To access the complete Vibrant Streets Guidelines click here.
Vibrant Streets Guidelines Summary: City Council endorsed the Vibrant Streets Guidelines in 2006 as a framework for the Integrated Street Furnishing Program. The vision? To improve the public realm. Make it better. Design sidewalks first and foremost to ensure a generous, straight, clear and continuous Pedestrian Clearway – to “put pedestrians first’ on City sidewalks by offering them room and a clear path. And, when this primary purpose is taken care of, space can potentially be assigned for pedestrian amenities such as transit shelters, benches, garbage bins, and way-finding systems.
The Vibrant Streets Guidelines are clear that furnishings are to be located only in a designated Furnishing zone – and that they must be set back from the Clearway so as to avoid Clearway obstruction even when the furnishings are in use. For example, if one were using a garbage can one would ideally be standing in the Furnishing Zone as opposed to the Clearway. The same principle would apply if one was sitting on a bench, or using a way-finding pillar.
Vibrant Streets Guidelines are clear in how this coordination and integration should be done: Staff are to analyze sidewalks upfront to determine an appropriate size for the Pedestrian Clearway, to comfortably accommodate expected pedestrian volumes. The preferred minimum is 2.1m – though there are many instances where much more space is required and appropriate for the Clearway. Cost-efficient planning would also necessitate that staff consider population and usage projections when undertaking this type of planning so that bottlenecks and other disruptions in the future can be avoided up-front, minimizing wasteful alterations to sidewalks and street furniture in the near-future.
The problem in the case of the new InfoToGo Pillars? Staff are bypassing the requirement to assess Pedestrian Clearway widths on a case-by-case basis, and are reducing VIbrants Streets Guidelines to a simple exercise of installing the new InfoToGo Pillars to allow the minimum 2.1m from distance “building to billboard”. The result? An unjustified and unecessary bottleneck in the Pedestrian Clearway – and a much greater bottleneck when users stand in the Clearway to read the ‘way-finding’ information on the spine of the billboard.
In addition, according to the Vibrant Streets Guidelines, street furniture should not “dominate the streetscape” and “the design of new street furniture must demonstrate appropriateness for its intended use, not as a venue for advertising. This means the public must be able to recognize the functionality and use of the elements. The size and scale of amenities should not be increased in order to accommodate larger advertising faces.” The new InfoToGo Pillars violate this aspect of the guidelines by prioritizing advertising dissemination as opposed to information dissemination, which in the case of the later it does poorly. In addition, the redesign of the pillar has been significantly altered from the former design planned for Toronto. The new InfoToGo Pillar is designed to maximize the size, intrusiveness and brightness of the advertising component – dominating the nearby streetscape – rather than the size and usefulness of community information, which actually shrank significantly with the current iteration.
A quick comparison of InfoToGo Pillars in other cities that contain far less advertising and far more information is also illustrative of how Toronto’s InfoToGo Pillars unnecessarily violate this aspect of the Vibrant Streets Guidelines.
See Vibrant Streets Quick Facts for more specifics, and some photo examples.