AUSTRALIAN PLANNER SEPTEMBER 1994

Brindle (1992) has attempted to suggest that the physical planning characteristics of Toronto, which we have often used as a model for overcoming automobile dependence, should not be given this status. He suggests it is a ‘paradigm lost’. This paper attempts to address each of the substantive issues in the article by Brindle in order to restore some status to the Toronto paradigm. Before doing this we would like to make a few comments about arguments that we are not trying to refute. There are a number of straw man arguments set up by Brindle which impute extreme positions that neither we nor any others who have contributed to discussions on Toronto, have ever taken e.g. ‘‘Toronto has few freeways’’, ‘‘Toronto is not a car city’’, ‘‘Toronto has conquered urban sprawl by successfully balancing jobs and workers’’. Toronto is not perfect; it is a city which has many of the problems of modern day cities, including a lot of car-related issues. However, it has also had a very interesting history in its battle to provide a more balanced transport and land use system. A critical point in its recent history was the Spadina Expressway conflict in the early 70’s, after which Toronto chose not to build radial freeways but to emphasise transit instead and in the context of what many other cities were doing at the time, this was a significant policy decision which helped promote a less auto-oriented city. We have said that in the context of North American and other auto-orientated cities of the west, Toronto is significantly better in its transit use and lower in its car use, fitting somewhere between the European and the American/Australian model of city. And at least in the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto (Metro Toronto for short), the higher density urban form and high transit use, place it closer to the European than the American type of city. Its paradigm as far as we are concerned, is that it adopted a far more transit-oriented approach to urban development during a period when automobile-oriented planning was the dominant model and managed to create a much better balance in its transport orientation than other North American and Australian cities. We have never suggested that Toronto has ‘conquered urban sprawl’ and certainly not through a balancing of housing and jobs, though we have emphasised that Toronto has had a good deal of success in building up population densities at strategic nodes, in the central city and along transit corridors. We have in fact written a good deal about the inherent problems of tackling urban planning and transport problems simply by trying to move jobs closer to where workers live (Newman, Kenworthy and Vintila, 1992; Kenworthy, 1993). However despite some of these straw man arguments, there are some substantial claims based on data which we would like to contest as they tend to suggest that Toronto does not have much to show us. The slight delay in answering this paper, which seems to have received considerable emotional support from many who appear to favour more car dependence, is because we have been pursuing the 1990 data in which to make our comparisons. For example, Brindle has criticised us for not considering the whole Toronto region, only Metro Toronto. We have now done this and the relevant data are outlined in this paper. There are therefore quite a lot of new data here which we believe show even stronger reasons why Toronto is a paradigm we should regain. The paper systematically addresses each one of Brindle’s claims about our data as well as a number of important qualitative arguments which we believe reveal inconsistencies in Brindle’s position on much of the subject matter. The following conclusions are drawn through detailed analysis in the paper: Australian Planner Vol. 49, No. 3, September 2012, 259 273