An Urban School Drop-off Debacle
Huron Street Public School - 9am - march break
Huron Street Public School - 9am - week after march break
Huron Street Public School is a block and a half north of Bloor Street West, two short blocks east of Spadina Road, right in the Annex in downtown Toronto. It is within very easy walking distance of three subway stations – St. George, Spadina, and Dupont (roughly 250 m from the first two). It is also surrounded to the east by numerous 6-10 storey apartment buildings along St. George Street and of course sits within the famous, leafy, and relatively dense Annex neighbourhood, the same neighbourhood Jane Jacobs chose to live in when she moved to Toronto from Greenwich Village so long ago. She still lives just a few blocks away.
Given all of this, I am just dumbfounded at the number of people in this neighbourhood who seem to believe it necessary to drive their kids to school. The pictures above speak for themselves. There is no parking allowed on either side of Huron Street in front of the school. The teachers have their own car park around the side of the school. Every single car you see in the photos is there temporarily dropping someone off. It’s embarrassing, to put it mildly.
It’s also ridiculously dangerous. I cycle past the school every day – with cars stopped on both sides of the street, and two lanes of through traffic (mostly also parents) still moving between the stopped cars, it’s a cacophony of accidents waiting to happen as kids do their best to run from one side to the other amidst this mess. The worst insult is that the parking managment strategy of disallowing parking on this section of the street is a tacit approval for and enabler of parents to continue this negative behaviour.
The empty photo speaks volumes – the residential street is four lanes wide, a width that not only promotes parents in driving to drop their kids off (because there’s so much room to do so) but also seems to encourage speeding at off-peak times, while making it more difficult to cross the street. Is it not worrisome that even in the inner city, in Jane Jacobs’ own neighbourhood, we’re doing this bad of a job at promoting walking to school? How can we complain about suburban attitudes to driving, and especially school drop-offs, when this terrible example is sitting in our own backyard?
It looks like there’s a lot of work still to be done in changing even urbanites’ attitudes towards and use of the automobile. I can only hope that some enterprising activist public space organisation will get its ass out of Kensington one of these days and start “occupying” the drop-off space in front of Huron Street Public School and others like it. Now that I would like to see.
Of course, I’m also sure that building “a bicycle expressway along Bloor/Danforth” would solve this whole problem. Right? (that’s sarcasm in case you can’t tell)
4 Comments so far
Leave a comment
hi!
that problem is exactly the same that happens here (a litle town in a litle country-Portugal)your words could be mine, hehe)
I like very much to visit your blog
Have a nice day
By Crix on 04.04.06 5:43 am
Sorry to be rude, but I don’t see what this has to do with the planned Tooker Bike lane expansion. You seem to favour the kind of bicycle travel outline in Paul Dorn’s Bike COmmuting Tips, which I am totally in favour of. Taking the scenic route is a great way to get around on a bicycle.
There are however safety concerns for those who choose to bicycle on the busier streets. The majority of bicycle colisions occur on the main East-West streets in Toronto (keep an eye on the Take The Tooker website for more info, I am planning on posting a map of Toronto cycling accidents there soon). These safety issues would be alleviated by having a bike lane along Bloor street.
By Ben Wendt on 08.04.06 10:51 am
Ben,
That’s ok – your comment’s welcome and you have a point. The post was a bit amibguous in its criticism of the “bicycle expressway” along Bloor.
Frustration with some of the rhetoric surrounding bike lanes, particularly the Tooker, led to the rather backhanded swipe. You are also right to suggest that the implication was that easy cycling along small residential roads was preferred to a bike lane along one of the busiest in the city. I will try to explain:
Bike lanes are frequently billed as a “solution” – in reality, that solution for the most part boils down to safety – and if the perception of safety is improved enough, there’s the possibility of increased bicycle ridership (but to accurately track increase, one would have to track use along previous routes as well in order to gauge whether any increase in cyclists was due to changes in routes of existing cyclists because of the bike lane).
However, this small problem of travel to school at a school very close to Bloor Street and right downtown was being viewed as a microcosm of the larger city, and of the transportation issues of the larger city in particular.
As was said “it looks like there’s a lot of work still to be done in changing even urbanites’ attitudes towards and use of the automobile.” The (perhaps unwise) sarcastic swipe at the Tooker was made in reference to this question of a “solution” – and the writer’s extreme doubts about whether travel patterns to this school would be remotely effected by the implementation of the bike lanes along Bloor. Since the school’s issue was being viewed as a microcosm of the city, that then begged the question of whether such a bike lane project could really have a significant effect on mode choice in the city as a whole. Can a bike lane change urbanites’ attitudes towards and use of the automobile? You might say yes. I do not agree.
I intend to post a more thorough questioning of bike lanes and their potential larger impact at a later date – however I will say this – I am eager to see your map of cycling accidents. This could be a very good tool – but my instincts tell me that the vast majority of accidents will be occurring at intersections – and unless we completely change the way bike lanes cross intersections in Toronto, I fear that bike lanes along our existing model will fail to address the problem. I eagerly await to be proven wrong.
By Editor on 08.09.06 1:08 pm
Maps of bike crashes can be found all over the place. iBike TO recently put up a copy of The Toronto Star and Car Advertiser’s bike crash map.
By AMH on 03.29.09 11:54 pm
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>