How you see Parkside Drive depends on your relationship to it.
For some drivers, it's a way to be funneled south from Bloor St. W. to the Gardiner as efficiently and quickly as possible.
For many residents, it's a dangerous, alarming barrier in between a residential neighbourhood and a much-loved city park.
Last week, city officials submitted a plan to reimagine Parkside in a way that would make it safer.
Over a decade, the document said, the 1.9-kilometre street has seen 1,487 collisions: "Parkside Drive has a history of collisions and highly vocalized community concerns about road safety," city transportation manager Barbara Grey wrote.
Over that decade, three people have been killed and five seriously injured. All seven of those collisions involved vulnerable road users: two cyclists, two pedestrians, a motorcyclist, and an elderly couple who were rear-ended at high speed in October of 2021.
Both died; the driver's trial on a criminal charge of dangerous driving causing death is ongoing. This collision caused the study to be launched.
Since April of 2022, a speed camera on Parkside Drive has issued over 61,000 tickets, a city record. That works out to an average of 66 a day.
The city's plan, which is headed to council in November after being approved this week by the city's infrastructure committee, calls for a number of changes to the street, including bike lanes and some reduction in lanes for motor vehicle traffic.
The problem with that: Ontario Premier Doug Ford has positioned himself as a stern enemy of bike lanes: not just future ones, but existing ones as well.
Toronto mayor Olivia Chow pushed back this week:
The constitutional reality, though, is that when push comes to shove, rightly or wrongly, the province holds all the cards.
Unlike the relationship between the provinces and the federal government, which are more or less equals within their own areas of responsibility, municipal governments are formally subordinate to their provinces. This is why Ontario could legally cut the number of Toronto councillors in half in 2018, a decision upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court.
So if Parkside must be fixed, and bike lanes likely can't be part of the solution — leaving aside the rights and wrongs of that — what tools are left?
We talked to two experts who had a range of ideas about the city's remaining tools for taming Parkside:
Narrowing motor vehicle lanes
Driver speed can be influenced by the width of the lane, points out TMU urban planning professor Raktim Mitra.
"The width of a lane has has significant psychological impact on a driver," he says. "Even in places where there is no speed limit posted, If the lanes are narrower, drivers usually drive slowly."
People may or may not obey speed limits, and they may or may not be enforced.
But drivers can't avoid having to deal with the way the road is physically built, he says.
"Width is, I think, is a much, much more effective way to coming down traffic, rather than posting a speed limit."
James Brown, of the architecture and urban design firm Brown + Storey, agrees.
"You can just narrow the road lane, which I think also has a role in terms of slowing traffic down."
Brown + Storey studied how to change Parkside Drive, and its relationship to High Park, in 2022.
More formal crossings with traffic signals
Given the relationship of the park to the neighbourhood, there are far too few safe places for pedestrians to cross between the two, Brown argues.
"A lot of east-west streets come to the park, but they dead-end. Few of them have pedestrian crossings, so a lot of people aren't willing to walk three blocks to the crossing, so they jaywalk, which makes it kind of dangerous. All those residential streets should be properly punctuated when they hit the park."
"Crossings should be formal traffic lights, not pedestrian lights, so pedestrians can be confident about crossing a busy road safely: "When you have to push a button to cross, it's just ridiculous."
A large sidewalk, or a wide mixed-use path with space for bikes and pedestrians
"The sidewalks are not wide enough," Brown says. "There's no sidewalk on the west side of it. It doesn't tolerate any margin for accidents. It's just poorly designed."
Mitra points to the Martin Goodman Trail to argue that a generously sized trail has enough space that cyclists and pedestrians can comfortably share the space.
"Instead of thinking of sidewalks as sidewalks, if they are wider, then they could be used as multi use, multi use paths that could be used by both pedestrians and cyclists."
One lane of traffic in each direction
The City's proposal would take motor vehicle traffic down to one lane in each direction for most of Parkside's length.
Brown agrees: "If you take it down to two lanes, then you have spare space, which you then can put onto the west side of Parkside Drive and do something substantial with it."
Design features that connect the park to the street
Brown argues for visual cues that can be seen from Parkside, such as opened-up areas that create views.
"You need a host of elements to turn (speeds) down. It's just not one thing, as I was saying, if you created linear trees along the edge of it, then you have a number of things that visually and aesthetically tell the driver that you're in this special place. Right now, it's a threshold you just drive through as quickly as you can.
"It's mostly been in the hands of traffic (engineers), and those guys do what traffic people do. It's never really lived up to its name, you know, it's not a park-side drive.
Mitra doubts that the project would escape provincial scrutiny:
"I would argue that bike lanes are a measure that that kind of contributes to traffic calming. But if you think about it, the provincial legislation that was put in place, in principle, it's against that, right?
"The whole argument against the bike lane was that bike lanes slow down traffic. I'm not sure that in principle the province is in favour of traffic calming."
