Walkability: Stroll and Roll

For the third year in a row, we’re bringing back the Walkability series! The idea of designing walkable cities has come a long way since the early 2000s, and even since a few years ago. Many developers and builders of new master-planned communities in and around Toronto are identifying walkability as a key feature of the designs, and in our opinion, Toronto is easily one of the most walkable cities in the world!

For past Walkability excursions, we visited a number of amazing Toronto neighbourhoods, including Yorkville, Alexandra Park, the Garden District, Fort York, East Bayfront, Old Town, Niagara, Yonge and Eglinton, the St. Lawrence Market, King West, and The Junction - and we hope to visit many new areas this month! We also hope to revisit a few of the neighbourhood’s we toured in 2013 to see if any of their Walk Scores have improved.

To change things up a bit, we’re also going to focus on how bikeable these neighbourhoods are. With the City of Toronto adding a few bike lanes along some main streets in the downtown core, it will be interesting to see if this impacts future development projects, or at least the marketing of future condo developments. Even to this day, developers and even homebuyers consider it a bonus to have a parking spot included in the purchase price of a condo unit; will the feelings toward that begin to shift?

Biking through Alexandra Park in Toronto

We think it’s already starting to. Take Ideal Developments’ Dragon Condos as an example. Each unit at Dragon Condos not only comes with an indoor bicycle parking spot, it also comes with a bike! Though biking in downtown Toronto doesn’t currently seem like the safest transportation option because of some of the injuries and accidents you hear about in the news, steps are being taken to improve safety and it is arguably safer today than it was five years ago.

So, for all of June we’ll be walking and biking around Toronto to let you know which neighbourhoods are the best to do both of those activities! Of course, we’ll also be sharing some health benefits of staying active by ditching the car and putting your legs to work.

Stay tuned - we have a lot of great features planned for you!