SENT TO COUNCILLOR GRIME'S OFFICE. July 10 – 2019
(RESULT: Councillor's will retain the opportunity to have a say in sidewalk installations: great where needed; often not required at all.)
To Whom It May Concern:
I am writing you on behalf of The Kingsway Park Ratepayers Incorporated, a group which has existed for over 50 years, representing more than 500 members. We write to you today in regard to the staff recommended change in policy for the approval process for new sidewalks on local roads.
We feel it is essential that the LOCAL WARD Councillor retain final sign off for new sidewalk requests because he knows the concerns and the preferences for his constituents on road resurfacing projects. Etobicoke Community council should retain the final word on road reconstruction projects. Our local Councillor is our elected official; he is our direct proxy for our district and understands the perspectives of the residents, and appreciates the different context each neighbourhood possesses. This process has worked brilliantly ever since I started to volunteer over 25 years ago for The Kingsway Park Ratepayers Inc. As volunteers with jobs and families, none of our Board members wants to be forced downtown during working hours to make presentations of 5 minutes duration or less to either the General Manager of Transportation or a committee upon which our Councillor may or may not be a member. Any hope of illustrating uniqueness will be lost in the generic application of sidewalks, based on isolated requests not necessarily embraced by all the residents of that street.
The local Councillor has to be able to adjudicate sensitively what makes each of his constituent neighborhoods’ unique. Blanket policies eradicate character and ignore everything that makes districts attractive to different people. There is real value in that for the city. That rural look commands a premium in a house sale, and delivers a lot of tax dollars to city coffers.
Permit me to ask you to revisit the origins of the design of the Sunnylea district (and much of Etobicoke) to understand why it continues to work so well without sidewalks. The area was designed to have a heavily treed canopy ( Home- Smith’s desire as the architect in the area and developer of the Kingsway and baby Point) to create “a little bit of England far away from England”; no fences- just hedges, lawns and gardens sweeping to the edge of narrow, slightly humped road with ditches for passive drainage. Snow and rain removal was brilliantly inexpensive, low tech and effective, accomplished by ditches that absorbed run off water, sustaining trees and the aquifer below. Only the major arterial and collector roads have sidewalks currently as those roads carry substantially more traffic and pedestrians (due to bus lines etc.). Sidewalks come at a huge environmental and enormous cash cost: inserted, they require deep cuts into the soil resulting in the severance of stabilizing tree roots. The concrete is laid over tamped down beds of gravel through which nothing can penetrate- not even oxygen. Trees need 18 inches of uninterrupted topsoil to survive. Concrete prevents the oxygen exchange which suffocates the underlying soil and all the creatures it supports, which is why one sees trees blown over in windstorms with roots stopping exactly parallel to the sidewalk or driveway they abut. We need to learn from this: amputating the feet off existing trees for a sidewalk creates a dangerous destabilizing effect on the large trees that create shade, oxygen and habitat.
Furthermore, sidewalks add to the heat sink generated by paved surfaces. Because there is a strip of earth between the road and the sidewalk, a whole new unconnected desert is created .Lastly and most importantly, sidewalks enshrine a delusion of safety because motorists on roads with sidewalks have been shown to feel safer traveling faster because they anticipate no pedestrians on the streets to impede them. On our side streets, walking facing the light traffic reclaims the road surface for ALL USERS. Shared roadways without sidewalks tend to be narrower and the "locals" slow down in the expectation of foot traffic, CYCLISTS and skateboarders, dog walkers and folks with strollers. The passive effect of slowing traffic down is also enhanced with traffic calming/speed humps and the visual attractions of the interesting variations in greenery, creating the side friction ( passive traffic calming ) written about in many traffic calming studies.
To address the issues of safety means REMINDING folks to drive slower and with greater consideration for the potential of pedestrians- using signs and all measures of persuasion. That way we will entice a bit more walking for our health, preserving our trees, lawns and gardens, lovingly tended in Sunnnylea for more than 100 years. Please- let’s not waste taxpayer dollars dismantling the green in the city that is established and functioning brilliantly. Leave the approval and sign off with the local Councillor. Do not remove that process and relinquish it to a centralized committee mentality, please. It’s not broken. Don’t try and fix it.
Very best regards,
F.T.Campbell
President, KPRI Inc.
