Good intentions, bad design make Hwy. 7 a jumble of contradictions

The redesigned Highway 7 in Markham was remade to accommodate a variety of new users as well as a full complement of cars. For a traffic engineer, this is having your cake and eating it too.

Thestar.com
May 29, 2017
By Christopher Hume

If there’s one place where Markham took a wrong turn, it was on Highway 7. The clash of intentions and confusion of consequences that play out on this unfortunate thoroughfare point to a city busy making every mistake in the book.

Is it a highway? A road? Is it designed for cars? Buses? Cyclists? Pedestrians? The answer is all of the above - and none.

This is what happens when a municipality refuses to make the tough decisions about its future, and tries instead to be all things to all people. The starting point, of course, is that Markham is a former town that turned into a current suburb that now wants to turn into a future city.

Well, sort of.

More than anything, Markham is in the grips of an identity crisis. It doesn’t know what it wants to be. It doesn’t help that the city encompasses several separate civic entities - Unionville, Buttonville, Milliken, old Markham as well as the spaces around them. These are historic communities that date from a time before city-building was hijacked by professional planners. Since the mid-20th century, disciples of that most dismal of pseudo-sciences have wreaked untold havoc on communities around the world.

Markham is no exception. The contrast between the compact, coherent layout of the original towns and the surrounding tract housing couldn’t be more dramatic, or depressing. Without the car, modern-day Markham wouldn’t exist. The car dictates not just the built form of Markham but how residents occupy it. It’s no surprise, therefore, that this is a landscape with little room or tolerance for other forms of mobility.

Which brings us to Highway 7. In its latest incarnation, it has become an arterial hybrid, a reflection of a community aspirations if not its reality. Between Chalmers Rd. in the west and Town Centre Blvd. in the east where the new thoroughfare is fully realized, it comprises six to eight lanes of traffic, two bus lanes running down the middle, bus stops at regular intervals, bike lanes on either side, and sidewalks. For much of its length, the highway is lined with strip malls, shopping centres and parking lots. In some sections, newly-built condos face directly onto the road, residential units at grade.

What this adds up to is a layer of good intentions piled on top of a bedrock of boilerplate suburbanism. While many might admire the desire to create a more urban environment, the results are incongruous, even dangerous. For example, at some intersections passengers have to cross multiple lanes to reach a bus stop. Cyclists, of which there are precious few, use in their allotted space at their own risk. Much safer to ride on the sidewalks, which are equally empty.

What’s interesting about the redesigned Highway 7 is how it was remade to accommodate a variety of new users as well as a full complement of cars and trucks. For a traffic engineer, this is having your cake and eating it too. For residents, it’s more like being allowed to chew but not swallow.

It also means a street that offers little beyond a way to get from A to B. This is another issue Markham has yet to resolve. Same thing with sidewalks. It’s great to have them, but there’s nowhere to walk to. Despite the addition of trees and planters, this road is a decorated dead space that leads from one parking lot to the next.

It’s been said many times, but cities in which cars dominate are not those in which pedestrian culture flourishes. Until Markham gets its vehicular dependence under control, projects like Highway 7 are destined to be little more than window dressing. Even the new Markham Downtown, still under construction, is basically a variation on the suburban theme with better architecture. Residents will still drive there and back. The truth is that people won’t abandon their cars until walking becomes more convenient - and enjoyable - than driving.

At best, Markham’s makeover is a first step, highly visible but ultimately timid. It suggests a set of possibilities without realizing them. It proposes a new way of inhabiting that city, of relating to the community as a something other than a commuter or consumer.

But when the comforts of the same old, same old are available, what incentive is there to change? And change, we shouldn’t forget, is the thing we fear above all others.