Toronto Sprawls by Lawrence Solomon

Author:Lawrence Solomon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS006000
Publisher: University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division
Published: 2007-05-18T16:00:00+00:00

8 The Suburbs beyond the Suburbs

WITH SATISH DHAR

The province’s creation of Metropolitan Toronto accomplished its goals. Through this partial amalgamation mechanism, the suburbs were financed and methodically filled in.

But partial amalgamation was not the province’s only financing mechanism in the years following the Second World War. The province also spawned suburban expansion through infrastructure projects that would mesh Toronto with its immediate suburbs and beyond. These flowed from far-reaching plans begun by prewar planning bodies.

As the end of the war neared, political leaders established planning agencies to provide for the betterment of the people. The City Planning Board, created as Toronto’s first official planning board in 1942, by 1943 had produced a thirty-year master plan that called for vast slum clearances and superhighways. By 1945, the city had begun Regent Park, Canada’s first large public housing project. In 1946 the province brought in a planning act to encourage municipalities to develop official plans for their communities.

The planning anticipated, and relished, a postwar population boom that would settle the countryside. At a 1944 municipal conference on planning and development attended by hundreds of municipal delegates, Premier George Drew exhorted his audience to ‘go to the limits of the imagination’ in expanding the population, stating that there was ‘no reason why this province cannot maintain 25 million in a higher degree of prosperity than ever before.’ The province soon did go to the limit, reconstructing itself as a lower-density land. The creation of Metropolitan Toronto, funded by city taxpayers and ratepayers, was phase one in the dispersion of the population. Phase two took in Metro and beyond. It would be funded by the province.

Highway 401, now among the world’s busiest freeways, was initially designed in the late 1940s to be a low-volume, trans-provincial highway well north of Toronto,1 its ‘Toronto Bypass’ specifically intended for through traffic only. Completed in 1956, the twenty-six-mile bypass ran through the undeveloped outer suburbs of Scarborough, North York and Etobicoke. It was a motorist’s dream, according to one Toronto newspaper, providing ‘some of the most soothing scenery in the Metropolitan area … It winds smoothly through pastures and across streams and rivers, and beside green thickets. It seems a long way from the big city.’

The ‘bypass’ role of the twenty-six-mile stretch soon changed, and the highway soon stopped seeming a long way from the city. In line with the province’s decision to amalgamate Toronto’s metropolitan area, and with federal efforts to develop Toronto’s suburbs, the province constructed interchanges at every major intersection along the length of the bypass. Dormitory communities then sprang up in the northern fringe of the Toronto area and beyond as the Highway 401 bypass became a predominantly short-trip, commuter highway. By 1959, a highway that but three years earlier was estimated to carry 48,000 cars per day was now carrying 185,000 cars per day, and rush-hour traffic jams had routinely reduced highway speeds to fifteen miles per hour. To the 401’s original two lanes in each direction, the provincial government then added three collector lanes in each direction, to handle local traffic.

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