Quote:
Originally Posted by supafamous
The viaducts don't actually carry much traffic (even in their pre-bike lane days) relative to how much land it takes up and the impact it makes to dividing the neighbourhood. Cities around the world have been tearing down elevated roadways in city centers for a while now b/c they realise how much negative impact it has to neighbourhoods.
Replacing them with surface streets adds a couple mins to the commute but makes the whole area safer, cleaner, easier to live in while also freeing up land to build housing on.
re: Laneways - the concept of laneways is great but the actual use/design of them has been pretty underwhelming. Too many of them are built/designed by terrible builders so they are ugly and poorly laid out - many of them feel more like college dorms than homes. The nice ones are far and few between (see: https://smallworks.ca/projects/ or Lane Houses ? Lanefab Design/Build).
The original design was a compromise so NIMBY's didn't show up with pitchforks at City Hall but now with 10 years of them we should have learned that they fit in just fine and fixed the parts that don't work which include:
- Allowing full 2 story laneways. The half storey 2nd floor was designed to avoid casting too many shadows on neighbouring lots but this makes the upstairs pretty awful to live in.
- Allowing larger laneways (tied to the above).
- Requiring more parking. Turns out most garages aren't used as garages and that uncovered parking is more effective so let's allow double wide carports or allow the laneway to be setback further so people can park perpendicular to the lot (along the alley).
- Allow different types of parking options. Let me do a 2 story laneway with a double garage downstairs and a 450sf studio upstairs (or extend the upstairs so it's 600sf). |
Bryn from LaneFab has always been trying push COV to change a few policies for bigger lane way homes.
Having a full two story laneway house would be awesome, as it would fit my family of 4 comfortably, but with current policies, I'm only allowed to build maximum of 940sq
Not sure how the laneway housing policies are in Toronto, but some of their laneway homes their are massive, some having the appearance as high as 3 stories tall.