Living on a Subway Line | The Ups and Downs of TOD
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- Опубликовано: 7 фев 2025
- Before I went to Vancouver and came back to Toronto, I lived in a condo tower that is right on top of a Toronto subway station. It had its upsides and downsides, and today, let's talk about them.
As always, leave a comment down below if you have ideas for our future videos. Like, subscribe, and hit the bell icon so you won't miss my next video!
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Hi, my name's Reece. I'm a passionate Creator, Transportation Planner, and Software Developer, interested in rapid transportation all around my home base of Toronto, Canada, as well as the whole world!
Should I make more housing / tod type videos? Let me know!
absolutely!
yess
yes it’s nice to see not just trains
yee
Can you do a video on Metronet Perth. Its a really good and low cost plan to expand high quality rail (with bus connections) out to very low density suburbs ~300pp km2. Gradual low cost extensions using existing right of ways have seen Perth triple its daily ridership since the 1990s. One of the lines that opened was the 70km Mandurah line which was built in 2006 for ~$2.5bn and now carries 20 million people a year.
Perth is a midsized city of 2.1 million and is a good example that a lot of North American cities could follow
How do you make so many videos so often and they're all fleshed out and articulate. The content we need
In Japan the retail areas in stations and attached buildings (which are also owned by the transit provider) are large and have plenty of spaces for independent businesses as well as chains. They key for good TOD is for the transit provider to own the TOD. The real value in providing good transit is in owning real estate near the transit.
Early American transit providers understood this but they went the "sell the land to make money fast" route rather than the "own the land to make money constantly over decades" route.
So kind of like penn station or columbus circle makes money from retail?
@@erikkrauss8481 Yes, only much, much larger in scale. i.e. imagine the railway owns nearby buildings, sometimes all buildings within a block of the station. The station creates value for the buildings, and the railway reaps that benefit -- and is encouraged to continue to provide good service in order to keep that value high. The rail service itself is run at a loss in order to drive value from renting out the real estate.
This is how the bulk of Japan's urban rail networks are privatized and run at a profit.
@@NozomuYume TransLink is _finally_ considering your model with the Surrey - Langley extension. I haven't heard any talk of doing the same on the Broadway Corridor, maybe it's too late in the game to bring a new arm online there. But, there has been talk of an underground shopping centre ("U-Mall"?) with the Broadway-City Hall SuperStation, particularly because City Hall is building a brand new campus between it and the station. Imho, it presents some good, long term, financial opportunities for the transit authority. A regular revenue stream of that sort of size would be a great stabilizer for SkyTrain's ongoing mandate, without always having to prostrate itself at the feet of Victoria and Ottawa.
Most people who havent gone to seoul tokyo hk or sg will not understand this idea. The advantage is always on the fare price, no subsidy and better connection with the neighbourhood. The idea to make people use the location to shop and move around to earn more.
This encourages people to use the transit and in return increase transit development.
@@aldryn00251 Yeah, I don't think the idea's lost on us. :/
You have an impressive work rate for videos produced.
Totally agree about being too close to stores, and my friend has said the same about going to the grocery store at 10 PM just to buy Poptarts or something lol. But, it's definitely better to be too close than too far to get there without a car!
For sure, just an interesting thing I noticed.
In Hong Kong, TODs are mainly serving upper middle-class families which drives an automobile most of the time and the families in public housing flats have to use feeder services to use the rail system
That's not really true, is it? The developments above MTR stations are largely standard middle class, and its surroundings within a walking distance are a mix of middle-class private housing, government subsidized housing, as well as public housing. Most of the residents of TODs use public transport instead of drive, as there aren't even enough parking spaces for most of the residents of TODs, and many do not own cars. The upper-middle class tend to live in areas not served by MTR, like the mid-levels or other mountainous parts of HK, or in houses or low-density developments in the New Territories far from MTR stations.
@@wawapuffe Precisely I mean new TODs after the MTR-KCR merger in 2007
@@barncheng9281 The new TODs, like LOHAS Park, Yuen Long's YOHO developments, or Double Cove in Wu Kai Sha seem pretty standard middle class to me, with people mainly using the MTR. The Kai Tak developments may be the main difference, as TOD is done really terribly there.
@@wawapuffe I guess it really depends on how does one define "Upper Middle Class"...
The MTR is a private company that owns the shopping centers and condos above the stations. It is said that the MTR effectively makes its money being landlords, and interconnects its land holdings with their trains.
Idea: when the Eglinton crosstown opens and finch west you should do an updated visiting all stations of TTC. That way you visit the whole line and it’s sorta like a challenge. Love the video keep up the good work
Yep, it will be time for an update, been long planned!
Covered awning through a carpark reminds me of Heuston Station in Dublin. Platforms 2-5 are in the main concourse; platform 1 is down one side; platforms 6-8 are in a mini concourse down the other side; and for platform 10 you walk down a long covered walkway through the carpark. There is no platform 9. Platform 10 is mostly unused.
A lot of these issues do come from living directly above the transit stop (lack of outdoors, monopolized amenities, etc). TOD that would focus more on making a general neighborhood around the transit (which there are plenty of examples of) does solve a lot of this. With the typical North American surburbinization though you do often end up with the situation of a few towers and then the sprawl a few blocks out. Addressing that though means opening the door to general urbanism, and the fun times that comes with that discourse. Cool video. Canada always has some interesting developments.
Yep, the neighbourhood is critical!
I remember back in 1963 when University Ave was dug up to build the 1st extension. This was before I moved to Vancouver in 1964.
I like the new hair cut
I remember when North York Center stop first opened. All of the condo's were added since then or since it was announced. Used to be just two story buildings along Yonge between Finch and Sheppard. Similar to how Yonge looks now from Finch to Steeles but even less towers.
Totally wild!
@@RMTransit in the early 80's the tallest building was the Sheppard center until Xerox Towers were built
Yonge Street through North York prioritizes cars because it is the primary connector for the 401 for neighborhoods between Dufferin Av. and Bayview Av. The Bathurst Street to 401 interchange is useless. It is really hard to route that traffic around your commercial strip. Plus, historically the retailers of Yonge Street depended on the cruiser traffic of Yonge Street from the affluent suburbs.
So miss traveling to Toronto ! Looking forward to things opening up so we can do more weekend trips !
I used to live very close to finch subway station. When I lived there, the station already had 2 Tim Hortons!
I checked the place few days ago after a year, and saw ANOTHER TIM HORTONS!! so now it has 3 🤣. But the new one has a sign that tells the story of Tim Horton...! So that's cool!
Haha Finch has loads!
you really touched on a lot of great stuff here, thank you! sometimes, convenience isn't better.
I visited Metrotown around Christmas and it was actually quite annoying to have to walk down and cross the street just to get into the mall now, especially when I saw the old walkway still being there as I came down from the escalator :(
I really like the direct connections to malls especially when it's raining (which is literally everyday in Vancouver). I think Brentwood station will be directly connected to the new Brentwood mall. Thanks for doing a video on this!
I agree! The trend these days is for outdoor shopping on a "high street", with a cafe here and a bagel there. I don't get it. It's fine for LA or Phoenix, but 6 months of the year, is pissing down rain in YVR. Who strolls in that? The worst is that EuroDisney mess of a fake town square at the airport. It looks so amateurish, and I could live with that if they at least made use of the empty "floors" above into little suites or studios for rent, but no. I see they built a covered walkway from the parking lot, but when you get to the buildings, there's zero shelter!
_"But did you see the price of those shoes?!? They're practically giving them away!"_
About half of the exits in Singapore's Raffles Place MRT (subway/metro) station in our downtown are to adjacent shopping malls & office buildings (though with CoViD regulations requiring them to have manned checkpoints at their entrances for shoppers to log their entry (to facilitate future contact-tracing if another shopper there gets infected) some of these exits may be closed for the landlords to save on the amount of manpower needed), but many of them require negotiating a few steps, which is a shame because while the station has 9 exits (one of the most in this country) only 1-2 of them are wheelchair accessible
In regards to North York Center and your comments about the hostile public realm, I think it's important to mention the other aspects of the Yonge street re-design beyond the bike lanes: the wider sidewalks and reduced car lanes (from 6 + turn lanes to 4 + turn lanes).
People always focus on the bike lanes but I think it's more important to talk about treating our streets as public destinations vs thoroughfares, and it's great to see stuff like Destination Danforth, ReimagineYonge, and YongeTomorrow happening as we start to make our main streets into a more complete public realm instead of just high speed car sewers.
Definitely important
Looking at Google maps it's not hard to see what you mean when you say "poor pedestrian environment". It's right next to a big highway interchange with abysmal looking pedestrian safety, it's a minimum sized sidewalk that crosses a highway on ramp without even a painted crosswalk.
I have said this before but not here, "bike lanes are the Dráno of street scapes. Parking should never be permitted on roads". "It's a road Jim", "not a parking lot". Cheers.
I live over New West station which is a full on 3 story mall... I love it I go from P4 direct to the station. But the noise is can be annoying
New West is legendary
Reminds me of Tseung Kwan O in Hong Kong haha (minus the single-family homes)
I find a prewar neighborhood around transit to be better than a TOD around transit because it has it’s charm
TODs are a topic that should be revisited as new ones are developed.
When I saw Metrotown for the first time, not long after it opened I thought it was the coolest thing. Went back there
around 2010 (via the now gone bridge) it seemed very utilitarian and down scale. Did Metro-town change or did I change?
I’m not sure what you’re specifically referring to? Can you elaborate?
@@RMTransit Referring to the quality of the mall. The bridge access and contemporary design initially impressed me, but the mall after 2000 seemed to have slid into mediocrity. Again, not sure if that was my perception or if in fact some characteristics of the place had changed. Elimination of the bridge would seem to continue the decline of this one time model of TOD.
Here in Singapore, transit-oriented development is tackled slightly differently. In the city centre, you’ll find more underground passageways linking many different office buildings and malls together, but this doesn’t really seem to come at the expense of street-level foot traffic - probably because Singapore doesn’t have a lot of very broad roads, and the liberal amount of trees planted here doesn’t give off as much of an artificial feeling. The underground walkways also seem to encourage walking further distances, since they’re usually air-conditioned and give a nice respite from the hot and humid climate here.
However, when you get to the more residential areas, things change. Singapore’s neighbourhoods are designed like satellite towns, where you’ll have pretty much every amenity you’d need within a 10-15 minute bus ride. Within each town centre, you’ll typically find an MRT station, a couple of malls, and a local bus interchange. In older neighbourhoods, these would be separate buildings connected at street level, though in recent times, the bus interchanges have been increasingly co-located with the malls. But you’ll almost never find residential housing located within these hubs - they’ll usually be adjacent, but not directly connected.
As Singapore grew and built new neighbourhoods, they would all be designed around this central hub. The bus network is then designed to complement this, and “feeder” services are designed to run in loops, going out from the hub out to the edges of the neighbourhood, then loop back to the hub.
This hub model, and the feeder bus network, seems to be able to eliminate the problem of having “no middle zone”. There are usually some smaller malls sprinkled throughout the neighbourhood, and that’s where you’ll find your mom-and-pop convenience stores - people will buy day-to-day items there, then go to the town hubs for grocery shopping, entertainment, etc.
Gosh, I hope this slightly rambling comment made sense.
Made sense, excellent comment
For some reason every time I hear ToronTo with emphasis on the 2nd T I get confused
I still say it that way haha
North York Centre is absolutely terrible for pedestrian access. It has great transit but the neighborhood feels like a busy suburb with some condos randomly built here and there. The traffic is so loud you couldn’t even have a conversation with people while walking on the street.
North York is but a busy suburb. It is a suburb of Toronto, which has a downtown, which North York is not. The traffic comes from North York's affluent adjacent towns.
what do you think about highrise developments built above Transit Depots?, an example is Chai Wan MTR Depot
Very smart idea!
I lived by the right a way of the NYC elevated subway in the Bronx both express lines which were convenient to get to my service job in the theater district in Manhattan
Reece, did you have too cross a 6 lane stroud at all, to get anywhere else?
oh my goodness yonge street. I left this year for work ,but i really hope they make reimagine yonge work.
tecnically the proposal you talked about at 5:20 was never adopted, they postponed everything for further consideration until after the city elections
Sweet lav!
I'm surprised you didn't like North York Centre. To me, I find it very convenient. When I visit Toronto, I often stay at the Novotel on Park Home. It's connected to the subway, stores, and restaurant. That nice Loblaws came in handy for me when looking for baby formula in the evening. I would love to live in that area. Just sayin.
Hmm, I don’t think I said I didn’t like North York Centre!
@@RMTransit Sorry. It came accross to me that way.
i think its amazing since outside of toronto, i seem to regularly find very considerate drivers all across southern ontario. i think its just the culture the 401 and traffi c has forced ;p;
How does this compare to Montreal where a large section of the city center is part of the undeground network. Is it even worse than your example in toronto or do you reckon it alleviates some of the problems?
Side note: I don't know why but I was expecting something about the vibrations in the building above the line lol.
Didn't notice any vibration even when standing in the grocery store directly above it. Its quite modern construction so I imagine they mitigated it well.
One of the biggest problems with high-rise and large apartment buildings is the ease of providing ample parking. If you're in a neighborhood like most of NYC where there's a bunch of small apartment buildings on 20 to 30 foot wide lots, its a lot harder to add parking, so residents will have to rely on the limited on-street parking, which will reduce the number of car owners. And those areas normally have just as much population density, if not more.
Well you’d actually be surprised. Underground parking is expensive, most developers would be happy not to provide it!
@@RMTransit we need to get rid of parking minimums for sure, and have maximums in some areas. There should also be incentives for developers to not build any parking in areas with great transit access like your old neighborhood.
There are bylaws in the Metro area that dictate how much parking is required, for cars and bikes, and electric hookups for electric vehicles of all kinds. When you read a story about someone developing a building or complex, they always list the parking specs, and by and large, they are all undeground. The malls that are being developed throughout the region are using the parking lots for first phases of their plans, and digging holes for cars, both residential and for customers. This is going on with almost every mall of substantial size, from North Vancouver to Langley, and further into the Valley too.
Hello RMTransit I love ur vids the content is goated and I have a video topic suggestion anything about if the TTC could and/or would add new subway cars to their fleet
It’s planned indeed, I think I’ve made a video talking about it, there’s a plan to replace the trains on Line 2 in the next decade
@@RMTransit Oh Great Because I live in between Castle frank and sherbourne stations,and also keep up the good work!
If you want to see TOD on steroids, go to Tokyo. What makes TOD more common there is more lax zoning regulations and more vertical integration where the rail companies own the shops and apartments by train stations.
Montreal has very good TOD, too. The RESO network is TOD taken to the extreme.
I’ve been to Tokyo! It’s great!
Haha, Reso is good but it’s not the Path!
I’d say inside connections are still better. Especially anywhere with snow and slush for people in wheelchairs and similar mobility aids.
That's true, but I'm sure in an area with such high levels of pedestrian activity that the sidewalks would be well maintained and cleared promptly.
These are interesting discussions!
Ah, didn't know you were from Vancouver until now. I was wondering why you pronounced Toronto like a foreigner.
1. What do you mean about "missing middle" housing being overplayed in North America? We are desperate for it. The only people who think it's overplayed are NIMBYs who can't stand hearing about it anymore. 2. Impulse purchases are a problem for people who aren't on a budget, so I disagree with that being downside to living in a TOD. I live one block from a subway station, and I never make impulse purchases on my way to/from the train. If a lower income person lives near/above transit, they probably won't have that problem. 3. And what's the matter with "impulse" transit trips? I know people who take car joyrides for no reason, which burns gasoline, so I don't see the problem with someone taking transit for fun. Except maybe if that impulse trip is during rush hour? I disagree with that being a downside of living in a TOD. If anything, it contributes to transit culture and the general public's enthusiasm for transit. If only more people took unnecessary transit joyrides...
1) I’m not really speaking about the general public, I’m talking about people already in the transit and urbanism discourse. We have a lot of missing middle housing in a lot of cities, we could use a lot more but I think the degree to which it’s our problem is overplayed.
2) I was a student when living there, so I was very much on a budget - I don’t really agree that being on a budget means you’ll never make an impulse purchase, you can waste money and still be on a budget!
3) This video was about my personal thoughts and experience, they apply to me not to everyone! But certainly to some people! As mentioned in the video, impulse transit trips wasted a lot of time for me! It was fun but, like a lot of things that are fun moderation is key!
Looking at a place in TO atm, which station were you on top of?
Mentioned in the video!
They're like everywhere in Taiwan what you mean
That "sometimes public transit is too ideal" argument is ?????
Its not an argument for everyone, just my personal experience. I am sure most people are less impulsive. But, then again the issue of ultra local convenience killing streetscapes is a real one!
i used to live at 700 king west, directly connected to Mc Donald's......not good :)
Have you ever seen the movie “Way Down Town”? You might want to check in out
Yep
I agree that some of the ‘missing middle’ problem is overstated in North America- but I think it’s because people have downgraded the term missing middle from smaller apartment complexes to duplexes or townhomes that are still closer to single family homes.
Especially in places like Minneapolis where the new multi family housing is then subject to many of the same setback requirements and such that make real density un feasible
“Animated streetscape” is the excuse some people give for not taking public transit.
where i live in Jakarta, TOD is a jargon misused by Developers
You lived in College Park?
Nope, discussed in the video!
@@RMTransit Yes, I caught that later.
hummm yes rm transit confirmed living in niagra falls
…Niagara Falls…
Toronto drivers are paragons of courtesy and prudence compared to Ottawa drivers. I say this as an Ottawa resident of nearly 20 years.
8:45 And in car dependent places you make impulsive trips to 7/11.
Yes, it is convenient living around TOD's however crime rates around TOD's are slightly higher than places that are further away from TOD's.
Do you have any data?
@@RMTransit Yes from an Australian perspective where in Australia there is publicly available annual suburban crime rate data published online via the various official Australian state and territory police websites sorted by Local Government Areas (LGAs) where the LGAs with higher concentration of TODs have slightly higher robbery and breaking and entering crime rates than LGAs with little to no concentrations of TODs.
Idk, I feel like there’s a lot of reasonable explanations for this that aren’t exactly damning
@@RMTransit From this perspective I can agree with you.
9:40 Pffff come to Portugal and then we'll talk 🤣🤣
Hmm.... Green space... Good rail connections.... Not super densely packed...
Reece, get outta St. Clair West. If I see you there, I will probably die, so shoo from my neighbourhood
:(
@@RMTransit jk if you actually live around here i'd be honored not upset lol
thanks for the great quality near-daily videos, idk how you manage to find so much good content
nice haircut
My home country only has a terrible bus system, even the Canadian/US system would be better than what we have :/
Haircut!!
Yeah I was aware of the haircut.
You pay a huge premium for this convenience. Something only the privileged can afford. Something I found out the hard way when I moved close to Davisville Station.
I mean Torontonions don’t complain do you want to see my room 🥲
Can you wear a university of manitoba sweater next time? Thanks.
Don't have one! Also didn't attend it!
@@RMTransit will your wear one if i send it one to you?
Any particular reason haha?
@@RMTransit Just to add to your collection of university sweaters. Your welcome.
Haha, I’d be touched
This is so Asian style now. If you go to any major cities in Asia, they are all look the same.
Arcology v0.1
you should really read Marx
There is no one right way to use transit. There is only use and non-use, so stop this nonsense talk about abusing transit.
Hmm?