enthusiastic expressway construction throughout its suburbs. We suggest that a variant of the equivocation that was instigated by expressway and rapid-transit planning in the urban core can be found at the regional scale in the countervailing reactions to mobility and land-use choices that were made in adjacent suburbia. In other words, Canadian equivocation about major mobility development has worked across municipal boundaries as much as within them. After the accommodation between expressways and rapid transit had been reached within the city centre, the same dynamics came into play by enabling the peripheral communities within urban regions to serve at different times as dumping grounds, safety valves, and/or alternative sites for land-use and transportation policies that had been rejected or curtailed in the inner city. In this way, each urban region has been able to pursue simultaneous – and theoretically contradictory – development strategies and to advance urban paradigms that embrace divergent goals and values with commensurate vigour. An alternative analytical approach worth considering begins from the premise that urban and suburban development dynamics are inherently at odds and that while Canadian metropolitan regions appear to be successfully mediating between these competing development paradigms, it is almost certain to be a temporary equilibrium. Like in other spaces, Canadian urban and suburban relations will eventually devolve from symbiotic collaboration into antagonistic rivalry. It is thus possible that opposing urban paradigms may continue to unfold in parallel for some time, but in due course a combination of economic, social, and environmental pressures will compel the eventual eclipse of one paradigm by another. The equivocating approach to urban development can be viably maintained during times of economic plenty, but any number of factors are able to disrupt the equilibrium and demand policy choices that rupture the apparent symbiosis between dispersed mobility and compact and complete communities.

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Since the mid-twentieth century Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal have been able to negotiate these conflicts between urban and suburban development trajectories due to a combination of rapid urbanization and population growth; large influxes of immigrant populations; continued annexation and occupation of Indigenous territories; the absence of sustained senior government interventions through federal or provincial programming; and strong macroeconomic performance combined with growing infusions of national and international capital. Together these exogenous conditions have nurtured a unique policy framework in which there have been few constraints on development, and municipal officials have been able to simultaneously pursue an urban growth model and a suburban growth model with neither fundamentally undermining the other. After examining how the contested understanding of suburban and urban spaces in Canada affects even the fundamental definition of where one form of community begins and another ends, we will return to the question of whether such inherent tensions are likely to eventually disrupt the pattern of policy equivocation that we have chronicled in the development of the urban core’s major mobility infrastructure during the twentieth century. We also recognize that several other interpretive approaches could add further understanding to the developmental trajectory of Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal over the past six decades, but, as we have been suggesting throughout this book, the particular influences of global-city aspirations and access to globalized capital would play a significant role in all of them. We thus submit that each city’s historically situated relationships with global capital are a necessary explanatory component for understanding the realities of Canadian urban and suburban development. We conclude that, while there have been observable tendencies toward equivocation and accommodation in these relationships, neither are the results of such efforts neutral, nor do they create an enduring equilibrium. Instead Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver each have experienced a centrifugal force in their development whereby mobility and growth strategies (especially those for expressways that accommodate automobile dependence) that had been rejected, blocked, and/or made implausible within the city’s core were resuscitated and often expanded upon in their suburban peripheries. Just as unaffordable housing in urban cores has driven many lowincome residents to relocate to suburban and exurban environs, investment capital has also flowed to the periphery in search of returns on the conventional forms of development offered to house those priced

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out of the urban core. As Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal have successfully courted global capital for their new urbanist densification in the core, many development initiatives that had been constrained or faced reduced profitability within the city’s core have found a home in suburbia where regulatory environments are often open to them. The approaches that each city took to balancing automobility and public-transportation infrastructure continue to have ripple effects across and throughout their surrounding suburbs. We close our book by looking out in this direction, with an eye toward setting the stage for future research that could help to explain what Canada’s urban equivocation has come to mean beyond the city centre. u r b a n o r s u b u r b a n n at i o n ?

It is often said that Canada is a predominantly urban country in its settlement patterns: “Like many other industrialized countries, Canada is a very highly urbanized nation. In 2006, just over 80% of the population was living in urban areas, and roughly two thirds of Canadians were living in a census metropolitan area” (Turcotte 2014). This orthodoxy has been challenged in recent years, however, with some arguing precisely the opposite. In a 2014 study David Gordon and Isaac Shirokoff came to different conclusions: Canada is a suburban nation. Two-thirds of our country’s population lives in the suburbs … Our research for the 1996–2006 period estimated that 66% of all Canadians lived in some form of suburb. In 2006, we found that within our metropolitan areas, 87% of the population lived in Transit Suburbs, Automobile Suburbs or Exurban areas, while only 12% lived in Active Core neighbourhoods … Within the Active Cores and Transit Suburbs, both classifications grew by 3%, which was below the national average population growth of 7%. The Automobile Suburbs and Exurban areas grew by 9%, exceeding the national average. The net effect of this trend is that 90% of the CM A population growth from 2006–2011 was in automobile suburbs and exurbs. Only 10% of the population growth was in more sustainable active cores and transit suburbs. (Gordon and Shirokoff 2014, 1) This significant (and proportionately dominant) growth of automobile-dependent suburban and exurban areas of Canadian cities noted

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in the 2011 census is not a new phenomenon and was previously highlighted in the 2006 census, which found that “the shift out of urban cores to suburban populations identified in 2001 continued. The population of peripheral municipalities in the CM A grew more than 11 per cent, often along transportation routes” (Smith 2007, A5). That this comment is derived from the same 2006 census data that declared Canada a “highly urbanized nation” with “80% of its population living in urban areas” reveals further evidence of equivocation, which reduces clarity about what Canadians mean by terms like city, urban, and suburban. There are many incompatible and inconsistent definitions being deployed by researchers and agencies for various purposes, leaving a bewildering landscape of possibilities regarding the scale and scope of urban Canada. Offering yet another example of Canadian urban equivocation, Statistics Canada researcher Martin Turcotte remains essentially unsettled on the question of what constitutes a Canadian city, suggesting: It is probably clear in the minds of most people who live in one of Canada’s urban areas whether they live “in the city” or “in the suburbs.” Yet the concepts of suburb and city are seldom understood in the same way by everyone and are sometimes used very loosely … We will try to impose some order on these ideas by presenting four ways of categorizing them, based on four criteria for delineation: (1) administrative or political boundaries; (2) the boundaries of the city’s central core, not to be confused with the urban core, which is defined in “Statistics Canada’s standard geographic definitions”; (3) distance from the city centre; and (4) neighbourhood density. (Turcotte 2014) This official methodology proposed by Statistics Canada relies on a combination of the last two criteria for their designation of urban areas across the country. Their researcher (rather awkwardly) chooses the location of each community’s city hall as a proxy for city centre and categorizes distance from that point in concentric rings to distinguish peripheral areas from central areas. Then, to account for the fact that some peripheral neighbourhoods have areas with many “urban” characteristics and that some core neighbourhoods have more “suburban” features, housing density is also used as a proxy for population density, measuring the number of low-density dwellings like

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detached houses and mobile homes versus high-density residential forms like apartment buildings. Using these numbers (figure 6.1), Statistics Canada reports that in 2001, 23% of Toronto’s residents lived in high-density neighbourhoods, 47% lived in low-density areas, and the rest resided in medium-density neighbourhoods. In Montreal the proportions were 47% in high-density, 19% in medium-density, and 34% in low-density areas, while in Vancouver the percentages were 25% in high-density, 38% in medium-density, 37% in lowdensity areas (Turcotte 2014). Gordon and Shirokoff (2014), however, employ a different set of criteria to paint a very different picture. They note the tremendous variation in the attempts to classify suburbs and the notable lack of agreement or confluence in how to even define what constitutes a suburb, despite the copious research output cataloguing supposed suburban ills. This is particularly insightful, in our estimation, because it highlights the politicized nature of such definitional choices. Gordon and Shirokoff write that after examining dozens of definitions offered in the literature, and with an eye to consistency for comparative study, they settled on residential density and transportation behaviour: “Our classification methods were examined by an expert panel of leading geographers and urban planners as well as anonymous peer reviewers for a refereed journal. Density classifications proved most useful for classifying exurban and rural areas. The most reliable definitions of inner-city and suburban development emerged from journey-to-work transportation data” (Gordon and Shirokoff 2014, 9). Using these criteria, they came up with a very different portrait of Canada’s three largest cities. As illustrated in figure 6.2, the endemically equivocating approach to mobility in Canadian cities has fostered a Canadian suburban formation that can be differentiated from US tendencies but also distinguishes urban regions across Canada from non-urban areas. John Miron used an innovative methodological approach to measuring density in both American and Canadian urban regions in order to analyze sprawl, and he found that, overall, Canadian regions and Canadian suburban sprawl were significantly denser than their American counterparts. In 2003 he concluded: “First, not surprisingly, large urban regions have higher local densities than do smaller urban regions; local density is also more variable across the urban region as city size increases. Second, in general, Canadian urban regions have higher local densities than American urban regions. Third, variability

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50% 45% 40% 35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0% Vancouver

High Density

Toronto

Medium Density

Montreal

Low Density

Figure 6.1  High, medium, and low densities in major Canadian cities, 2001

in local density within individual urban regions is still substantial. Fourth, while there is some evidence that local density is rising over time, there are also numerous urban regions where local density has declined” (Miron 2003, 14). Miron (2003, 13) also noted that among the ten largest Canadian and American urban regions, Toronto and Montreal stood second and third in density respectively and that “Vancouver has only one-third of the population of San Francisco, and yet has a comparable local density.” While it is clear that there is not much consistency or consensus in defining urban or suburban communities in Canada, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the effects of urban equivocation around mobility have yielded important regional reverberations. canaburbs: testing the endurance of canada’s a m b i va l e n t u r b a n i s m

As we conclude our investigation, it strikes us that Canada’s suburban landscape holds the key to answering the question of whether the seeds of urban equivocation that have been planted in the development of major mobility infrastructure within Canada’s three largest cities will

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80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Active Core

Transit Suburb

Vancouver

Auto Suburb

Toronto

Exurb

Montreal

Figure 6.2  Density portraits of major Canadian cities Source: Gordon and Shirokoff (2014).

blossom into an enduring form of ambivalent urbanism. If they do, then Canada might exhibit a distinctive model of accommodating alternative spatial and mobility realities between the inner city and the suburban region. We hope that this book can encourage the next steps along the path toward discovery, by revealing how the formative decisions about major mobility infrastructure in Canada’s inner cities have always been entangled with and influenced by the pursuit of the global capital flowing into these cities. We have learned enough about the way in which equivocation has shaped the inner city to feel confident in predicting that a similar dynamic will echo and reverberate in spatial and mobility reactions that unfold in the surrounding suburbs. But explaining how these future attempts to accommodate community and mobility will play out on a metropolitan scale will require another iteration of conceptualization and data gathering. As Canada’s suburban mobility has been less contested and controversial, on the whole, compared to the conflicts that have boiled over in urban settings, there is less research to leverage when one sets out to explore

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mobility in Canaburbs, compared to the prior findings upon which our work could draw and build. While we have benefited considerably in anchoring our analysis in a critical mass of research into urban Canada, there is far less scholarly examination of Canadian suburbs and very few attempts to explain how historically situated circuits of capital have influenced mobility and land use in Canada’s suburban spaces. Like Canadian cities, however, the surrounding suburbs are themselves evincing global-city aspirations, often responding to the development choices being made in the adjacent urban cores. Suburban municipalities are attempting to formulate viable development strategies, positioning themselves to tap into global flows of capital in ways that take advantage of their locations and particular attributes. Sometimes this means working in collaboration with urban plans and policies, and at other times it involves presenting competing options for development and enterprise that have been stymied within the city. Suburbs have often been able to offer global capital a safety valve from the pressures of urban regulatory strictures, by offering possibilities to seek the high or higher returns on investment that might otherwise be thwarted by limits on mobility in the urban core. If the equivocation we have documented surrounding major mobility infrastructure in urban cores extends to support an enduring dynamic of Canadian urbanism, then exposure of the global forces that are at work in influencing transportation and land use in the Canaburbs, especially around the allocation of space and of funds for major mobility infrastructure, will be needed to advance our understanding of Canada’s urban development on a metropolitan scale. We propose extending the analytical approach that was applied to Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver not just temporally into the twentyfirst century but also spatially to assess the development dynamics of Canaburbs. It is beyond the scope of our work here to undertake such an investigation, but in order to bolster our proposition that it could offer new insights and to tempt others to advance this line of inquiry, we now offer a provisional and partial consideration of three Canaburbs adjacent to Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. The initial evidence we have found strongly suggests that these suburban spaces flex their development strategies in equivocal ways that echo practices documented in the urban core. However, these strategies do not exactly reproduce the ambivalence regarding what should be done about major mobility infrastructure that was seen in the urban core. Rather,

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they adapt the ambivalent urbanism that was developed during Canada’s twentieth century to take account of, among other things, the metropolitan legacy of that core development. Based on these initial findings, we suggest that extending our interpretation of major mobility development in Canada’s largest cities to their suburban regions could provide a worthwhile point of departure for interpreting the suburban interactions that have subsequently unfolded. Those decisions were made along at least two levels that our analytical framework reveals. First, there is reaction to the mobility patterns and possibilities that were enabled by the global capital that had been attracted to and by the major mobility infrastructure in the urban core. Second, there is a new iteration of building infrastructure to attract and embed global capital in peri-urban development. We begin the examination of these relationships in Montreal’s, Toronto’s, and Vancouver’s largest suburban municipalities – Laval, Mississauga, and Surrey, respectively. Just as we encountered ambiguity and contingency in examining the three major cities that are the focus of this book, there is a parallel particularity awaiting those who seek to create a profile of Canaburbs. In every city region, the relationships between urban cores and suburban peripheries are both varied and dynamic, constantly under revision and contestation. It is worth keeping this diversity in mind during an initial look at each large city’s corresponding large suburban area and noting how these trajectories have influenced and been influenced by an interdependence that in turn has been shaped by ambivalence. Laval Laval is Montreal’s largest suburb and displays a mixture of stereotypical suburban characteristics and anomalous features. Laval is a significantly sized municipality, with a 2011 population of 401,553, making it the third-most-populous jurisdiction in the province and the thirteenth-largest in the country (Statistics Canada 2013a). It occupies a number of islands in the St Lawrence River, the large Île de Jésus and the much smaller Îles Laval grouping. It is wedged between the Island of Montreal and the Quebec mainland, and thus almost all the transport routes between the two cross through or under Laval. Laval was primarily Indigenous Mohawk territory until 1636 when French Jesuits arrived, occupied the territory, and were granted a seigneury over the whole Île Jésus; the Jesuits soon relinquished their

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land to crown agents, who passed the seigneury to Quebec’s first bishop, Francois de Montmorency-Laval, in 1675 (Ville de Laval 2006, 5). For the next two and a half centuries the island retained a predominantly rural character with several missions and essentially only one small-population centre. The island’s economy was overwhelmingly agricultural, and Laval was known as the Garden of Montreal, becoming a preferred location for rural visits by neighbouring urbanites. During the first half of the twentieth century numerous small villages grew up, prompted by the close proximity to the city of Montreal, which enabled a modest tourist economy to develop. In 1965 the Quebec government amalgamated fourteen established municipalities on Île Jésus into the City of Laval (2011). By the time Laval became a city, its population had reached 170,000, mostly clustered around the south and west shores of Île Jésus, driven by the growth of Montreal, which had triggered new waves of suburbanization. Despite the city’s considerable growth, emphasis is still placed on Laval’s continued rural and agricultural character: “Laval is not just another sprawling suburban city with a few industrial parks” (Canadian Encyclopedia 2015), and while this is true in some respects, the city also displays many classic sprawling suburban features, particularly when it comes to mobility. Laval’s transportation infrastructure is predominantly automobile oriented. Of the almost 190,000 residents of Laval who commute to work, slightly more than 80% use private automobiles, with 96% of those being drivers in single-occupant vehicles. The 16% who take public transit are not a negligible segment either, but the 2% who walk are (Statistics Canada 2013a). Laval has five major expressways (autoroutes) as well as four provincial routes lacing the island, making for a heavy automobile orientation in major mobility infrastructure. As the City itself notes, “at certain locations, the flow of traffic is truly impressive. And that’s the case of the interchange of Autoroutes 15 and 440, where the daily average flow of traffic is 300,000 vehicles or the same as at the Turcot interchange in Montréal” (City of Laval 2011). As was also the case in Mississauga, the construction of these major autoroutes closely tracks the great expressway build-out across North America and coincides with Montreal’s major push to become a global city. All five highways were built to support Montreal’s Expo and Olympic mega-events: A-15 in 1958, A-25 in 1967, A-19 in 1970, A-440 in 1974, and A-13 in 1975.

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Table 6.1 Population growth in Laval, 1941–71 Year

Total population

Growth

1941

 21,631

–

1951

 37,843

74.9%

1956

 69,410

83.4%

1961

124,741

79.7%

1966 1971

196,088 228,010

57.2% 16.3%

Source: Adapted from Institut de la Statistique Quebec, http://www.stat.gouv.qc.ca.

Unlike the expressway accumulation found in Mississauga and Surrey, however, Laval’s expressway length is actually below the total length of such infrastructure found within the city of Montreal. Although many routes from the rest of Quebec reach Montreal through Laval, Montreal is also a crossroads for expressways coming from other directions. So, while Mississauga, for example, has a far greater expressway length than the city of Toronto has, the reverse is true of Laval. There is a clear relationship, however, between the construction of expressways and Laval’s twentieth-century population growth. Both before and after the period highlighted in table 6.1, Laval’s population growth was less spectacular, typically in the single digits – for example, 8.9% between 2006 and 2011. As in other Canaburbs, the population explosion during the thirty-year period from 1941 to 1971 tracked the major burst of expressway construction. In Canada’s first urban region to pursue a global-city agenda, the scale of expressway-infrastructure development in both the urban core and the largest suburb reveal a particular balance in their relationship. Even though Montreal’s Metro did not reach Laval until 2007, planners and public officials did not build vastly more expressway infrastructure in Laval than was created within the urban core. Was this proportionality a result of effective suburban mobility to and from the city centre by expressway, thus reducing the demand and the development opportunities for replicating a full range of commercial and business-office land uses in the suburbs? This could be one facet of equivocation in the Canaburbs that would be worth exploring in future.

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Mississauga Mississauga is both a remarkable and an entirely recognizable Canadian suburb and in many ways represents the quintessential Canaburb. Located immediately west of the city of Toronto, Mississauga is the sixth-largest municipality in Canada, with significantly more inhabitants than the city of Vancouver, for example. The 2011 population of Mississauga was 713,443 (Statistics Canada 2011). Mississauga is often claimed to have the biggest population of any single Anglo-American suburb (Statistics Canada 2006a). It is home to Canada’s busiest airport, Toronto Pearson International, which handles more international passengers than all but one other North American airport, John F. Kennedy International in New York City (Airports Council International 2016). For a presumptively peripheral jurisdiction within the Greater Toronto Area, Mississauga has an impressive accumulation of corporate headquarters, claiming to be “home to more than 60 Fortune 500 Canadian Head Offices” (City of Mississauga, n.d.a, 1). The municipality is also relatively dense with just under 2,500 people per square kilometre, and, like in Laval, 16% of its residents use public transit to get to work, higher than the average for both Canada and Ontario (City of Mississauga 2011). Although this profile might suggest an anomalous suburban municipality, Mississauga also has numerous features that are typical of suburban communities. Like many contemporary Canaburbs, it is significantly multicultural, with more than 52% of its population speaking a language other than English at home, and 53.7% identifying as visible minorities, compared to just under 20% in Canada and 26% in Ontario as a whole (City of Mississauga 2011). Mississauga is also home to “the greatest concentration of major highways in the country” (Canadian Encyclopedia 2015) and is the “only city [sic] in the G TA [Greater Toronto Area] serviced by seven major highways” (City of Mississauga, n.d.b, 2). Several of the widest and most heavily driven stretches of Highway 401 – which is the busiest expressway in North America (U.S. Department of Transportation 2014) – are located in Mississauga. This territory, like all parts of Canada, was densely occupied precontact by Indigenous peoples. There was an arrangement of many nations who used and occupied the Credit River Valley area, primarily – but hardly exclusively – Iroquois- and Algonquin-speaking people, among them Mississaugas who had migrated south from Georgian

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Bay to the area where the river met Lake Ontario (Spencer 2014). The name Mississauga is derived from the Anishnaabe word Misizaagiig, which means “River of the north of many mouths” (Heritage Mississauga 2014). Toronto Township, which comprised most of present-day Mississauga, was founded in 1805 when a municipal official purchased the land from its Indigenous inhabitants. In 2010 the Mississaugas of New Credit approved a $145 million settlement with the federal government to resolve two outstanding land claims for this territory (Edwards 2010). A series of small communities and villages were steadily developed throughout the area and then amalgamated, in large part drawn to railways and related industry. The population growth was consistent enough that Mississauga saw early development of most types of major mobility infrastructure. In 1937 the Malton (later Pearson) Airport was established, and in 1935 the Queen Elizabeth Way (Q E W ) – one of the world’s first controlled-access expressways – was opened, spurring large-scale suburban land development. The Town of Mississauga was created in 1968, and the City of Mississauga was incorporated in 1974 (Heritage Mississauga 2014). If the growth in Mississauga can be attributed in part to its majormobility-infrastructure development, then it is worth noting the role and timing of expressway construction and its relationship to such efforts in the city of Toronto. Mississauga has an incredibly dense confluence of expressways, and while Ontario’s premier Bill Davis was giving his famous speech rejecting the Spadina expressway in 1971, Mississauga was building equivalent infrastructure just as fast as it could. Aside from the existing Q E W , Highway 403 was opened in 1963; the 401 in 1968; the 427 in 1971; and the 410 and the 409 in 1978 (Sewell 2009). As in Laval, the population growth in Mississauga closely tracks this expressway (and airport) infrastructure construction, with the population essentially doubling every decade between 1941 and 1981 and continuing to add significant numbers thereafter (table 6.2). The relationship between the city of Toronto and its largest suburb of Mississauga appears to reflect a different intra-municipal dynamic than the one that exists between Montreal and Laval. Mississauga kept increasing its expressway infrastructure long after such efforts had been halted in the urban core. This dichotomy of mobilities between the city and the suburb made it possible to accommodate both automobile- and

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Table 6.2 Population growth in Mississauga, 1931–2001 Year

Total population

Growth

1931

 12,231

–

1941

 15,350

 25.5%

1951

 33,310

117.0%

1961

 74,875

124.8%

1971

172,352

130.2%

1981

315,055

 82.8%

1991 2001

463,388 612,925

 47.1%  32.3%

Source: Adapted from City of Mississauga (2004)

human-centred development within a single metropolitan region, but they came to be focused in different locations. Taken as a whole, the Toronto metropolitan region’s development appeared to offer something for everyone, whether they sought the capacity to access most places by automobile in Mississauga and its suburban environs or they preferred to live in the transit- and pedestrian-friendly precincts of the city of Toronto. Future research could explore whether this mode of equivocation has generated more mobility, and perhaps more sprawl, in total by pursuing automobile- and transit-oriented development activities in tandem. The result might have made the Canaburb of Mississauga a complete community with fully elaborated corporate, commercial, and residential land uses, but it came at the cost of spreading development widely across the landscape to make room for the automobiles and their infrastructure that were essential for accessing places and activities in Canada’s most extensive suburb. Surrey Much like Laval and Mississauga, Surrey has grown up in a complex relationship with its adjacent urban core of Vancouver. Like other Canaburbs, Surrey has had rapid growth and emergence as an alternative locus of development, in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, which can be better understood through the intersection, in Canadian urban areas, of global-city aspirations, access to capital, and equivocation over major mobility infrastructure. Its timeline of rapid growth over the past twenty-five years places Surrey several decades behind

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both the Toronto and the Montreal urban regions in terms of its emergence as a globally interconnected node. Surrey covers a vast geographical area – 316 square kilometres – far larger than Vancouver or any other of the municipalities in this metropolitan region. The area was home to Halkomelem-speaking Indigenous inhabitants for millennia, including Stolo, Kwantlen, Semiahmoo, Katzie, and others. Europeans first arrived there in the late 1700s when Spanish and English ships made contact in south Surrey, and then various teams arrived overland through the 1800s. Surrey was incorporated as a municipality in 1879 and remained dominated by small-scale fishing, forestry, and agriculture operations during much of the twentieth century, with expansion starting to accelerate in 1937 after construction of the Pattullo Bridge linking Surrey directly to the town of New Westminster and by extension to Vancouver. Surrey retains a strong farming base, with 35% of its total land still designated for agricultural uses, and it was not incorporated as a city until 1993 (City of Surrey 2016; Brown 2014). The city’s population growth began much later than either Mississauga’s or Laval’s, but it is following a similarly steep trajectory (table 6.3). This rapid population growth is expected to continue into the future, fuelled in large part by the flood of new immigrants whom Surrey continues to welcome, and many projections see Surrey surpassing Vancouver as the region’s largest population centre in the coming decades (Global News, 2014). These demographic trends are illustrated by Surrey’s high percentage of visible minorities (52.6% in 2011) and foreign-born immigrants (40.5% in 2011) who are being increasingly drawn to the affordable housing stock (Statistics Canada 2013b). Suburban growth is always tied to transportation infrastructure. Like most suburbs, Surrey is known for its automobile dependence: 83% of commuters use a private vehicle, while only 13% take public transit, and 2.5% walk (Statistics Canada 2013b). Surrey’s rapid-transit infrastructure is in short supply, which has been a matter of contention in recent years. Starting in 1990, four SkyTrain stations were successively opened in Surrey, providing a heavily used rail link to Vancouver. To provide rapid-transit mobility within Surrey, municipal planners released an ambitious light-rail-network proposal in 2012 (Sinoski 2012), pointing to a more sustainable balance in future between automobiles and transit, but after the 2018 municipal election these plans were rejected by a new mayor and council who were pledging to extend

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Table 6.3 Population growth in Surrey, 1986–2011 Year

Total population

Growth

1986

154,310

–

1991

208,706

35.3%

1996

304,477

45.9%

2001

347,825

14.2%

2006 2011

394,976 468,251

13.6% 18.6%

Source: Adapted from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Surrey,_British_Columbia

the SkyTrain eastward to Langley instead (N. Bennett 2018). Until these plans can be realized, Surrey continues to be defined by its reliance on expressways. Starting in 1910, Surrey was served by a well-used interurban electric railway, but the rapid growth of affordable private cars and the construction of road infrastructure soon eclipsed this mobility alternative, and passenger service ceased on 30 September 1950 (Brown 2014). Surrey now has three major expressways within its boundaries, each sticking to the edges of the city, with major arterials lacing through the middle as a connective network. In 1959 the George Massey Tunnel was built, completing the connection of Highway 99 coming from the south and running through Surrey and into Vancouver. The Surrey portion of the Trans-Canada Highway, or Highway 1, was completed in 1964, bringing traffic into Vancouver from the east and running through the northern third of Surrey. In 2005 the British Columbia provincial government launched the Gateway program, a massive upgrading of road, port, and bridge infrastructure which saw the construction of a new ten-lane Port Mann Bridge and the South Fraser Perimeter Road running along Surrey’s western flank, both of which have significantly contributed to increased traffic to and through Surrey. Given that Surrey’s major mobility infrastructure is still developing, and recalling the populationgrowth patterns that Laval and Mississauga saw during their peak build-out decades, it is easy to imagine that Surrey has some years of continued double-digit growth ahead. But during those years ahead, rapid-transit-infrastructure construction could emerge as a significant part of Surrey’s investment in mobility. Surrey would then offer a third flavour of urban equivocation among major Canaburbs by seeking to

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accommodate both growing automobile and transit-mobility capacity wholly within its boundaries. Future researchers should have much to analyze in the event that Surrey makes progress on its rapid-transit development plans and offers a more even mix of major mobility infrastructure within a large suburban municipality. some closing thoughts on canada’s urban a n d   s u b u r b a n e q u i v o c at i o n

If equivocation embeds ambivalence within Canada’s city making, then it strikes us that most accounts of Canadian urban development could be enriched by paying greater attention to suburban spaces. These spaces developed as Canaburbs within major metropolitan regions have been considerably under-theorized and under-accounted for to date. There are several reasons that can explain this lacuna, but we feel confident that in the coming years there will be an increase in (much-needed) research into urban-suburban dynamics as areas beyond city cores absorb growing numbers of immigrants, refugees, other newcomers, and less affluent families who are displaced from unaffordable inner-city housing markets. Over time, certain forms of investment and capital will follow these migrations, enabling development and planning strategies that would not otherwise occur in Canada’s urban regions. Where the population growth in Canada’s suburban communities continues to outpace that in the urban core, new major mobility infrastructure is likely to follow. As suburban theory and research deepens, it will become apparent that Canaburbs, like their suburban counterparts around the world, can be as diverse, variegated, and thus interesting as any other place in the metropolis. Long derided for their ubiquitous blandness, homogeneity, and cookie-cutter design features, Canaburbs exhibit unmistakable layers of differentiation from one another and from suburbs elsewhere in the world, which is obvious to anyone who makes the effort to observe them in detail. What constitutes a suburb is contested and shifting, and the edges of where the city ends and the suburbs begin are not hard and fast. Thus, urbanists will have to eschew easy characterizations of suburban attributes and activities and instead come to understand their histories, construction, and development if they are to make sense of Canada’s urban future. The practical and theoretical repercussions of urban disengagement with suburban development are costly in numerous ways. Such

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Big Moves

misunderstanding often fuels urban-suburban antagonism and rivalry over many forms of development, maybe most especially transportation development. In many Canadian cities there are acute and wrenching divisions between city cores and peripheries that have very divisive political implications. Perhaps the most infamous recent example of such destructive debate can be seen during the term of Mayor Rob Ford’s leadership in Toronto. After Toronto’s amalgamation into one megacity in 1998, voters from six previous municipalities chose a single mayor, reducing the political space for equivocation and setting the stage for tremendous political and cultural schisms. Under Ford’s controversial administration, inner-city voters who favoured more progressive candidates fiercely resented Ford and the politicians whom they viewed as having been foisted on them by more conservative and ostensibly less sophisticated suburban constituents. The city of Toronto has been convulsed by debates between suburbanites who feel that policy-makers are condescending and have forgotten them, and core city residents who resent the political embrace of suburban values that they judge to be regressive and revanchist. Toronto’s long-standing legacy of equivocation was, at least for a time, quickly transformed into a political conflict that fostered hostility, paralysis, and, on more than a few occasions, ridicule and farce. As we have seen in the preceding pages, all three of Canada’s largest city regions have consistently attempted to pursue divergent mobility trajectories, to equivocate on the values underlying them, and to balance aspirations in such a way that a range of preferences for travel, public space, and community structure appears to be accommodated. These approaches have yielded considerable successes, but they have had significant repercussions as well. The relationships between regional cores and their peripheries, between inner cities and suburban areas, are often fraught. The particular contours in each of Canada’s three biggest city regions reflect both coexistence and a competition for the capital that reaches them from around the world. The development of each urban region’s biggest suburban communities – Laval, Mississauga, and Surrey – displays the reciprocal effects of urban and suburban pursuits of global capital and can be best understood as a (mostly) uncoordinated elaboration of equivocal actions and reactions to engage mobility and development opportunities over time. As Canadian city regions consider future growth and development of major mobility infrastructure, they would be served by reflecting

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Canaburbs and the Future

207

on the repercussions of the pursuit of global capital that helped to shape their infrastructure. We believe that our research has clearly illuminated that local priorities and community resistances are usually compelled to engage with the global-city aspirations that have flows of capital behind them. When advocates of major mobility infrastructure are able to leverage the global circuits of capital that pass through Canada’s cities, they are more likely to prevail over local visions and voices. But the prevalence of such global resources over local values is not an unmitigated conquest. Local voices did influence the nature and extent of mobility-infrastructure development in Canadian cities, as they are likely to do again in future iterations of such development across the Canaburbs. The Canadian legacy of urban equivocation has facilitated the simultaneous pursuit of multiple and contending mobility and landuse paradigms. Such a balancing act might not sustain itself, as economic and political velocities compel sharper choices. But it may also endure longer than many would expect. We close this study with an expression of hope that Canada’s future urban and suburban decision makers will reflect on their local histories and be inspired by the achievements and the possibilities that were crafted through regular attempts to avoid conflicts over mobility and land use, with sporadic achievement in reconciling these disputes. The results of urban ambivalence and policy equivocation are literally embedded in the expressways and rapid-transit infrastructure that shape movement and space in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. In both the successes and the shortcomings of this infrastructure legacy can be found lessons for Canada’s urban future.

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Appendix

Data Dictionary Produced by Michael Oram, with Anthony Perl, Jeffrey Kenworthy, and Matt Hern

In order to pursue the analysis presented in this book, we were obliged to construct a unique data set that assembled information about both physical and fiscal characteristics of major mobility infrastructure in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. Collecting and organizing such data became a prerequisite for our analytical objective. In many nations, data on numerous aspects of urban mobility can be easily obtained from agencies responsible for transportation, urban development, or statistics generally. This information resource provides a reliable and accessible empirical foundation for building the kind of analysis that we have presented in the preceding pages. Canada has been recognized as an outlier among developed nations when it comes to the public availability of statistical data. A recent media investigation into Canada’s data culture found that “either the government doesn’t collect the numbers, or it doesn’t make them easily accessible to the public. Or they are kept hidden away entirely. [As a result] Canadian society has no way of answering key questions about itself, in fields ranging from energy and the environment to the condition of seniors in nursing homes” (AndrewGee and Grant 2019). This led one of Canada’s major national newspapers to recommend that the federal government develop a new Canadian “facts strategy” because “the most obvious problem with our data deficit … is that Canadian politicians and voters often don’t have good evidence to make the right decisions, whether the issue is maternal health, people with disabilities, energy use or the housing industry. That’s fine if you belong to the school of policy-making where decisions are made on feelings and hunches. The rest of us should demand better” (Globe and Mail 2019). As a small contribution to illustrating what greater availability and quality in Canada’s urban mobility data could resemble, we are presenting in this appendix the specific definitions and sources of the data that we have

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assembled, which are organized in the form of a data dictionary. A data dictionary has been defined as “a part of the metadata that is used to understand the data and the databases that contain it. The data dictionary identifies data elements and their attributes including names, definitions and units of measure and other information” (Northeast Environmental Data-Network 2006). In assembling our data set, we drew upon sources from municipal and provincial governments, as well as transit agencies and the news media. Each source used different definitions and measures for much of the fiscal and physical information that we sought to interpret. Different jurisdictions typically adopted unique standards and formats for measuring mobility infrastructure. Sometimes these measures changed within a single jurisdiction as the result of government reorganization or a new political direction. Financial information was even less transparent than physical measures for major mobility infrastructure. Infrastructure funding was rarely disaggregated for specific projects and physical segments. Capital expenditures on road building thus often mixed city streets, suburban arterials, and urban expressways (and sometimes even rural expressways) into a single annual total. Due to this idiosyncratic variety in both fiscal and physical measurement across Canada, our data represents a patchwork of sources and content, which we have sought to stitch together. This has required a fair amount of interpolation and estimation, which we seek to document here. We hope that this contribution will make our work more transparent and enable our judgments about data collection to be understood better by readers and researchers who seek to expand and improve upon our efforts. There remains much work to close fully the data gaps on Canada’s urban mobility infrastructure and thus create a solid factual foundation along the lines called for in most prescriptions for evidence-based policy analysis. definitions

We begin by presenting our definitions of the key urban-mobility terms used in our data collection. Unlike some nations, where such definitions are prescribed in national statutes or administrative codes, Canada has not adopted a single legal framework of expressway or rapid-transit standards. Instead, provinces have pursued the development of their road networks and urban transit infrastructure, applying their own standards, which are not wholly compatible across the country. We have thus relied on semi-formal guidelines and academic and professional standards in creating our definitions of major mobility infrastructure.

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211

Expressway An expressway, as defined by the Transportation Association of Canada, is a roadway that provides priority to motor vehicles and possesses the following characteristics: grade separation, traffic volume, restricted access, and minimum traffic speed. This definition, and our justification for selecting it, is elaborated in Perl, Hern, and Kenworthy (2015).

Rapid Transit Canada’s landscape of public-transit infrastructure is even more diverse than that of its expressways. As a result, we relied on principles articulated by transit-operating agencies and transit researchers to support a definition of rapid-transit infrastructure that could be applied consistently in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. Our definition was centred on right-of-way and the propulsion attributes to differentiate rapid transit from other forms of public transportation. “Rapid transit is a type of high-capacity public transport that typically operates on an exclusive right-of-way” (TransLink 2016b). This transit consists of electrically powered rail and has high capacity, reliability, and safety (Vuchic 2005).

Construction of New Major Mobility Infrastructure We sought to differentiate between the initiation and extension of major mobility infrastructure – which contributes to the structure of transport networks and plays a significant role in shaping urban form – and the augmentation of capacity and function within existing mobility networks. Transport infrastructure is regularly and incrementally adjusted and adapted through maintenance and upgrading. Thus, we began with the definition offered by Falcocchio and Levinson (2015) that physical changes to a roadway or transit line that result in increased capacity constitute construction. But we then focused on construction that extended the linear route of the expressway or rapid-transit infrastructure as being the most relevant to our attempt to explain the relationship between major mobility and urban development.

Currency Valuation All dollar figures have been converted to constant 2014 Canadian dollars. The Bank of Canada’s (2014) inflation calculator was used to calculate the adjustments for inflation.

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212 Appendix

Time Frame for Data Collection Our data have been collected from the earliest evidence of major mobility infrastructure within the urban boundaries of Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. Most of our data come from the postwar decades of the twentieth century – i.e., the 1950s through 2001, coinciding with the 1 January 2002 amalgamation of the municipalities on the Island of Montreal (Trent 2012). With one exception, any infrastructure that was not operational at 1 January 2002 was deemed to be outside the scope of the analysis and interpretation that we have developed. Vancouver’s Millennium Line rapid-transit infrastructure opened to the public on 7 January 2002. Since it had been built and was fully operational (but not in revenue service) by the end of 2001, we elected to include that infrastructure in our analysis of Vancouver. Selected, and by no means comprehensive, information about major mobility infrastructure that has been built within our urban area boundaries beyond 2002 has been included as supplementary information. It is identified in separate listings here under the headings “Construction beyond 2001” or “Nonoperational as of 1 January 2002” for reference purposes. u r b a n at t r i b u t e s

Montreal p o p u l at i o n

We obtained population data from two sources. The first source was Statistics Canada’s census metropolitan area (CM A). The second source was Statistics Canada’s census subdivision (CS). The difference between the two sources is definitional, with the CS being the same area as the legal body that is the City of Montreal, and the CM A being a creation of Statistics Canada. The C MA includes an urban core surrounded by suburban municipalities. The CS refers to a single municipality as determined through provincial legislation. In other words, the CS covers the City of Montreal (“metropolitan Montreal”), and the C MA includes the surrounding suburbs (“greater Montreal”). The 1951 and 1956 census data were used for population counts between 1951 and 1957, with the years between censuses being averaged out. Between 1958 and 1987, population figures were periodically verified through City of Montreal’s population data. From 1988 to 2011, population counts were averaged out from the observed census population figures accessed through the City of Montreal’s website for the years 1991, 1996, 2001, 2006, and

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213

2011. For the years 2012, 2013, and 2014, population estimates were provided in the City of Montreal’s annual budgets. m u n i c i pa l b o u n d a r i e s

Municipal boundaries in and around Montreal have undergone a series of changes over the years. Prior to 2002, the Island of Montreal was made up of twenty-eight municipalities. On 1 January 2002 the provincial government enacted amalgamation to create one City of Montreal on the entire Island of Montreal. This amalgamation only lasted four years and was broken up into sixteen municipalities in 2006. However, following this break-up of the amalgamated city, a regional authority, the Metropolitan Transportation Agency (A M T ), continued to provide and plan for public transport in the greater Montreal region (Trent 2012; AMT 2013; Government of Quebec 2015). The AMT carries out its role in coordination with municipal transit agencies. Expressway data were collected for the City of Montreal, using the boundaries as they had existed before 2002. Individual municipalities were responsible for their own expressway expenditures at the start of urban expressway development in and around Montreal, while the regional transit body, the Montreal Urban Community (M U C ), was responsible for building rapidtransit infrastructure. For example, it was the City of Montreal – and not the surrounding municipalities – that signed the 1964 expressway-funding agreement with the Province before Expo 67. Expo-related expressway projects and the A-720 expressway (located almost entirely in Montreal) accounted for the lion’s share of expressway investment in the Montreal area and left many surrounding municipalities untouched. In contrast, the original rapidtransit investments were committed by the City of Montreal, with other municipalities sharing responsibility for rapid-transit-infrastructure investment when they joined the M U C in subsequent decades. e x p r e s s way s

Length Measurement Expressway length was measured using Google Earth’s line tool. A line was overlaid on the expressways, following their routes through the area of study for Montreal. Expressway start and end points are identified in each of the following tables. All measurements were completed between 23 and 27 May 2016; a second set of measurements was completed between 20 and 30 June. All Google Earth imagery used was dated in 2015.

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214 Appendix

Limits, Gaps, and Notes There has been considerable change in the funding sources for Montreal’s expressway infrastructure. During the 1950s, Montreal and surrounding municipalities were the sole funders of the A-40 expressway. In the 1960s, expressways became a cost-shared initiative of the municipal, provincial, and federal governments. By the 1970s, the Government of Quebec had become the principal funder of expressway infrastructure. Intergovernmental funding arrangements are complicated by both retroactive and transitive financing provisions. In other words, intergovernmental transfers were negotiated after expenses had already been incurred on expressway construction, with the financing being used to leverage construction of other expressway segments. For example, in 1961 the Province assumed responsibility for funding part of the A-40 infrastructure and agreed to repay the City of Montreal through annual transfers. However, during this same period the City made significant investments in Expo-related expressway projects (e.g., the A-10 expressway) and provided much of the expropriation costs for the early development of the A-720 expressway’s infrastructure. Annual spending patterns have been extrapolated from estimates of total project costs, or the most similar expressway project cost with a known expenditure, which were spread over the life of the construction project. Along the trajectory of developing Montreal’s major mobility infrastructure, fiscal reporting on capital expenditure for expressway infrastructure has been inconsistent and incomplete. For example, after 1961 the City of Montreal focused its expressway expenditures on right-of-way acquisition through expropriation and other preparatory engineering works (e.g., relocating utilities), but its reporting documents do not provide a clear breakdown of these outlays. As another example, the federal government provided Quebec with a $346 million loan (all figures in 2014 Canadian dollars) as part of a job creation program in 1970. The Province agreed to a twenty-year repayment schedule, but that schedule was never released. Similarly, the provincial transport ministry has reported aggregate construction costs along an entire expressway’s route. Most highways – such as the A-19, the A-40, and the A15 – are provincial expressways that run through Montreal. It was thus challenging to isolate the spending for specific segments within the City of Montreal. In 1960 the federal and provincial governments came to an agreement on cost sharing for the Trans-Canada Highway. Following this, in 1964 the City of Montreal entered into a cost-sharing agreement with the Government of Quebec for expressway construction leading up to Expo 67.

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Appendix

215

Overview A-10 Jurisdiction Project type Project scope Years of construction Primary sources Secondary sources A-15 Jurisdiction Project type Project scope Years of construction

City of Montreal Expressway Construction 1964–67 Unavailable La Presse Montreal Gazette

Secondary sources

City of Montreal Expressway Construction 1957–59 1964–67 Department of Highways annual reports Provincial budgets Le Devoir

A-19 Jurisdiction Project type Project scope Years of construction Primary sources

City of Montreal Expressway Construction 1968–70 Department of Highways annual reports

A-20 Jurisdiction Project type Project scope Years of construction Secondary sources

City of Montreal Expressway Construction 1965–67 Montreal Gazette

A-25 Jurisdiction Project type Project scope Years of construction Primary sources Secondary sources

City of Montreal Expressway Construction 1961–69 Ministère de la Voirie annual report Montreal Gazette

Primary sources

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216 Appendix A-40 Jurisdiction Project type Project scope Years of construction Primary sources

Secondary sources

A-720 Jurisdiction Project type Project scope Years of construction Primary sources Secondary sources

City of Montreal Expressway Construction 1955–80 City budgets Provincial budget Department of Highways annual reports Le Devoir Pineault (2000) Quebec Chronicle Telegraph (1961)

City of Montreal Expressway Construction 1967–89 Department of Highways annual reports Montreal Gazette

Length Some expressways in Montreal have an overlap in their names and numbering. Where this occurs, multiple names and numbers have been noted. Some expressway infrastructure beyond Montreal’s municipal boundary was included when municipal-level co-financing of such infrastructure was in evidence. A-10 (A-720) Name Construction notes Length Total length A-15 Name Construction notes Length Name Construction notes Length

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Autoroute Bonaventure From the intersection of Robert Bourassa Boulevard and Saint Jacques Street to the junction of Highway 15 4.24 km 4.24 km

Autoroute des Laurentides From the junction of Highway 40 in Montreal to exit 16 in Laval 5.25 km Autoroute Décarie From the junction of Highway 40 to exit 66 2.33 km

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Appendix Name Construction notes Length Name Construction notes Length Total length A-19 Name Construction notes Length Total length A-20 Name Construction notes Length Total length A-25 Name Construction notes Length Name Construction notes

217

Autoroute Décarie From the junction of Highways 20 and 720 to exit 66 3.67 km Autoroute 15 From exit 57 to the junction of Highways 20 and 720 (exit 63) 4.68 km 15.93 km

Autoroute Papineau From the junction of Henri-Bourassa Boulevard in Montreal to exit 4 in Laval 0.67 km 0.67 km

Autoroute du Souvenir From Highway 520 to the junction of Highways 10, 15, and 720 (exit 63) 12.17 km 12.17 km

Length Name Construction notes Length Total length

Autoroute Louis-H.-La Fontaine From the junction at Rue Notre-Dame to exit 4 1.38 km Autoroute Louis-H.-La Fontaine From the junction of Highway 20 in Boucherville to Rue Notre-Dame (via the Louis-Hippolyte-La Fontaine Bridge and Tunnel) 0.88 km Autoroute 25 From Pie-IX to the junction of Highway 440 in Laval (just to Highway 40 junction) 2.69 km Trans-Canada Autoroute From exit 4 to the junction of Highway 40 1.83 km 6.78 km

A-40 Name Construction notes Length

From the junction of Highway 15 to exit 76 6.68 km

Length Name Construction notes

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218 Appendix Name Construction notes

Length Name Construction notes Length Total length

Autoroute Félix-Leclerc From exit 76 to exit 78 (1965) and from exit 87 toward exit 151 in St Cuthbert, at Charles-de-Gaulle Bridge at tip of the island 5.43 km Autoroute Metropolitaine From the junction of Highway 25 to exit 87 2.07 km 14.18 km

A-720 Name Construction notes Length Name Construction notes Length Name Construction notes Length Name Construction notes Length Name Construction notes Length Total length

Ville-Marie From Highway 20 to Guy Street 1.86 km Ville-Marie Guy Street to Sanguinet Street 2.37 km Ville-Marie Viger Tunnel 0.30 km Ville-Marie Sanguinet Street to Papineau Street 1.30 km Ville-Marie Papineau Street to Le Havre Street 1.10 km 6.93 km

Total expressway length in pre-amalgamation Montreal 60.90 km

Expenditure Capital expenditure on expressways was assessed in three ways. When it was specified in municipal or provincial budgets, actual costs for highway projects were extracted. If specific costs were not reported, but cost estimates were identified in annual reports on municipal or provincial transport infrastructure, these estimates were used. When neither actual nor estimated costs were available in government documents such as budgets and annual reports, then local media were used to estimate spending on expressway projects. Expenditure evidence and estimates were assembled only for the portions of expressways within the boundaries of pre-amalgamation Montreal.

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Appendix A-10 Evidence sources Cost (2014 CAD)

219

Estimates from local media $209,967,893, with Montreal paying $114,422,257 and Canada contributing $95,545,636

A-15 Evidence sources Cost (2014 CAD)

Estimates from Quebec budgets and Le Devoir $78,197,337, all spending by the Quebec government

A-19 Evidence sources Cost (2014 CAD)

Quebec budget $9,303,123, all spending from the Quebec government

A-20 Evidence sources Cost (2014 CAD) A-25 Evidence sources

Cost (2014 CAD)

A-40 Evidence sources

Cost (2014 CAD)

Estimates drawn from local media $71,534,091, with $26,467,614 from Montreal and $45,066,477 from the Quebec government

Estimates based upon local media. Cost shared between the City (20%), the Province (57%), and the federal government (23%) MVQ Annual Report provides estimate of annual cost split and the City’s contribution $1,138,429,054, with $229,559,961 from Montreal, $647,569,229 from the Quebec government, and $261,299,864 from the federal government

Estimate from local media and based upon spending for similar infrastructure on the A-10. Provincial government originally agreed to pay (­reimburse) half the cost of the A-40 and eventually to reimburse the full amount of Montreal’s share. $721,752,622, with $464,410,966 from Montreal, $172,526,192 from the Quebec government, and $84,815,464 from the federal government

A-720 Evidence sources

Actual from annual report Estimates from local media Primarily funded by the provincial government, with a loan from the federal government in 1971 Cost (2014 CAD) $2,279,865,349, with $147,400,707 from Montreal, $1,714,975,491 from the Quebec government, and $417,489,151 from the federal government Total Expenditure $4,509,049,469

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220 Appendix

Capital Expenditures, 1955–90 Year

Total capital expenditures (2014 CAD )

Year

Total capital expenditures (2014 CAD )

1955

88,238,083

1973

330,733,317

1956

92,882,193

1974

214,919,570

1957

113,095,658

1975

44,036,172

1958

125,524,447

1976

42,966,324

1959

62,508,120

1977

43,222,312

1960

37,152,877

1978

42,746,849

1961

27,430,711

1979

42,272,397

1962

74,088,456

1980

72,700,803

1963

95,006,632

1981

71,987,977

1964

84,420,466

1982

52,420,925

1965

369,791,055

1983

51,991,610

1966

385,158,892

1984

53,812,805

1967

391,979,980

1985

73,845,950

1968

209,302,288

1986

55,634,000

1969

86,780,104

1987

47,438,623

1970

175,201,040

1988

38,332,648

1971

428,729,260

1989

38,332,648

1972

312,600,265

1990

31,763,984

Total

4,509,049,440

rapid transit

Measurements Measurements for the Montreal Metro system were taken in two steps. First, the City of Montreal’s Énoncé de l’intérêt patrimonial du Métro de Montréal was used to gather the overall length of each line. Next, station-to-station distances were calculated using Google Maps.

Limits, Gaps, and Notes There has been considerable change in the funding sources of Metro construction over time. The Metro began in 1962 under a municipal financing, but within two decades this infrastructure was entirely funded by the Province. The fiscal shift occurred incrementally and on an ad hoc basis, with no consolidated record of capital investment as a result.

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221

Starting in 1971, the Province supported capital spending on Metro construction through transfers and credits to the MUC , but the MUC remained responsible for building the Metro until the late 1980s. After amalgamation in 2002–3, the Province designated AMT as the agency responsible for building the Orange Line extension to Laval. In 1976, Quebec’s Liberal government imposed a moratorium on Metro construction. The same government soon lifted the moratorium with a new cost-sharing agreement in place between Montreal and the Province. In this agreement the Province agreed to refund 60% of previously incurred construction costs and to fund 60% of future construction costs. Shortly after the election of the Parti Québécois in 1976, the Province increased its commitment for future Metro construction costs to 100%.

Overview Metro Jurisdictions Project type Project scope Primary sources

Secondary sources

City of Montreal (formally the Montreal Urban Community) Rapid transit Construction City of Montreal budgets Montreal Urban Community annual reports Quebec National Assembly, Journal of Debates Ministère des Transports La Presse Société de transport de Montréal

Physical Characteristics Metro Section Years Section Years

Section Years Total length

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Green, Orange, and Yellow Lines Construction 1962–67 Green and Orange Line Extensions 1970–78 (Green Line, opened in phases, with first ­extension in 1976) 1970–86 (Orange Line, opened in phases with first ­extension in 1980) Blue Line Construction 1976–88 (first segment opened 1986) 60.70 km

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222 Appendix

Expenditure Metro Infrastructure Total cost (2014 CAD)

Actual expenditure $7,944,623,105

The City of Longeuill provided $4,000,000 to support construction of the Yellow Line. After delays and inflation, in 1975 the costs for the Green and Blue Lines construction bore little relationship to the 1971 estimates of $2,602,740,384.62 (figures from Société de transport de Montréal, 2016). The Province of Quebec in 1976 agreed to pay 60% of all future Metro ­construction and to reimburse 60% of previous construction. Following the ­election of 1976 this promise was increased to 100% of all new construction.

Capital Expenditures, 1955–90 Even though M U C has reported capital expenditure on rapid-transit infrastructure yearly through at least 2011, we have opted to include only the yearly expenditures through 1990 in our data set because the last linear extension of the Blue Line rapid transit occurred in 1988. Given the fluidity of intergovernmental financing of urban mobility infrastructure in Quebec, it is possible that capital funding up to 1990 was used to pay for this linear extension. Subsequent capital expenditures can be deemed to have not contributed to the linear expansion of rapid-transit infrastructure until the Orange Line’s extension to Laval in 2002. Year

Expenditures (2014 CAD )

Year

Expenditures (2014 CAD )

1962

62,371,630

1976

539,741,639

1963

216,818,448

1977

622,111,767

1964

294,041,857

1978

533,071,545

1965

525,712,085

1979

284,761,279

1968

0.00

1980

489,912,556

1969

0.00

1981

234,323,604

1970

2,197,603

1982

218,277,726

1971

141,857,533

1983

229,131,929

1972

181,806,611

1984

246,494,066

1973

292,392,043

1985

294,720,814

1974

376,306,272

1986

309,497,783

1975

529,793,959

1987

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318,667,988

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Appendix

223

1988

262,797,526

1990

164,240,113

1989

174,790,337

Total

7,944,623,105

Toronto p o p u l at i o n

Population data for the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto between 1951 and 1966 were obtained from Internet Archive (2014a) by aggregating the populations for each municipality within Metropolitan Toronto. From 1966 to 1976, population figures were obtained from Internet Archive (2014b) for both incorporated and unincorporated municipalities within Metropolitan Toronto. From 1976 to 1985, data were obtained from CANSIM, table 0510030 (Statistics Canada 2000), which uses 1981 census boundaries. For 1986 to 2002, CAN S I M , table 051-0016 (Statistics Canada 2003), was used. This table uses 1996 census boundaries. For the years 2003 to 2013, C A NSIM, table 051-0052 (Statistics Canada 2013c), was used. m u n i c i pa l b o u n d a r i e s

The Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto was established in 1953 and included “the City of Toronto, the townships of East York, Etobicoke, North York, Scarborough and York as well as seven villages and towns that had been separated from these townships over time.” In 1966, Metropolitan Toronto was reorganized from thirteen municipalities into six (Gartner 1991). In 1998, metropolitan government was abolished and replaced by the amalgamated City of Toronto (Government of Ontario 2015). The Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto’s boundaries were used for our data collection as they are identical to the current boundaries of the City of Toronto (Government of Ontario 2015). e x p r e s s way s

Length Measurement Expressway data were collected using Google Earth’s line tool. A line was overlaid on the expressways, following their routes through the study area. Start and end points for each expressway are identified in the listings. Each expressway was also divided into segments based upon width. These segments were used to identify the number of lanes present. Again, this was done using Google Earth. Merge lanes were not included in the lane calculations. The collector and feeder lanes on Highway 401 were measured

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224 Appendix

separately from the highway proper, using the same techniques. If a new lane came into existence between intersections, the start and the end point of that lane was deemed to be the start and the end of the segment. For those lanes that began or ended at an intersection, the midpoint of the intersection was used to define the start or end of the segment. Determination of the number of lanes was completed by examining the satellite imagery provided within Google Earth, which shows the lanes in use and enabled the exclusion of shoulders. All Google Earth imagery used in these measurements was dated 2015.

Limits, Gaps, and Notes Expressway spending in the municipality of Metropolitan Toronto peaked in the 1960s, aligning with the construction of both the Gardiner Expressway and the Don Valley Parkway. Expressway spending was primarily funded through municipal and provincial contributions, with occasional and minor contributions from other entities. However, the contribution of each entity toward the total cost of infrastructure is not always clear. The 400 series of expressways were provincially planned and funded infrastructure projects, and the Gardiner Expressway, Don Valley Parkway, and the Allen Road expressway were planned and managed by municipal government. After 1984, capital spending on expressways was no longer itemized in annual reports of municipal government. However, no linear extension to Toronto expressways occurred following this date.

Overview Gardiner Expressway Jurisdiction Construction periods 1955–66 1980–83 1987–88

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Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto Construction

Expenditures during the 1980s are listed in the annual reports as repair work; however, no specifics appear regarding the scope of these expenditures. The original length of the Gardiner was 11.27 km (from Lakeshore Boulevard and Don Valley Parkway to approximately Lakeshore Boulevard (West) and Humber Bay); the ­current length is 17.32 km. Several plans were proposed for expanding the Gardiner in the 1980s; however, none was implemented except bridge replacements costing $100 million in 1999 (Bateman 2015; Get Toronto Moving Transportation Committee 2016; Cole Engineering 2016).

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Appendix Primary sources

Secondary sources Don Valley Parkway Jurisdiction Construction periods 1958–61

1958–66 Primary sources

Secondary sources Highway 400 Jurisdiction Construction period 1949–56 Secondary sources Highway 401 Jurisdiction Construction periods 1949–56 1963 through 1970s

1980s Secondary sources

Highway 404 Jurisdiction Construction periods 1973 1975–77

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225

Annual reports of the Commissioner of Finance, Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto Ontario budgets Globe and Mail

Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto Construction occurred in two phases, beginning with land acquisition in 1956. Construction of the first phase took place between 1958 and 1961. The second phase was completed in 1966. Annual reports of the Commissioner of Finance, Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto Ontario Budget Globe and Mail

Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto Construction coincided with that of Highway 401. Government of Ontario (2016) Sewell (2009)

Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto Construction of the Toronto portion of the expressway Expressway was widened throughout this period. In 1963 the Ontario government announced that the expressway would become a collector and expressway system. In the 1980s, Ontario announced that the expressway would be subject to selective widening. Government of Ontario (2016) Solomon (2007) Globe and Mail Sewell (2009)

Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto Metropolitan Toronto gave the Province permission to develop Highway 404 within its jurisdiction Don Valley Parkway to city limits was completed

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226 Appendix Secondary sources

Highway 427 Jurisdictions

Construction period c. 1960–72 Secondary sources Allen Road Jurisdiction Construction period 1961–71

Secondary sources

Government of Ontario (2016) Baker (1964, 1972) Delaplante (1969) Globe and Mail Hill (1977) York (1981)

Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto (Airport Road to just south of Finch Avenue West), straddling the municipal boundary, and placing some lanes outside the jurisdiction of Toronto and in Mississauga Construction began in the 1960s, and the expressway opened in 1972 Salmon (1953) Sewell (2009)

Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto Construction began in the early 1960s and ended in 1971 when the project was cancelled. Construction expenditure was documented from 1962 to 1971. Rider (2010) Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto (1973b, 1974b)

Physical Characteristics Gardiner Expressway Section Length Lanes Features Section Length Lanes Features Section Length Lanes

31713_Perl.indd 226

Lakeshore Boulevard and Don Valley Parkway to Yonge Street 2.19 km 8 Elevated Dufferin Street to Lakeshore Boulevard and Don Valley Parkway Yonge Street to Lakeshore Boulevard (west end) 8.71 km 6 Elevated Dufferin Street to Lakeshore Boulevard and Don Valley Parkway Lakeshore Boulevard (West) to Islington Avenue 3.42 km 8

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Appendix Features

Section Length Lanes Features

Total length Don Valley Parkway Section Length Lanes Features

Section Length Lanes Features

Total length

31713_Perl.indd 227

227

Overpass over Parkside Drive Overpass over Colborne Lodge Drive Overpass over Ellis Avenue Overpass over Windermere Avenue Bridge over Humber River Overpass over Brookers Lane and railway tracks Overpass over Park Lawn Road Islington Avenue to Highway 427 and Queen Elizabeth Way 3.00 km 6 Overpass over Wickman Road Overpass over The East Mall Terminates as an overpass over Browns Line at Highway 427 17.32 km

Gardiner Expressway to South of Brookbanks Drive, north of Lawrence Avenue East 12.30 km 6 Overpass over Pottery Road Overpass over Beechwood Drive Bridge over railway tracks and Don River Overpass over St Dennis Drive Overpass over Eglinton Avenue East South of Brookbanks Drive, north of Lawrence Avenue East to Highway 401 1.88 km 8 High-occupancy vehicle (HOV ) lane Bridge over Don River (north of Lawrence Avenue East) Overpass over Brookbanks Drive Overpass over York Mills Road Overpass over Underpass Gate Terminates at an overpass over Highway 401 where it becomes Highway 404 14.18 km

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228 Appendix Highway 400 Section Length Lanes Features Section Length Lanes Features Section Length Lanes Features Section Length Lanes Features Total length Highway 401 Section Length Lanes Section Length Lanes Features Section Length Lanes Features

Section Length Lanes Section Length Lanes Features

31713_Perl.indd 228

Black Creek Drive to Jane Street 0.42 km 4 Overpass over Jane Street Jane Street to Highway 401 1.2 km 6 Overpass over Highway 401 Highway 401 to Finch Avenue West 4.35 km 11 Overpass over Finch Avenue West Finch Avenue West to Steeles Avenue West (city limits) 2.00 km 10 Overpass over Steeles Avenue West 7.97 km

Renforth Drive (city limit) to Highway 27 2.11 km 8 Highway 27 to Islington Avenue 3.55 km 10 Overpass over Martin Grove Road Islington Avenue to west of Allen Road 8.96 km 8 Overpass over Wendell Avenue Overpass over Jane Street Overpass over Dufferin Street West of Allen Road to west of Yonge Street 3.19 km 6 West of Yonge Street to east of Bayview Avenue 3.41 km 8 Overpass over Yonge Street

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Appendix Section Length Lanes Features Section Length Lanes Section Length Lanes Features Section Length Lanes Section Length Lanes Features Section Length Lanes Section Length Lanes Section Length Lanes Total length

229

East of Bayview Avenue to Highway 404 and Don Valley Parkway 3.42 km 6 Overpass over Leslie Street Highway 404 and Don Valley Parkway to west of Birchmount Road 3.10 km 9 West of Birchmount Road to Brimley Road 3.00 km 6 Overpass over Kennedy Road Brimley Road to east of McCowan Road 1.34 km 8 East of McCowan Road to east of Morningside Avenue 5.04 km 6 Overpass over Markham Road East of Morningside Avenue to west of Meadowvale Road 1.33 km 8 West of Meadowvale Road to east of Port Union Road 3.43 km 6 East of Port Union Road to city limits 0.24 km 8 42.12 km 87% of this route has additional collector lanes

Highway 401 Collectors Section Islington to Highway 11A Length 11.23 km Lanes 6 Section Highway 11A to west of Bayview Avenue Length 3.36 km Lanes 8 Section West of BayviewAvenue to Nielson Road Length 14.80 km Lanes 6

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230 Appendix Section Length Lanes Section Length Lanes Section Length Lanes Section Length Lanes Total length

Highway 404 Section Length Lanes Features Section Length Lanes Features Section Length Lanes Features Total length Highway 427 Section Length Lanes Features Section Length Lanes Features

31713_Perl.indd 230

Nielson Road to Morningside Avene 1.54 km 8 Morningside Avenue to Meadowvale Road 2.52 km 6 Meadowvale Road to east of Port Union Road 2.38 km 8 East of Port Union Road to city limits 0.62 km 6 36.45 km Equivalent to 87% of the linear route of Highway 401 through Toronto

Steeles Avenue East (city limits) to southeast of Finch Avenue East 2.66 km 10 HOV lane Southeast of Finch Avenue East to northwest of Sheppard Avenue East 1.25 km 12 HOV lane Northwest of Sheppard Avenue East to Don Valley Parkway 1.40 km 10 HOV lane 5.31 km

Steeles Avenue West (city limits) to Albion Road 0.39 km 4 (2 within city limits) Overpass over Albion Road Albion Road to Rexdale Boulevard 3.88 km 6 (3 within city limits) Overpass over railway tracks Bridge over river

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Appendix Section Length Lanes Features Section Length Lanes Features

Section Length Lanes Features Section Length Lanes Features Section Length Lanes Features Total length Allen Road Section Length Lanes Features Section Length Lanes Features Section Length Lanes Features Section Length Lanes Features

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231

Rexdale Boulevard to Woodbine Racetrack’s entrance 1.00 km 7 (3 within city limits) Overpass over Woodbine Racetrack’s entrance Woodbine Racetrack’s entrance to Airport Road 2.55 km 6 (3 within city limits) Overpass over Dixon Road Overpass over Highway 409 Overpass over Fasken Drive Overpass over Airport Road Airport Road to Rathburn Road 5.00 km 10 Overpass over Renforth Drive Overpass over Highway 401 Rathburn Road to Dundas Street West 2.98 km 6 Overpass over Dundas Street West Dundas Street West to Gardiner Expressway 1.54 km 8 Overpass over the Queensway 17.34 km

Transit Road to Wilson Avenue 0.94 km 5 Railway tracks in centre, with station at Wilson Avenue Wilson Avenue to Yorkdale Road 0.90 km 4 Railway tracks in centre Overpass over Yorkdale Road Yorkdale Road to Flemington Road 0.76 km 8 Railway tracks in centre, with Yorkdale station Flemington Road to Lawrence Avenue West 0.35 km 5 Railway tracks in centre

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232 Appendix Section Length Lanes Features Total length

Lawrence Avenue West to Eglinton Avenue West 2.00 km 4 Railway tracks in centre, with Glencairn and Eglinton West stations 4.95 km

Total expressway length 109.19 km Collector lanes run parallel to 40% of Toronto’s expressway infrastructure.

Expenditure C a l c ul at i on s Expressway costs have been estimated, unless otherwise noted, due to incomplete information provided in annual reports and budgets on specific projects. The annual reports and budgets provided aggregated spending on capital programs for roads and expressways without giving the specific project details that would be needed to isolate the component that was allocated to funding expressway infrastructure extension. Therefore, local media, primarily the Globe and Mail, were used to inform project cost estimates based upon reports of expenditure at times of expressway construction and opening or expansion. T i me F r a m e The time frame for investment in new expressways (defined as those extending over a longer distance, rather than having their width or vehicular capacity enhanced) runs from 1949 to 1983. This period begins with the construction of Highways 400 and 401 and ends six years later following the completion of Highway 404 within the then boundary of Metropolitan Toronto. F und i ng S ou rces Funding for Toronto’s expressways came from three sources. The first was the Government of Ontario. Second in total spending was the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto, and the third and smallest funding source was the federal government’s Grade Crossing Fund and Canadian National Railways. Gardiner Expressway Source Cost (2014 CAD)

Estimates derived from news media $1,822,541,208.48

Don Valley Parkway Source Cost (2014 CAD)

Estimates derived from news media $530,327,109.93

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233

Highway 400 Source Cost (2014 CAD)

Interpolated $63,031,251.00

Highway 401 Source Cost (2014 CAD)

Estimates derived from news media $333,108,693.27

Highway 404 Source Cost (2014 CAD)

Interpolated $159,167,675.81

Highway 427 Source Budget documents Cost (2014 CAD) $438,539,682.01 Construction began in the early 1960s, with expenditure documented from 1962. Allen Road Source Budget documents Cost (2014 CAD) $781,408,917.25 Total costs $4,128,124,537.75

Capital Expenditures, 1949–77 Year

Total capital expenditures (2014 CAD )

Year

Total capital expenditures (2014 CAD )

1949

20,848,630.31

1964

254,294,078.81

1950

26,984,146.55

1965

251,020,849.55

1951

33,119,662.79

1966

256,099,442.18

1952

39,255,179.03

1967

231,320,931.00

1953

47,451,874.21

1968

220,456,845.16

1954

55,648,569.39

1969

235,611,213.16

1955

64,197,981.32

1970

173,393,786.34

1956

138,234,598.64

1971

172,194,375.55

1957

135,320,980.63

1972

111,560,681.62

1958

111,867,062.30

1973

90,241,065.23

1959

114,146,932.16

1974

58,475,059.26

1960

237,270,607.26

1975

74,699,106.01

1961

197,292,313.12

1976

95,563,759.07

1962

243,839,868.66

1977

116,428,412.12

1963

321,286,526.33

Total

4,128,124,537.75

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234 Appendix

The preceding figures represent yearly capital expenditure totals within the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto on expressways. They are derived from three sources: the Province of Ontario, Metropolitan Toronto, and third parties. Each year consists of the outlays derived from the annual reports of Metropolitan Toronto with the following exceptions: 1 1949–55 figures are derived from interpolated spending on Highways 400, 401, and 427 (1955 only), Don Valley Parkway (1953–55), and the Gardiner Expressway (1950–55). For Highways 400 and 401 the yearly outlays were calculated by dividing the construction costs equally over the eight years of their construction. 2 1968–71 are derived from Metropolitan Toronto Transportation Plan Review: Transportation Finance, 1962–1981, and the Transportation Finance, part 2, History of Transportation Finance in Metro, 1961– 1971. These reports indicate greater spending within the period than was identified in the annual reports of Metropolitan Toronto. To determine the share of funding coming from Ontario versus Metropolitan Toronto, we applied the ratio listed in the annual reports to the amounts in the finance reports of the planning and history of transportation. rapid transit

Measurements The length of most rapid-transit infrastructure was obtained from 2013 TTC Operating Statistics (Toronto Transit Commission 2016b). The originating and terminus stations for each linear extension of rapid transit was confirmed using Transit Toronto’s history of each line, in addition to news media. Opening dates of the subway lines and their subsequent extensions were confirmed on the TTC’s website (Toronto Transit Commission 2015b).

Limits, Gaps, and Notes The Toronto Transit Commission issued debentures to fund certain segments of rapid-transit infrastructure. This was subsequently eliminated as a method of funding rapid-transit projects, and by 1992 the debt incurred through these debentures had been retired. In 1964 the level of TTC debenture debt dropped by $385,254,637.50 when right-of-way debt for the Bloor- Danforth subway route was transferred to Metropolitan Toronto. After 1981 the TTC no longer made any capital expenditure to build rapidtransit infrastructure. All capital expenditure came from Metropolitan

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235

Toronto and the Ontario government. However, it is not always clear how much each entity provided toward the total project costs. Metropolitan Toronto instituted a special levy, equating to 2%–3% on the property tax, to help fund rapid-transit projects between 1959 and 1981. Prior to 1962 this levy also provided capital for road construction.

Overview In yet another example of urban equivocation, the names of Toronto’s rapidtransit lines shifted multiple times during our data-collection period. As different segments were connected to one another, names were changed; for example, the University subway was built separately from both the Yonge and the Spadina subway segments, but these were eventually merged into one name. We identify the name of the rapid-transit line that was in use for the data being described or referenced in the listings. Currently Toronto’s rapidtransit lines are numbered, and the names are thus a historical artifact. Yonge Subway Primary sources

Secondary sources

Ontario budget Annual report of the Commissioner of Finance, Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto, Toronto Transit Commission annual report Globe and Mail New York Times (1954) Washington Post (1954)

Bloor-Danforth Subway and University Subway Primary sources Ontario budget Annual report of the Commissioner of Finance, Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto Toronto Transit Commission annual report Secondary sources Globe and Mail Spadina Subway Jurisdiction Project type Project scope Primary sources

Secondary sources

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Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto Rapid transit Construction Expansion Annual report of the Commissioner of Finance, Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto Toronto Transit Commission Globe and Mail Toronto Star

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236 Appendix Scarborough RT Jurisdiction Project type Project scope Primary sources

Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto Rapid transit Construction Annual report of the Commissioner of Finance, Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto

Physical Characteristics Yonge–University–Spadina Subway Section Eglinton station to Union station Years under 1949–54 construction Section York Mills extension Years under 1968–73 construction Section Finch extension Years under 1968–74 construction Section St George station to Wilson station From Eglinton West station northwards this line shares a right-of-way with Allen Road, running in the centre of the expressway Years under 1974–78 construction Section Downsview extension Years under 1992–96 construction Total length 32.30 km Bloor-Danforth (-University) Subway Section University subway (Union station to St George station) This section is now part of the Yonge subway Years under 1959–63 construction Section Bloor-Danforth (Keele station to Woodbine station) Years under 1959–66 construction Section Bloor-Danforth extension to Islington and Warden stations Part of this section shares the Bloor Viaduct with Bloor Street and Danforth Avenue, with the subway travelling on its own level below the traffic as the line crosses the Don River and the Don Valley Parkway Years under 1965–68 construction

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Appendix Section Total length

Scarborough RT Section Years under construction Total length

237

Bloor-Danforth extension to Kipling and Kennedy stations 26.20 km This does not include the University Avenue infrastructure from Union station to St George station, which is included in the Yonge subway measurements

Kennedy station to McCowan station This line is above grade 1980–85 6.40 km

Total Rapid-Transit Length 64.90 km

Expenditure C a l c ul ati on s Specific capital costs for infrastructure are not identified in the annual reports; therefore, local media, primarily the Globe and Mail, were used to estimate the construction costs of these lines and their extensions, unless otherwise noted. T i m e F r a m e Construction of the Yonge subway began in 1949. Rapidtransit extension continued through 2001, aligning with this study’s time frame. Outside of our analytical time frame, the Sheppard subway was opened in November 2002. F u n d i n g S o u rc e s Toronto’s rapid-transit-infrastructure funding came primarily from the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto and the TTC during the 1970s. After 1981, however, the TTC no longer contributed capital funding to infrastructure-construction projects, and the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto became the primary funding source. The federal and provincial governments also funded specific rapid-transit-infrastructure projects from the 1970s onward. Yonge Subway Total cost (2014 CAD) Original line: Union to Eglinton

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Estimates derived from local media $2,215,571,087.06 $447,142,857.14

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238 Appendix Combined ­extensions, 1968–74

$1,768,428,229.92 Between 1969 and 1975, Metropolitan Toronto collected $488,196,350.91 through the special levy to fund rapid transit. Between 1974 and 1975, an additional $30,467,809.65 came from Metropolitan Toronto’s ­capital fund for rapid transit.

Bloor-Danforth (-University) Subway Estimates derived from local media (Islington and Warden extensions) Total cost $4,800,211,611.43 (2014 CAD) Spadina Subway Total cost (2014 CAD) Original construction Extension to Downsview station Scarborough RT Costing Cost (2014 CAD)

Estimates derived from local media $4,020,865,748.14 $3,296,770,737.03 $724,095,011.11

Actual $1,426,508,175.05 Costs escalated due to changes in technology pursued by the provincial government (i.e., the use of linear induction motors)

Total expenditure $12,463,156,621.68

Capital Expenditures, 1949–96 Year

Total expenditure (2014 CAD )

Year

Total expenditure (2014 CAD )

1949

74,523,809.52

1960

152,717,457.60

1950

74,523,809.52

1961

745,995,723.08

1951

74,523,809.52

1962

422,788,022.63

1952

74,523,809.52

1963

266,833,133.83

1953

74,523,809.52

1964

803,936,362.29

1954

74,523,809.52

1965

921,623,874.35

1955

0.00

1966

222,757,365.43

1956

0.00

1967

409,156,159.96

1957

0.00

1968

39,361,722.24

1958

0.00

1969

111,879,857.02

1959

28,333,756.66

1970

234,352,425.24

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Appendix

239

1971

435,431,065.91

1984

543,399,196.01

1972

530,583,452.98

1985

268,218,464.00

1973

302,924,852.48

1986

494,329,725.73

1974

113,894,854.05

1987

452,521,478.65

1975

325,934,753.86

1988

283,193,178.47

1976

653,546,752.77

1989

171,730,970.19

1977

921,821,042.42

1990

142,845,930.32

1978

328,527,597.77

1991

188,902,916.16

1979

372,946,269.72

1992

253,922,652.33

1980

124,595,888.11

1993

33,029,086.81

1981

110,759,229.81

1994

33,029,086.81

1982

191,078,936.80

1995

33,029,086.81

1983

313,052,348.43

1996

33,029,086.81

Total

12,463,156,621.68

Total capital expenditures on rapid transit were calculated from the annual reports of both the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto and the TTC . For each year they reflect total expended by both funders with the following exceptions: 1 From 1949 to 1954 the cost of the original Yonge subway line was divided evenly over each year of construction. 2 Between 1993 and 1996, expenditure on the Spadina subway line extension to Downsview station was spread evenly over the project’s construction years.

Vancouver p o p u l at i o n

The population of Vancouver was calculated for the years 1976–85 based upon the city’s 1981 census boundary within the Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD). For 1986 to 2014 the GV R D was defined on the B C Stats website and closely aligns with the Local Health Areas (Government of British Columbia, n.d.). The GVRD populations in 1956, 1961, and 1971 are for the metropolitan area definitions according to the respective census years. The population of Vancouver city declined from 1971 to 1976. From 1986 to 2014 the figures for the City of Vancouver relate to the Vancouver Local Health Area, for which each year’s population is recorded. These data are all

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240 Appendix

a little higher in the actual census year data for the city in 1986, 1991, 1996, 2001, 2006, and 2011. The official census populations between 1986 and 2014 for the City of Vancouver were obtained in census years. The growth rate in population from year to year relates to that of the Local Health Area to give a better estimate for the city in the inter-census years. m u n i c i pa l b o u n d a r i e s

The study area for Vancouver’s urban mobility infrastructure comprises the combined municipalities of Vancouver, Burnaby, and New Westminster. In 2007 the G VRD was renamed Metro Vancouver and represents twenty-one municipalities (including Vancouver, Burnaby, and New Westminster) along with an Electoral Area and one Treaty First Nation (Metro Vancouver, n.d.). TransLink, Metro Vancouver’s transportation authority, was formed in 1998 and given responsibility for the major road network, public transit, and transportation planning within Metro Vancouver (including the three municipalities within this study (TransLink 2016b). e x p r e s s way s

Length Measurement Expressways were measured using Google Earth’s line tool. A line was overlaid on the expressways, following their routes through the study area. Each expressway was also divided into segments based upon width. These segments were used to identify the number of lanes present. Again, this was done using Google Earth. Merge lanes were not included in the lane calculations. If a new lane came into existence between intersections, the start and end point of that lane was deemed to be the start and end of the segment. For those lanes that began or ended at an intersection, the midpoint of the intersection was used to define the start or end of the segment. Determination of the number of lanes was completed by examining the satellite imagery provided within Google Earth, which shows the lanes in use and allows for exclusion of the shoulders. Primary measurements were taken from 23 to 27 May 2016, a second set of measurements was completed from 7 to 9 June, and a final measurement was taken on 14 June 2016. All Google Earth imagery is dated 2015.

Limits, Gaps, and Notes Early spending on expressways in British Columbia is difficult to determine because the provincial government did not identify spending on specific sections of road-infrastructure projects. Capital expenditure is reported in

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241

aggregate for road construction across the province. For example, in 1949 the Government of Canada’s Trans-Canada Highway Act created a cost-share program between the federal and provincial governments to build the TransCanada Highway. Provincial governments began accessing this fund in 1950 (Government of Canada 2012). In the 1950 provincial budget this costsharing program appeared as a borrowing limit of $5 million of which British Columbia used approximately half to fund the Trans-Canada Highway infrastructure. However, specific infrastructure segments built with this funding were not identified (Government of British Columbia 1950). In 1990 the Government of British Columbia created the Freedom to Move special account, which provided $3.5 billion over five years to fund new mobilityinfrastructure projects (Government of British Columbia 1990). Then in 1993 the BC Transportation Financing Authority was created to fund expressways, bridges, and roads (Government of British Columbia 1993). In 1998 the Government of British Columbia announced that it would be adding new HOV lanes to the Trans-Canada Highway in Burnaby (Government of British Columbia 1998). When private funding was used to build capital projects, such as the Lions Gate Bridge, it was difficult to trace the funding and yearly spending. Best estimations from historical documents have been made. Construction of the Stanley Park Causeway occurred only following a plebiscite in 1933 (McCord Museum, n.d.). When it purchased the Lions Gate Bridge, the Government of British Columbia bought 99% of the First Narrows Bridge Company’s shares (Bennett 1955). British Columbia has used tolls to help recover the capital costs of bridges and expressways at times in its history. As such, the Lions Gate Bridge, Oak Street Bridge, and Second Narrows Bridge all had tolls in the past. In 1953 the Toll Highways and Bridges Authority was established to oversee future construction paid by these tolls. Then in 1963 the provincial government passed legislation to phase out tolls by 1964. By this time the cost of the Lions Gate Bridge and Second Narrows Bridge had been paid. This meant that the original Port Mann Bridge opened without toll collection (Bennett 1963, 1962, 1958). These tolls may have been forgone because the federal government had agreed to pay half of the costs for the first Port Mann Bridge (e.g., two lanes out of four). The provincial government paid the remaining costs of the bridge (Bennett 1963). When the Trans-Canada Highway was built from 1957 to 1964, a small portion (2.3 km) was not built to full expressway standards. It was upgraded from 1990 to 1992 as the Cassiar Connector in Vancouver. Despite this upgrade, the stretch that became the Cassiar Connector was still part of the

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original construction costs and did not add length to the expressway. We have thus decided to include both rounds of capital expenditure for the original construction, plus the upgrade, because it was only after the second round of spending that the 2.3 km of this infrastructure could be classified as an expressway. As yearly capital expenditures were not reported for the Trans-Canada Highway, they have been calculated using the same methodology as in Toronto; that is, known expenditures were evenly divided over known years of construction. A similar interpolation was used for the Stanley Park Causeway, using known costs from Highway 99. As contributions from different levels of government were unspecified, and expressways within British Columbia are entirely owned and built by the Province, except the Lions Gate Bridge and its approach through Stanley Park, expressway capital spending was assigned to the provincial government unless clear evidence of an alternative source was found.

Overview Trans-Canada Highway Jurisdictions Vancouver and Burnaby Construction periods 1957–64 Second Narrows Bridge (opened in 1960) to East Columbia Street 1990–92 Cassiar Connector This 2.3 km section was not considered expressway ­standard prior to re-construction 2008–15 Widening project from East Columbia Street to McGill Street Primary sources BC Transportation Investment Corporation annual reports British Columbia provincial budget British Columbia Ministry of Transportation and Highways Secondary sources C. Davis (1997, n.d.) Janberg (2016a, 2016b) Highway 99 Jurisdiction Construction periods 1934–38 1955 1956–57 1999

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Vancouver Stanley Park Causeway and Lions Gate Bridge British Columbia government’s purchase of Lions Gate Bridge Oak Street Bridge built Lions Gate Bridge rehabilitated

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Appendix Primary sources

Secondary sources

243

British Columbia Ministry of Transportation and Highways (n.d.) W.A.C. Bennett budget speeches McCord Museum (n.d.) West Vancouver Archives (n.d.) West Vancouver Heritage Society (2012) D’Acres and Luxton (1999) Kheraj (n.d.)

Physical Characteristics Trans-Canada Highway Section Length Lanes Features

Section Length Lanes Section Length Lanes Total length

East Columbia Street to Grandview Highway 10.34 km 8 HOV lane Overpass over railway tracks Overpass over Central Valley Greenway Grandview Highway to McGill Street 3.79 km 6 Overpass over Boundary Road Overpass over Lougheed Highway Overpass over East First Avenue Tunnel under Adanac Street and East Hastings Street McGill Street to Second Narrows Bridge 0.63 km 6 lanes Second Narrows Bridge 1.30 km 6 16.06 km

Highway 99 Section Length Lanes Section Length Lanes Section Length Lanes

Oak Street Bridge 1.65 km (Marine Drive to Bridgeport Road) 4 Denman Street to Lions Gate Bridge 2.40 km 3 Lions Gate Bridge 1.50 km 3

Section Length Lanes Features

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244 Appendix Total length

5.55 km

Total length 21.61 km.

Expenditure Trans-Canada Highway

Original construction Second Narrows Bridge Cassiar Connector Total

Actual Estimates based on actual $67,905,816.45 (estimate) $133,936,170.21 (actual) $185,147,058.82 (actual) $386,989,045.48

Highway 99 Actual and estimates Stanley Park Causeway Lions Gate Bridge BC purchase of Lions Gate Bridge Oak Street Bridge Lions Gate Bridge rehabilitation Total

$19,463,225.81 (estimate) $119,866,251.81 (privately financed) $49,567,503.38 (actual, not included in total) $76,560,810.81 (actual) $116,257,478.63 (actual, not included in total) $215,890,288.43 (not including B C government purchase of the Lions Gate Bridge and rehabilitation costs for Lions Gate Bridge)

Total cost $602,879,333.91 (not including BC purchase of Lions Gate Bridge and the rehabilitation of Lions Gate Bridge)

Capital Expenditures, 1933–99 Year

Expenditure (2014 CAD )

1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938

21,840,277.78 3,892,645.16 3,892,645.16 3,892,645.16 101,918,619.19 3,892,645.16

1956

38,280,405.41

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Appendix 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964

80,252,675.01 41,972,269.61 41,972,269.61 41,972,269.61 8,488,227.06 8,488,227.06 8,488,227.06 8,488,227.06

1990 1991 1992

61,715,686.27 61,715,686.27 61,715,686.27

Total

602,879,333.91

245

rapid transit

Measurements Measurements were taken using Google Earth’s line tool. A line was overlaid on the SkyTrain routes. These measurements followed the routes to key stations (Waterfront, New Westminster, Columbia, Bridgeport, Y V R Airport, and Brighouse) to assess the length of each line. Initial measurements were completed from 23 to 27 May 2016, a second set of measurements was completed from 7 to 9 June, and a final measurement was taken on 14 June 2016. All Google Earth imagery is dated 2015.

Limits, Gaps, and Notes While multiple claims for funding the Expo Line can be found in the media, according to annual reports of BC Transit this agency was the sole contributor of capital to construct Vancouver’s first rapid-transit line, with the exception of a loan from the Government of British Columbia. The Millennium Line shares some right-of-way with the Expo Line. During its construction some of the Expo Line infrastructure was upgraded to accommodate the additional capacity of the new line; these upgrades included improvements to the Metrotown and Main Street stations. Although TransLink expended the capital, these funds came entirely from the Province.

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246 Appendix

Overview Expo Line Jurisdictions Primary sources

Secondary sources

Vancouver, Burnaby, and New Westminster BC Transit annual reports Government of British Columbia provincial budgets Government of British Columbia Hansard Urban Transit Authority annual reports TransLink Harcourt and Cameron (2007) Ross and Staw (1986) Siemiatycki (2006a, 2006b)

The Millennium Line opened on 7 January 2002. We include it in our data set because most of the capital had been expended before 2002, and the line was fully functional by the end of 2001, with a somewhat arbitrary decision to open for revenue service after the holiday season of 2001. Millennium Line Jurisdictions

Project scope

Primary sources

Secondary sources

Vancouver, Burnaby, and New Westminster (A 1.06 km segment of this route runs through Coquitlam, making no stops there) Construction (beyond Columbia Station) Expansion (a shared portion with Expo Line included expansions to the Metrotown and Main Street stations) Government of British Columbia provincial budgets Greater Vancouver Regional Transportation Authority (2002) TransLink annual reports and financial statements Gannett Fleming Inc. (2001) Rapid Transit Project 2000 Ltd. (2004) Special Commission SkyTrain Review (1999)

Physical Characteristics Expo Line Section Years Length Section Years Length

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Vancouver to New Westminster 1981–86 20.93 km New Westminster to Columbia 1984–89 0.60 km

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Appendix Millennium Line Section Years Section

Total length

247

Vancouver to New Westminster (shared with the Expo Line) 1999–2002 New Westminster to Vancouver (via Coquitlam and Burnaby) In 1999–2002 the project had an accelerated construction schedule. 20.00 km (plus 21.7 km shared with the Expo Line; 1.06 km lies within Coquitlam)

Total rapid-transit length 41.53 km

Expenditure Expo Line Actual and estimate $3,383,229,139.93 $60,285,815.86 (estimated for the 0.60 km stretch from New Westminster station to Columbia station, using the total per km cost of the 7.67 km extension into Surrey) Millennium Line Actual Total cost (2014 CAD) $2,014,584,953.04 Original line Extension to Columbia

Total costs $5,458,099,908.83

Capital Expenditures, 1981–2002 Year

Total expenditure (2014 CAD )

1981

123,774,597.50

1982

27,742,436.12

1983

651,782,400.66

1984

1,191,515,171.48

1985

1,394,081,863.06

1986

9,004,972.91

1987

20,134,178.62

1988

24,434,134.90

1989

1,045,200.54

1990

0.00

1998

0.00

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248 Appendix 1999

178,754,273.50

2000

638,817,898.02

2001

1,098,517,241.38

2002

98,495,540.14

Total

5,458,099,908.83

Expenditure for the extension to Columbia station is based upon the per km cost of the entire extension multiplied by the 0.60 km length of this extension and then distributed over the 1984–89 period.

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Notes

chapter one

  1 The postwar American highway-building phenomenon reached its fiscal apogee with the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act (also known as the Interstate Highway Act), which made $25 billion available between 1957 and 1969 for highway expansion. This funding would amount to ­approximately $1.9 trillion in 2010 dollars. Ninety per cent of these ­infrastructure costs were covered by the federal treasury, and the program was presided over by a massive highway-building bureaucracy in the Federal Highway Administration (U.S. Department of Transportation 2008; Lewis 1997).   2 For examples of precise definitions that are consistently applied ­throughout a national highway network, see the U.S. Federal Highway Administration’s Highway Performance Monitoring System, appendix B, accessed 8 October 2018, http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/ hpms/fieldmanual/page00.cfm. chapter three

  1 As noted in chapter 1, for simplicity and brevity the word city or cities is frequently used here to mean metropolitan regions, unless otherwise specified.   2 The metropolitan regions in the comparisons are (in the United States) Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix, San Diego, San Francisco, and Washington; (in Australia) Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth, and Sydney; (in Europe) Berlin, Bern, Brussels, Copenhagen, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Geneva, Graz, Hamburg, Helsinki,

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250

Notes to pages 65–116

London, Madrid, Manchester, Munich, Oslo, Prague, Stockholm, Stuttgart, Vienna, and Zürich; and (in Asia) Singapore and Hong Kong.   3 Toronto in the 1950s and Montreal in the 1960s were the first Canadian cities to invest in rail rapid transit. They were followed by Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver in the 1980s, with Ottawa preferring to develop busways on expressways until 2001, when light rail transit was initiated.   4 One simple reason for this is that any brief survey using Google Earth reveals that Canadian suburban lots tend to have much narrow frontages than do the American ranch-style, wide lots so prevalent in US suburbia. This means that there tend to be more lots per unit length of road, with more dwellings able to be built in a given area. Another reason is that the suburbs of Canadian cities are peppered with what often seem to be incongruous and significant pockets of high-density apartments, often over ten storeys, towering above their suburban neighbours. Such land-use ­configurations are not generally seen in either the United States or Australia, due to much stricter and mono-cultural low-density zoning practices.   5 Freeways are referred to in Canada as expressways, similar to in the United Kingdom where they are termed motorways. To be clear, expressways are identical to the more commonly used global term of freeways.  6 The n values for global regions shown in figures 3.14 through 3.24 are as follows: US cities, n=10; Australian cities, n=4; Canadian cities, n=5; and European cities, n=20. chapter four

  1 The Millennium SkyTrain line in Vancouver opened on 7 January 2002 and was included in the analysis as it was so close to 1 January. However, the Sheppard subway in Toronto, which was opened in November 2002, was excluded from the analyses.   2 Adding the remaining years up to 2002 to graphs simply to show zero ­relevant expenditures detracts from the readability of the graphs by further extending what is already a very extended horizontal axis.   3 See data in Kenworthy and Laube (2001) showing how higher density ­cities have higher levels of both transit service and transit use than do lower density cities.   4 There was continued investment spending in Montreal’s rapid-transit ­system post-1990, but in the period up to 2002 there was no network expansion. Expansion restarted in 2007, which is outside the temporal bounds of our analysis.

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Notes to pages 117–27

251

  5 Note that from 2002 to 2013 in our defined Toronto area there were no further additions to the length of either expressways or rapid-transit ­networks (in 2013 both still stood at 109 km and 72 km, respectively).   6 The Sheppard subway extension, which opened in November 2002, incurred considerable investment prior to 2002, but this is not included in our core analysis due to the cut-off date of 1 January 2002. Additionally, rapid-transit extension in Toronto saw a renewed and aggressive spending cycle commencing in 2006, which up to 2013 saw a further $6.9 billion expended on extension and some upgrading of the rapid-transit system within the current City of Toronto.   7 See for example http://international.stockholm.se/city-development/ slussen/ and http://www.fosterandpartners.com/news/archive/2016/07/ construction-work-begins-on-foster-plus-partners-new-slussen-masterplan/ (accessed 4 November 2016).   8 The trend of rapid-transit expansion outpacing expressway infrastructure continues well beyond the years in our data set. By 2014, including the part of the Canada Line within core urban boundaries, Vancouver’s ­rapid-transit-infrastructure length stood at almost 51 km, or 2.35 times the length of the expressway infrastructure.   9 All costs are in Canadian 2014 constant dollars. 10 “The Cassiar Connector takes Highway 1 (Trans-Canada Highway) under the interchange of Hastings Street (Highway 7A),” accessed 4 November 2016, http://www.translink.ca/en/Getting-Around/Driving/Traffic-Cameras/ Bridges-and-Tunnels/Cassiar-Connector.aspx. 

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Abu-Lughod, J., 9 activism. See community resistance air transport, 10–11, 11f, 12f, 199 ambivalence, 22, 30; institutionalized, 22, 51, 188; outcomes of, 207; toward mobility infrastructure, 30 ambivalent urbanism, 33, 195, 197 Asian cities: automobile dependence, 81, 85; density, 62; emissions, 84; fatalities, 84; indicators of transportation and land use, 58, 59–61, 250n2; mode split of all trips, 80 Atlanta, 63f, 68f, 81, 82f Australian cities, 58, 59–61, 87, 249n2, 250n4. See also mobility comparisons by city; specific cities automobility: aspirations, 170, 179; automobile dependence, 60, 80–2, 87, 92, 93, 96; automobile ownership, 59, 61, 76–7, 87, 88, 89; and expressways, 72, 126, 128, 167; impacts of, 173; research on, 57; suburban, 171; travel per G DP dollar earned, 61,

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85, 87, 92, 95f; and urban density, 67 Bartholomew, Harland, 178 Beaverstock, Jonathan V., 9 Bloor-Danforth subway (Toronto), 139 boosterism, 100–1 Brisbane, 82f British North America Act, 35 Bunting, Trudi, 104 Burnaby: boundaries, 104–5, 106f; density, 122; funding, 127f, 129f, 151; mobility infrastructure, 108, 110f, 123–5 Burrard Inlet, 17, 123, 178, 181 Burrard Peninsula, 104, 142 busways, 7 Calgary: automobile dependence, 81, 82, 82f, 85; density, 62f; emissions, 84; employment density, 71; expressways, 72, 75; fatalities, 84; gross domestic product, 71; indicators of transportation and land use, 58, 59–61; mode split of all trips, 80;

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motorcycle ownership, 77; public transit, 67f, 75, 78, 83; road network speeds, 77 Campbell, Tom, 183 Canaburbs. See suburbs Canada: ambivalence in, 21–2, 187–8; expressway funding, 131, 133–5, 143, 161, 163, 164, 181; governance, 22, 51, 101; immigration policy effects, 6, 41, 47, 100, 176, 190, 203, 205; Pacific gateway funding, 14; rapid-transit funding, 141, 143; rapid-­ transit infrastructure, 43, 74, 250n3; road-building programs, 18, 27; settlement patterns, 191– 4; transportation and urban ­policies, 8; urban form, 55 Canadian cities: attributes, 24, 27; concept of, 19, 23, 192; density, 192–4, 195f; development patterns, 24, 31; differences in, 19, 22–3, 27; effects of Canadian cultural attributes on, 25–6; effects of equivocation on, 31–2; global significance, 24; vs. US cities, 25–6, 193–4. See also mobility comparisons by city; suburbs; specific cities Canadians: national character, 19, 25–6, 30, 186 Canadian urbanism: dimensions of, 87; distinctiveness, 86–92, 93, 94, 95f, 96; similarities with other countries, 87, 92, 95; ­variations, 87, 95 capital: and equivocation effects, 21; and global-city aspirations, 4, 27, 190; influence on construction timing, 8; investment hubs,

31713_Perl.indd 294

10, 12, 99–100; linked to mobility infrastructure, 100, 101, 187, 190, 195, 197, 207; and local aspirations, 154, 160; private, 29–30, 145, 181; strategies to attract, 29–30, 155, 177; and suburban development, 184, 191, 196, 197, 206. See also global capital Cassiar Connector, 124, 127, 145 Castells, Manuel, 9 central business districts (C B Ds), 56, 70–1, 87, 95 Chicago, 63f, 68f, 82f Chinatown (Vancouver), 17, 159, 175, 177, 182 city, terminology, 5, 192, 249n1. See also Canadian cities city centre, terminology, 6 City of Montreal boundaries, 103, 104f City of Toronto, 29, 103 Cloward, Richard, 158 Colton, Timothy J., 45 Common Front Against the Highway, 165 community resistance, 20; to expressways, 16, 17, 18, 160–3, 164–6, 166–74, 174–83; groups, 162–3, 164–5, 166–7, 169–70, 171–3, 175, 176–7, 182–3; influence on mobility projects, 38, 48–9, 165–6, 173, 176, 183; measuring success of, 156–60, 161–3, 173–4, 177–8; outcomes generally, 166, 183–4, 183–5, 187, 207; patterns of, 154–6, 160; and perspectives on mobility infrastructure, 153–4, 170. See also Spadina Expressway

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Index

commuter rail, 65 Confederation of Residents’ and Ratepayers’ Associations (C O R R A), 171 Copenhagen, 63 core city, terminology, 6 corporate relocations, 10, 11–14, 34, 40 Courchene, Thomas J., 14 Crosstown Expressway, 167–8 cycling, 80, 175 data collection: data boundaries, 5, 101–6, 250n2; dictionary, 54, 209–48; goals, 109; measurement standards for, 7, 54, 106–9, 250n6 Davis, William, 17, 46, 173 Denver, 63f, 68f, 81, 82f Dion, Leon, 34 Don Valley Parkway, 44, 167, 170 Drapeau, Jean, 15–16, 37, 163 Dunsmuir and Georgia viaducts, 48, 123, 179 East York, 103 ecological concerns, 84, 173, 175– 6, 189 Edmonton: automobile dependence, 82f; density, 58, 62f; fatalities, 84; gross domestic product, 71; indicators of transportation and land use, 59–61; mode split of all trips, 80; motorcycle ownership, 77; public transport, 74, 78; ratio of transit routes to expressways, 75; traffic speeds, 79; transit operating-cost recovery, 83; transit usage, 67f, 83 emissions, 61, 84, 86, 95

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295

employment density, 59, 70–1, 87, 88, 89, 95 English-French relations, 11–12, 33–6, 39–40, 165 Énoncé de L’intérêt patrimonial du Métro de Montréal, 107 equivocation: and accommodation, 186, 187–8, 205, 207; as Canadian characteristic, 30; causes of, 187; effect on suburbs, 20, 184–5, 188–9, 190, 195, 196–7; and institutionalized ambivalence, 22; and mobility comparisons, 66–7, 96; in mobility-infrastructure development, 19, 30–3, 52; outcomes of, 47–8, 50, 186–90, 207; on policy, 20, 30–1, 115, 136, 138, 142, 144, 147; and pursuit of global capital, 187 Etobicoke, 103 European cities, 58, 59–61, 249– 50n2. See also mobility comparisons by city Evill, Brett, 57 Expo 67 (Montreal), 10, 38–9, 113, 114, 151 Expo 86 (Vancouver), 8, 14, 124, 128, 151 expressway infrastructure: and automobility, 72; construction timing, 8; measurements, 7, 107; terminology, 6–7, 106, 249n2. See also community resistance; mobility comparisons by city; specific cities; specific expressways fatalities, 61, 84–5, 86, 87, 95 Filion, Pierre, 104

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financial centres, 10, 12 Florida, Richard, 169 Fraser River, 123, 128 freeways. See expressway infrastructure French-English relations, 11–12, 33–6, 39–40, 165 Friedmann, John, 9 Frisken, Frances, 26 Galantay, Ervin, 39 Gamson, William, 158 Gardiner Expressway, 44, 167, 170 Gateway program, 204 gentrification, 166, 169, 184 Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts, 48, 123, 179 Giugni, Marco G., 158, 159 global capital: attracting, 20, 29; and community resistance, 153, 154; effects on mobility infrastructure, 4, 101, 177; pursuit of, 145, 151, 187, 195; in suburbs, 184, 191, 196, 197, 206; urban relationship to, 190 global city: aspirations, 4–5, 8, 100–1, 196; attributes, 9–15, 11f, 12f, 13f, 18, 34; formation, defined, 100; theories and research, 4, 9–10 globalization, 100 global vs. local aspirations, 15–18, 20, 30, 207; and equivocation, 30–1; and global-city-development strategies, 23, 151–2; influences on city form, 101; and mobility comparisons by city, 95–6; and ratio of transit routes to expressways, 95. See also community resistance Globe and Mail, 172

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Goldberg, Michael A., 19, 25–7, 54, 58 Good, Kristin R., 26 Google Earth, 107, 108 Google Maps, 107 Gordon, David L.A., 191, 193 Greater Toronto Area (GTA), 14, 97 Greater Vancouver Regional District, 49–50, 104 Greenpeace, 176 gross domestic product, 59, 71, 87, 95 Guinness family, 145, 151, 181 Hall, Peter, 9 Harcourt, Michael, 50 heritage sites, protection of, 162 Highway 401, traffic volume of, 159, 200 highways. See expressway infrastructure Hogan’s Alley, 179 Housing and Urban Renewal Committee, 164 Houston, 63f, 68f, 82, 82f, 249n2 Hutton, Thomas, 104 Indigenous lands, 190, 197, 200–1, 203 International Journal of Canadian Studies, 26 Jacobs, Jane, 40, 45, 172 Kaplan, Harold, 35 Kenworthy, Jeffrey, 54, 55, 56, 96, 112 Lakeshore Expressway, 44 land use and transportation, key indicators of, 59–61

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Index

Laube, Felix B., 54, 56, 96, 112 Laval: attributes, 197, 198; effect of equivocation on, 20, 184; and global capital, 206; history, 197– 8; mobility infrastructure, 198–9; population, 198, 199, 200t Lee, Jo-Anne, 48, 179, 182 Leo, Christopher, 177 level crossings, 50 Ley, David, 169, 170, 176, 177 light rail transit (LRT), 49–50, 62, 64f, 74, 108, 203 Lions Gate Bridge: development, 29, 48, 123; funding, 102, 123, 126, 145, 151, 181 local vs. global aspirations. See community resistance; global vs. local aspirations Los Angeles: automobile dependence, 82f; density, 58, 63; mobility infrastructure, 65; ­transit usage, 65, 68f Lower Mainland (BC), 47, 122, 151 Lower Westmount Citizens’ Committee, 164–5 mega-events, 7–8, 29, 37, 38, 198 Melbourne, 82 Mercer, Joseph, 19, 25–7, 54, 58 metropolitan region, terminology, 6 Metropolitan Transportation Agency (AM T), 103 Miron, John, 193–4 Mississauga: attributes, 199–200, 202; effect of equivocation on, 20, 184; and global capital, 206; history, 200–1; mobility infrastructure, 199, 200, 201–2; ­population, 200, 201, 202t mobility comparisons by city, 19, 53–98; categories of Canadian

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297

urbanism, 55, 87; data time frame, 54; emissions, 61, 84, 86, 95; employment density, 59, 70–1, 88, 89, 95; and equivocation, 66–7, 96; fatalities, 61, 84–5, 86, 87, 95; global vs. local aspirations, 95–6; gross domestic product, 59, 71, 95; influences on infrastructure, 57; key indicators of transportation and land use, 53, 58, 59–61; methodology, 55–6; mode split of all trips, 60, 80; private mobility, 80–2, 85, 92, 93, 95f, 96; private transport infrastructure, 72–3, 86; private transport supply, 76–7, 88, 89; public-private transport balance, 75, 79, 86, 95; public transport infrastructure, 73–5; public transport mobility, 65–7, 68f, 82–3, 90, 91, 92, 94; public transport supply and service, 78–9, 88, 90f; research perspectives, 55, 57; traffic intensity, 77, 86; urban density, 58, 62–4, 88, 88f, 96, 97, 250n4; urban density and transit usage linked, 67–9, 250n4 mobility infrastructure: accommodation through equivocation, 30–3, 186, 187–8, 205, 207; data boundaries, 101–6; differences in Canadian cities, 22–3; funding, 20, 99–100, 136, 138, 151–2; and global aspirations, 4–5; influences on, 3–4, 22, 28–30, 57, 148; and institutionalized ambivalence, 21–2; municipal strategies, 50–2; popular perspectives on, 153–4, 170; research into, 22; scope of

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298 Index

research, 8. See also mobility comparisons by city; specific cities Montreal: attributes, 10–14, 24, 34, 160; automobile dependence, 40, 54, 60, 76–7, 81, 82f; as commercial hub, 34, 37; community resistance, 38, 159, 160–3, 164– 6; corporate relocations, 13; ­density, 62–3, 66f, 68, 112, 194, 195f; equivocation, 136, 138, 161, 188–9; expressway network plans, 162–4, 165; expressway provision, 72, 73, 107, 108f, 111, 112, 113–14; funding, 7, 39, 51, 102, 112, 113–16, 117f, 127, 128, 131–8, 147–50, 250n4; funding sources, 38, 131–6, 137, 139, 164; global-city aspirations, 15–16, 155, 161, 163; global influences on, 99, 100; gross domestic product, 59, 71; indicators of transportation and land use, 58, 59–61; mega-events, 29, 37, 38, 151; mega-projects, 39, 163–4; mobility-infrastructure development, 36, 66, 110–12; mode split of all trips, 60, 80; municipal boundaries, 36, 51, 102, 103, 104f; political influences, 33–7, 35, 39–40; population, 122, 193, 194, 195f; public transport provision, 59, 74, 79, 107, 108f, 111, 112; public transport vs. road traffic speeds, 60, 79; ratio of transit routes to expressways, 75; road network, 60, 77, 164; streetcars, 36; subway (Metro), 16, 69, 160, 199; transit usage, 40, 65–6, 67f, 68, 69, 83. See also Laval

31713_Perl.indd 298

Montreal Metro: funding, 114, 132; infrastructure, 107, 160, 189, 199; usage, 16, 69, 199 Moore, Aaron A., 23 motorcycle ownership, 59, 77, 87 motorways. See expressway infrastructure Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto: boundaries, 103, 105f; density, 97; expressway funding, 43, 45, 136, 139, 140f, 141, 167, 172; politics, 172; rapid-transit funding, 45; transportation plans, 45, 46, 167, 168–9, 170–1 Myth of the North American City, The (Goldberg and Mercer), 19, 25–7, 26 Narrows Bridge, 123, 127 neighbourhood destruction, 161–2, 164, 165, 170, 179–80, 184 “Newburncouver,” 105 Newman, Peter, 54, 55 New Orleans, 63f New Westminster: boundaries, 104–5, 106f, 122; density, 122; funding, 127f, 129f, 151; mobility infrastructure, 108–9, 110f, 123–5 New York City: automobile dependence, 82, 82f; boundaries, 5; density, 58, 63f; pedestrian traffic, 55; transit usage, 40, 42, 55, 65, 68f, 69 North American Free Trade Agreement, 14 North York, 16, 45, 71, 103, 169 Occupy movement, 156 Olympic Games (Summer 1976), 38, 39, 40, 113, 115, 136, 151, 198

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Index

Olympic Games (Winter 2010), 129 Ottawa: automobile dependence, 82f, 85; busways, 7; density, 62; emissions, 84; indicators of transportation and land use, 58, 59–61; public transport service, 78; ratio of transit routes to expressways, 75; transit usage, 65, 67f, 68

299

Province of Quebec: expressway funding, 38, 131, 132–4, 136, 161, 163–4; jurisdiction over municipalities, 51; mobility infrastructure funding, 38, 155, 166; municipal amalgamation, 103, 198; nationalism, 11–12, 33–6, 39–40, 165; rapid-transit funding, 132, 135, 136, 137 Queen Elizabeth Way, 201

Parti Québécois, 11, 165 Pearson International Airport, 199 Perl, Anthony, 54 Perth, 82f Phoenix, 63f, 68f, 69, 82f, 97 Pill, Juri, 24, 96, 97 Piven, Frances Fox, 158 policy equivocation, 20, 30–1, 115, 136, 138, 142, 144, 147 Poor People’s Movements (Piven and Cloward), 158 population. See specific cities Portland, 63f Progressive Conservative Party, 173 Project 200, 180, 181 Province of British Columbia: expressway funding, 18, 49, 145, 146; Gateway program, 204; on light rail transit, 49–50; mobility infrastructure funding, 18, 145– 7, 148f, 151; Pacific gateway initiative, 14; rapid-transit funding, 49, 145, 147, 148; rural infrastructure funding, 49 Province of Ontario: expressway funding, 16, 44, 46, 121, 136, 139–40, 143, 171, 172; politics, 173; rapid-transit funding, 140– 2, 143; road-construction funding, 167

31713_Perl.indd 299

Raad, Tamim, 54 rapid-transit infrastructure: Canada vs. United States, 43; construction timing, 8; definition, 107; history in Canada, 29, 43, 250n3; measurements, 7, 107–9; municipal funding, 43. See also mobility comparisons by city; specific cities real estate markets, 48, 126, 145, 151 research, 22, 55, 56 Richmond (B C ), 123, 129 road lengths, comparisons by city, 59, 72, 86, 87 Robinson, Danielle, 171, 174 Rocher, François, 35 San Diego, 63f, 68f, 82f San Francisco, 58, 63f, 68f, 82f, 194 Sassen, Saskia, 9 Scarborough, 71, 103, 108 Seattle, 63f Sewell, John, 169, 171 Shirokoff, Isaac, 191, 193 SkyTrain: Canada Line, 75, 76f, 129, 251n8; Expo Line, 124, 145; measurements, 109–10;

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300 Index

Millennium Line, 128, 145, 250n1; in suburbs, 203–4; and urban density, 62, 64f, 69, 70f, 122 “slum” clearance, 17, 37, 48–9, 182 Smith, Richard G., 9 Social Credit Party (BC), 49 social movement impact theory, 158 social movements. See community resistance; specific movements Spadina Expressway: construction, 46, 171; funding, 46, 168, 172, 174; plans, 16, 45, 167–9; policy reversal, 166–7, 173; political campaign against, 172; resistance groups, 45, 166–7, 169–70, 171– 3; resistance outcomes, 159, 173–4; resistance to, 16–17; and urban-suburban conflicts, 169, 170 Spadina Review Corporation, 172 Stanley Park Causeway: development, 29, 48, 123, 174; funding, 102, 126, 145, 151 Statistics Canada, 192, 193 stock exchanges, 13–14 Stockholm, 63, 123 Stop Spadina, Save Our City Coordinating Committee (S S S O C C C), 45, 46, 165, 171–3 Strategy of Social Protest, The (Gamson), 158 Strathcona Expressway, 17, 49, 159, 177, 179–81, 182 Strathcona Property Owners and Tenants Association, 48–9, 182 streetcars, 36, 41–3, 116 streetcar suburbs, 42

31713_Perl.indd 300

suburban-urban dynamics, 169, 170, 189–90, 197, 205, 206 suburbs: attributes, 205; and automobile dependence, 96; definition, 193; density, 56, 97–8, 193–4, 250n4; development and funding, 184; effects of equivocation on, 20, 184–5, 188–9, 190, 196–7; and global capital, 196, 197, 206; lot sizes, 250n4; populations, 191–2; terminology, 6. See also Laval; Mississauga; Surrey subways. See Montreal Metro; Toronto Surrey, 20, 184, 202–5, 206 Sydney, 82 Taylor, Peter J., 9 Taylor, Zack, 29 terminology, 5–7, 33, 56, 250n5 The Electors Action Movement (TEA M), 176–7 Tomalty, Ray, 104 Toronto: attributes, 10–14, 24, 99, 166; automobile dependence, 54, 81, 82f, 85, 98; corporate relocations, 13; density, 62–3, 64f, 68, 71, 97, 112, 194, 195f; equivocation, 144, 189; expressway network plans, 51, 167–9, 170–1; expressway provision, 44–6, 72, 73, 74f, 112, 118; funding, 41, 43–4, 45, 46, 51, 102, 117, 119– 21, 122f, 127, 128, 136, 139–44, 147–50, 251n6; funding sources, 136, 139–42; gentrification, 169; global-city aspirations, 16–17, 155; global influences on, 99, 100, 151; indicators of

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Index

transportation and land use, 58, 59–61; light rail transit (LRT), 62, 64f; mobility-infrastructure development, 16–17, 112, 116– 17, 118, 250n1, 251n5; mode split of all trips, 80; motorcycle ownership, 77; municipal boundaries, 103, 105f, 206; politics, 206; population, 41–2, 122, 193, 194, 195f; public transport provision, 29, 60, 78, 79, 108, 109f, 112; ratio of transit routes to expressways, 75; road network speeds, 77; streetcars, 41–3, 116; suburban development, 167; subways, 16, 29, 43–4, 250n1, 251n6; transit operating-cost recovery, 83; transit usage, 41–2, 66, 67f, 83; values, 41, 44. See also Mississauga; Spadina Expressway Toronto Railway Company, 41–2 Toronto Township, 201 Toronto Transit Commission (T T C ), 43–4, 108, 139, 140, 142 trade agreements, 14, 99 traffic congestion, 162, 170 traffic speeds, 60, 77, 79, 86, 87 Trans-Canada Highway: definition, 7; funding, 131, 145, 164, 181; infrastructure, 17, 164, 165, 204 Trans-Canada Highway Act, 164 Transit Toronto, 108 TransLink, 107 transportation and land use, key indicators of, 59–61 Transportation Association of Canada, 106 Transport Canada, 139 Treaty of Paris, 35

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301

Trizec Corp. Ltd., 168 TTC Operating Statistics, 108 Tuohy, Carolyn J., 21–2, 188 Turcotte, Martin, 192 United States: expressway funding, 249n1; expressway infrastructure, 26, 27; national character, 25; rapid-transit infrastructure, 43. See also mobility comparisons by city urban density: comparisons by city, 58, 59, 62–4, 87, 88, 96, 97, 250n4; linked to transit usage, 67–9, 250n4; and mobility infrastructure, 112. See also specific cities Urbaniak, Tom, 28 urbanism, ambivalent, 33, 195, 197 urbanism, Canadian. See Canadian urbanism urban research, 6, 28 urban-suburban dynamics, 169, 170, 189–90, 197, 205, 206 US cities: bicycle and pedestrian traffic, 55; indicators of transportation and land use, 58, 59–61, 249n2; public transport vs. road traffic speeds, 60, 79; suburban lot sizes, 250n4; urban and suburban densities, 193–4. See also mobility comparisons by city; specific cities Vancouver: attributes, 11, 12f, 14, 18, 24, 99–100, 126, 174–5; automobile dependence, 47, 54, 61, 82f, 85; community resistance, 18, 48–9, 159, 160, 166, 175, 176–8, 182–3; corporate

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302 Index

relocations, 13; density, 62, 64f, 68, 193, 194, 195f; development patterns, 47, 50; equivocation, 47–8, 50, 124, 126, 147, 189; expressway network plans, 48, 176, 178–9, 180–2; expressway provision, 29, 47, 48–9, 72, 123–6; funding, 47, 49, 50, 51, 102, 126–30, 131f, 142, 145–50, 151, 177, 180–1; funding sources, 145–7, 148; global-city aspirations, 17–18, 47, 155, 177, 179; global influences on, 99–100; history, 17, 46–7; indicators of transportation and land use, 58, 59–61; light rail transit (L R T ), 49–50; megaevents, 124, 128, 129, 145, 151; mobility-infrastructure development, 7–8, 121–6; municipal boundaries, 51, 104–5, 106f, 122; official plan, 178; population, 122, 176; public transport provision, 47, 75, 76f, 78, 108– 9, 110f, 124–5, 250n1, 251n8; public transport vs. road traffic speeds, 79; ratio of transit routes to expressways, 61, 75, 76f; real estate market, 48, 126, 145, 151; road network speeds, 77; “slum” clearance, 48–9; suburban

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development, 126; transit usage, 67f, 69, 70f; values, 47. See also Surrey Vancouver Redevelopment Study, 17 Vancouver Sun, 178 Vancouver Town Planning Commission, 178, 181 Vander Zalm, Bill, 49–50 Vienna, 97 “Vienna surrounded by Phoenix,” 96–8 Vuchic, Vukan R., 7, 107 walkability, 31, 32, 175; mode split of trips, 80, 198; in suburbs, 203; in urban core, 96, 159, 162, 166, 189 Walks, Alan R., 104 Washington, DC , 63f, 68f, 82f White, Richard, 139 World Health Organization, 84 Yonge Street subway (Toronto), 29, 43, 44, 142 York, 103 Yorkdale Plaza, 168, 169 Young, Jay, 44 Yu, Henry, 159 Zelko, Frank, 176

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