The Ups and Downs of City Life

New mayor John Tory has promised to crack down on parking infractions during rush hour, focusing on couriers and delivery vehicles that mangle downtown traffic, which is still under construction along several high-traffic routes. It seems like construction season, like hockey season, is now a year-round affair.

On the one hand, I’m all for enforcement of parking laws, whether it’s during rush hour or at midnight on a Sunday. I’ve always thought flouting parking laws had an “I’m more important than you” quality to them. On the other hand, these folk need to make a living, and as Now Magazine recently pointed out, there’s a big glitch in hauling away a fleet of delivery vehicles every day — we’ve got nowhere to put them.

There’s a gap in our infrastructure, it seems, one I never thought about: there aren’t any downtown impound lots. The one that used to be at the foot of York Street is now closed and approved for — you guessed it — a condo tower. The distance of about 10 km to a police-contracted impound lot at St. Clair and Weston Road means it could take a tow truck driver half an hour or more to reach the core, so most drivers would only be able to make one or two round trips during rush hour anyway. Add to that little snafu the fact that only a small percentage of the tow trucks available are able to handle the heaviest delivery vehicles, and it creates a nifty little recipe for a gridlock of its own. That said, the City did announce that they issued 70 tickets and towed 29 vehicles on Monday morning.

A city rep told Now that Tory’s office was aware of the problem, but that they “simply cannot wait,” with traffic at a crisis point. They say it’s as much about determent as enforcement, with fines up to $1,000 and all the inherent inconvenience to people whose livings depend on those trucks.

To me, it just seems like the devotion of time, money and resources to a problem that should be way down on the list. I love cars as much as the next guy, but it should be clear to anyone who works or lives in the downtown core that something bigger than a dozen delivery vans and a few personal vehicles have gotta give. We need long-term innovative solutions, some of which will be very unpopular with driving constituents. We should be boldly creating pedestrian-only thoroughfares, levying user fees to those who choose to drive downtown, and reassessing our underutilized HOV lanes. Surely UPS vans are the least of it.

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The Wall Street Journal reports that new technology coming from manufacturer ThyssenKrupp AG could revolutionize high-rise living. They’re introducing an elevator technology that allows multiple cars to run in one shaft, as well as travelling horizontally and diagonally in addition to vertically. They’re expecting a full-size prototype to test in 2016.

The architectural possibilities of cable-free elevators is exciting enough on its own, although I wonder whether our staid city planners will embrace it anytime soon. As new technologies tend to be expensive, it may not become a building staple immediately anyway, but ThyssenKrupp is confident enough in the technology that they’re marketing it to builders and developers who may want to include it in their future plans.

Contemporary elevators that can run only one car per shaft limit the height to which we build because as the tower grows, so does the real estate the shaft takes up, but the magnetic levitation technology on which this innovation, dubbed Multi, depends, pushes and pulls cars along tracks with no friction. The manufacturer says the elevators, which may take only half as much space, will be most appropriate for buildings of about 1,000 feet.

Is Toronto ready for superskyscrapers in unfamiliar shapes? I sure hope so!

Happy New Year, all. May 2015 bring you and yours nothing but congestion-free commutes and rides that would make Willy Wonka proud.