Tap any Toronto pedestrian on the shoulder, and they’ll likely have a gripe to share about pounding the pavements in North America’s fastest growing city.
“The sidewalks have become overcrowded and much harder to navigate over the past few years,” said Alex Smith, who co-owns an architectural rendering company. “Delivery bikes weave through crowds, sidewalk patios push pedestrians closer to traffic, and construction zones leave barely any room to pass.”
If Smith had one wish, it would be for wider sidewalks, especially on King West and on Yonge downtown, where he feels the number of pedestrians has outpaced the available square footage. “When foot traffic is packed tight, it slows everyone down, makes crossings harder, and turns simple walks into frustrating stop-and-go movements.”
Smith takes long daily walks from his home near Bloor and Ossington. “Some mornings, it takes twice as long for me to cross intersections like Bloor and Bathurst or College and Ossington because the sidewalks are jammed,” said Smith. “Even smaller residential streets are harder to walk, with scooters dumped across paths, garbage bins blocking walkways, and temporary fencing forcing pedestrians into narrow, unsafe gaps.”
On a recent Tuesday in the Upper Beaches, Liza Egbogah was walking her son to school when they encountered a truck parked on the sidewalk. They were forced to walk on the road, while climbing a hill, to get around it. “Every day is a new obstacle course,” said Egbogah, a chiropractor and shoe designer. “If you have to pass a bus stop with lots of people, there is no room on the sidewalk so you’re on the road in traffic!”
Content creator Kwesi Kwarko-Fosu is an enthusiastic walker who regularly traverses long distances — say, The Eaton Centre to Square One. He’s noted more crowding and inconvenient closures, but feels it’s relative to other big cities. “Sometimes some sidewalks are dirty, but at least we aren’t New York. I’ve walked 30 kilometres down Yonge Street and it was fine,” he said. “There’s construction everywhere in Toronto now so sidewalks get closed, but go visit Montreal and you’ll see the same thing.”
St. Catharines resident Alice Wu often visits her sister in Toronto, and has compared walking in the smaller and bigger cities. “I walk a lot in St. Catharines, and I think Toronto is convenient in that the neighbourhoods actually have sidewalks.” Plenty of roads in her area have no sidewalk on either side. “I live on one such street. I live here for the affordability but the walking score is pretty poor.”
But this out-of-town visitor does notice more bad pedestrian etiquette in Toronto. “When we’re walking along a busy street, say Queen Street East, we’ll often run into a group of people walking ahead of us taking up the width of the sidewalk. Lately it’s gotten way worse,” Wu said. “We tend to be the faster walkers on any given sidewalk, so there’s no opportunity for us to pass them. Saying ‘excuse me’ sometimes isn’t heard in the loud traffic, so we’re forced to pass the group by going on the street. There have been times when they look at us like we’re the rude ones.”
Another behavioural scourge of the modern sidewalk are slow walkers nose-down in their phone, abruptly stopping or slowing to reply to some terribly urgent message, or darting to one side when they realize they’ve reached their destination.
They’re only slightly more birdbrained than another main offender: pigeons. On Bloor between Church and Yonge, public relations professional Stephanie Lasica routinely takes detours across the street or underground to the PATH to avoid flocks of up to 20 rats of the sky on the sidewalk. “Some of them are aggressive,” she said. “It also means there’s so much bird poop.”
Cyclists, whether for commuting, leisure or food delivery purposes, are often targets of pedestrian irritation — especially when they stray onto the sidewalk. “In the same way that people riding bikes are reliant on cars and other vehicles to ensure they stay safe, people riding bikes are responsible to ensure they’re not impeding the safety of pedestrians,” said Michael Longfield, executive director of the cycling advocacy organization Cycle Toronto.
In cyclists’ defence, Longfield points out that they must often choose between the relative safety of a sidewalk and the possible danger of some roadways, like an arterial road with no bike lane and traffic whizzing by at 70 kilometres an hour. “Especially on roads without protected infrastructure, people on bikes are more likely to use sidewalks. That’s a fact, not just in Toronto but in cities around the world,” he said. “When you have roads with safe and protected cycle tracks, like the bike lanes on Bloor, Yonge and University that the province is targeting for removal, the sidewalk riding drops dramatically. It goes from about 10 per cent on roads without any bike lanes to two per cent or even less.”
Thursday is garbage and recycling day in Julia McEwen’s Leslieville neighbourhood, a source of particular ire. “Garbage day on the sidewalk with a stroller? May as well turn around and go home,” said the magazine editor and mom of a toddler. “What grinds my gears is when green bin or garbage folks carelessly empty the bins and then chuck them in the middle of the sidewalk. Or worse, knock them over, blocking the whole thing.”
McEwen also has a bone to pick with “crumbling” patches in the pavement, which frequently result in scraped knees and tears for her daughter, whose gait is still unsteady. “When I became a mom, my sidewalk rage intensified and I realized how crappy some sidewalks are in the city — and how inconsiderate people are.”
As a wheelchair user, content creator and motivational speaker Spencer West uses the words “chaotic” and “challenging” to describe Toronto’s pavements. “I find the maintenance of the sidewalks is terrible. It’s wildly uneven; there are lots of patch jobs where they didn’t come back and fix the concrete,” said West, who spends most of his time in the west end. “Listen, I know there are a million things that need to be fixed in the city, but as a wheelchair user it takes me so much longer to get anywhere because I constantly have to pay attention.”
If his wheels get caught in a crack, for example, he could fall out of his wheelchair. “There are a few times where I’ve caught myself before it happened, and that’s just in the nice months,” West said. “If we talk about the winter — as a disabled person the sidewalks are inaccessible to me for the most part.”
When businesses or residents don’t clear snow from their own section of pavement, or push piles of snow into the gutters, it blocks the curb cut outs that allow wheelchair users (among others) to get down onto the road. “I literally couldn’t cross the street by my house because there was no curb cut out,” West said. “I had to push my wheelchair in traffic to go around.”
West would love to see wider sidewalks for a number of reasons, not least because it would allow for more accessibility ramps, like those provided to businesses by the not-for-profit StopGap. “Many businesses want to get the ramps, but because of the bylaws on how wide the sidewalks need to be for people to fit, they can’t get them because it blocks up the sidewalk.”
All of these gripes are worth acknowledging because pavements are extremely important. “Sidewalks are the unsung heroes of cities,” said Toronto urban planner Antonio Gómez-Palacio, a partner at the design firm Dialog who has worked on projects from Halifax to Victoria. “They’re such a huge part of our experience of cities. We may go to a park once every two or three weeks, but we walk on a sidewalk every single day.”
Gómez-Palacio has observed “increased pressure” on the city’s sidewalks, coming from two different directions: Higher density, like when a three-storey building is replaced by one with 30 storeys; and more transportation uses, like the Amazon delivery trucks that need to access the same sidewalk pedestrians do.
The issue is not just that more people are competing for those finite square metres. “We’re not really taking care of such a precious space, and a space of which we demand so much,” Gómez-Palacio said. “They’re the same sidewalks that we had 50 years ago when we had half the population and half the amount of the transportation functions.”
The good news, he said, is that it’s a relatively simple thing to improve. “It’s the easiest thing we can do to completely transform the perception of a city,” he said. “Simply having beautiful, well-maintained sidewalks, getting some great trees in place.”
The City of Toronto is well aware of many of these gripes. “As Toronto’s population grows, so does its sidewalk usage,” said Laura McQuillan, senior communications adviser. “Space in the public right-of-way is limited and we recognize that in some locations, pedestrians are feeling the impact of crowding on sidewalks.”
McQuillan said the city is committed to creating and enhancing spaces that improve safety and mobility for pedestrians, and pointed to the Vision Zero Road Safety plan, which includes fees to encourage construction companies to reduce the amount of time they close a sidewalk. There’s also the Complete Streets program, which is tasked with making it easier for people to walk, bike or take transit while transforming sidewalks into the kind of place you’d actually want to linger. And the Missing Sidewalk Installation program is meant to identify and fill in gaps in the “walking network,” such as residential streets that don’t have a pavement.
When it comes to the state of the sidewalks that many Torontonians complain about, McQuillan said the city spends $18 million in permanent sidewalk repairs each year, and that all sidewalks are inspected annually. “Further, as part of the city’s state-of-good repair capital program, sidewalks are improved or repaired, reconstructed, and in some cases widened, to meet current standards,” she said.
It’s crucial to prioritize TLC for these hardworking patches of concrete, because sidewalks are a city’s primary social space. “We tend to think about them only in relation to transportation systems, but they’re truly the place where you meet your neighbours, where you people-watch,” Gómez-Palacio said. “They have benches, places to linger, stoops to sit and spend time in. There’s a real opportunity for you to engage.”
The more densely populated an area is, the better its sidewalks should be. “Every linear foot of sidewalk is yielding a tremendous amount of benefits to the city,” Gómez-Palacio said. “The sidewalks downtown should be gold-plated.”
