Why Amsterdam is Awesome and Toronto Kinda Sucks

I live in what would be considered one of the more walkable areas of Toronto - the Upper Beach, or Birch Cliff area. We have a streetcar line (503) about 600m from our front door that runs to downtown. There is a bus route (12 & 117) about 100m from our front door that goes to a subway station (Victoria Park) that is 1.5km from our front door. The regional GO Transit train stop is 1.6km from our front door.

I can walk to three large grocery stores within about 1.2km from our front door, and two of them are about 700m from our front door. We are about 2km from the lake, complete with a boardwalk and sandy beaches where you can stand-up paddle board and even swim (if you like cold water).

There is a nice, pretty walkable area on Kingston Road with some small shops like a good coffee shop, a florist, nail salons, a book store, clothing stores, a thrift shop, and a pretty big YMCA with a pool, fitness centre and programs for all ages.

And yet, compared to a similar neighbourhood in Amsterdam, it sucks here.

Amsterdam is Different

We spent a few days in Amsterdam in early June, living in a lovely Airbnb that was in the Amsterdam-Zuid neighbourhood. At first glance, it’s very much like the area we live in. There’s a tram line that will take you into Amsterdam Centraal, or to Amsterdam Zuid train station. There are shops and a “main street” area where you will find things like a florist, book store, restaurants, coffee shops and a grocery store.

Kingston Road in our area of Toronto is a terrible road and is used heavily by people going from downtown Toronto to the east-end suburbs and places like Pickering, Ajax and even Oshawa.

On Kingston Road, there’s a constant stream of cars through our neighbourhood. They clog the streets, race through at well over the posted 40km/h speed limit and generally make a mess of the entire place. Traffic is a nightmare at the best of times and, as a result, the cars head to the residential streets to get around the traffic which makes those areas dangerous to pedestrians.

The streetcar on Kingston Road is terrible. It takes ages to get downtown because it’s mixed in with all that car traffic. You can very easily outrun it on foot. Cycling, if it wasn’t basically a death sentence (trust me on this), is easily the fastest way to get into the city.

Our nearby grocery stores have giant parking lots out front and the store is positioned in the back corner of the lot, meaning you have to walk across the parking lot if you dare do something crazy like walk to the store.

Beethoven straat in Amsterdam is a beautiful street. The shops are lovely and while there is some traffic on the road, it’s calmed with the use of narrower lanes and other measures that force drivers to slow down. The tram has priority at intersections. There are bike lanes and wide sidewalks that encourage people to use those modes of transportation to do things like take the kids to school, or pick up groceries or visit a coffee shop or restaurant.

The local grocery is an Albert Heijn which, by North American standards, is pretty small. The entrance is pedestrian-friendly and car-hostile. There is literally no parking. Nobody drives to do groceries. Instead, people pick up a few things a few times a week. Sometimes they stop on the way home from work. Or they bike over and grab what they need for the next day or two. Nobody does a “big” grocery run like they do in Toronto.

The Problem is Cars

We own a car because we live in Toronto. We would love to get rid of it because it’s a 2011 and needs replacing, but it’s basically impossible to be car-free in our neighbourhood. Not having a car in Toronto would suck. It’s not impossible…but it would be a major headache.

Despite the fact that we have ample transit options within a short walk from our home, it all sucks. It’s infrequent outside of weekdays and it’s slowed by all that traffic a lot of the time. Maybe we could use a car-share service when we needed a car, but that’s also not great in Toronto (yet).

If we lived in Amsterdam, we would definitely not have a car because having a car in Amsterdam would suck. There’s no place to park it and it’s really more inconvenient to try to use a car in Amsterdam because the city is not built for cars. It’s built for people who walk, bike and use transit.

So we’re stuck here in our crappy car-centric neighbourhood with our car. We love our neighbourhood, but it could be so much better if somehow Toronto could become less car-centric. A few things would help but there is no chance they would ever happen.

1. We should ban parking on Kingston Road and make the streetcar lanes for the streetcars and not for the cars. That would destroy the commuting route for all the people who use our neighbourhood as a quasi-highway to get from their suburb to downtown each morning and back again in the afternoon. Those people can take the 401 and the DVP highways and if it takes 30 minutes longer, well, too bad.
2. We should make the neighbourhood streets impossible to use to get from main road to main road. Some bollards or even a series of one-way streets that prevent through traffic would dramatically reduce the number of cars using those streets. Of course, it should be possible to bike through those streets because we want to encourage cyclists to use these streets to get around.
3. We should put a smaller grocery store on our main street. The “big” grocery stores should be torn down and rebuilt at the front corner of the lot, incorporated into housing so that they meet the street. Put a bit of parking around back for those that still want to drive, but make it so that people on foot or using bikes don’t have to cross the parking lot to get to the entrance.

This Will Never Happen

Politically, this will never happen. The outcry from people who drive through our neighbourhood would be massive. And even those who live here wouldn’t have the vision to see what our neighbourhood could be like if we removed the focus on the car.

So instead, we’re stuck here. Stuck owning a car. Stuck dealing with crappy transit. Stuck cycling on dangerous roads and streets. Stuck with getting pedestrians getting run down by cars (there have been multiple car/pedestrian “accidents” in our area including more than one fatality in the past few years).