How Toronto Got Addicted to Cars

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The idea of putting a highway thru a city centre is just insane.

Remember, Torontonians: The "Please vote" is not just a platitude. On October 24th, there will be a very real choice between the status quo and Gil Penalosa, a renowned urbanist who fundamentally gets this stuff. Transportation is political, and the chance to exercise your political views is coming in under a month.

"Toronto will commit suicide if it plunges the Spadina Expressway into it's heart...our planners are 19th century men with a naive faith in an obsolete technology. In the age of software, Metro planners treat people like hardware. They haven't the faintest interest in the values of neighborhoods or community. Their failure to learn from the mistakes of American cities will be ours too" Damn. Miss Jacobs did not pull punches.

I grew up in downtown Toronto. My family did not own a car. We took the bus, subway and street cars everywhere. We would walk to the grocery store up the street. For almost everything else we would shop at Honest Ed's. It was bliss!

"Urban planning is inherently political." Thank you, Not Just Bikes! Such an obvious statement, yet bizarrely controversial.

Even with all its issues, even though I was living in a car dependant suburb in etobicoke it still had the best transit of anywhere I have lived in ontario. It was a culture shock moving out of toronto to the niagara region let me tell you. I had never even wanted to own a car and I was forced into because the transit was so abyssmal

Not only calling it the SkyDome, but editing in a SkyDome logo. Beautiful.

I heard of a stray dog in turkey that rides the bus train and ferry and I’m like wow this dog has better access to transit than me here in America

Doug Ford underfunding transit, education, and healthcare to build a fucking highway through the Greenbelt that even traffic engineers say is fucking useless is the epitomy of what this video spoke of. Anyways, vote Gil Penalosa for mayor. He's an internationally recognized urbanist activist with a detailed plan to end car-addiction in Toronto and dismantle the yellow belt to build housing and liveable communities. Speaking of the yellow belt and Greenbelt, the Greenbelt was created to make the GTA densify, but then the yellow belt was never taken out of the zoning code; and now we have a national housing crisis.

The condo tower/single family home insane juxtaposition of Toronto planning always gets me. Its pretty much the only place in North America where that's so common place everywhere in the metro area.

I sent your last video to my city social media accounts, they made a point to tell me the administration and the planning department saw the video. You're doing the lords work.

As someone who moved to Toronto in 2010, photos of city from the 60s to 90s are chilling

As a Euro kid back in the 2000's, I walked into my doom multiple times in Toronto. Man I'm happy to be walking all over European cities again.

As someone who has to drive into and around Toronto for specialist medical checkups, I'm gonna enjoy listening to you tear into the city's transportation infrastructure. The city is so ungodly stressful to drive in as an outsider that I have the Jazz station saved in my car because it's the only genuinely calming noise available.

I'm literally on a train home from a weekend visit to Toronto and am excited to see how you break this city down. There was a lot to like, but after spending a lot of time in NYC and visiting some European cities, "so close to great yet so far" was my main takeaway.

I worked in Missisauga, a Toronto suburb, and it was the most wretched place to walk to go eat or do anything at all. At the time, I lived in Montreal, and the company I worked at was making me fly and rent a hotel every week. These few months must have made me emit more carbon than I will in the rest of my life. Now I live in Strasbourg, France, and bike everywhere. It's not perfect, but it's much better than Montreal.

Good video as always, though I am less sad about losing transit city! Toronto would be so much better if it had even 20% less cars in it. Edit: Now that I think about it, we built most of the decent stuff in transit city anyways like Eglinton and Finch - albeit worse than we could have!

Politics comes from the greek word for “city”. It literally meant “the affairs of the city” or “city planning”!

I'm visiting my mother in Ontario right now, and I am struck by just how dangerously impatient and indifferent to human life the drivers are. I grew up in Canada, but I only started driving after moving to the U.S. I have driven all over the U.S; in every major city in Florida, and every state along the northern border and around the great lakes, and I have never felt so close to a collision as I have in the couple of days I've been here in Ontario. It is crazy, these people drive like they want you dead.