The Cautionary Tale of Liberty Village

Once upon a time as a bright-eyed undergrad, I lived in Toronto next to a new, up and coming neighbourhood being branded as Liberty Village. It was going to be THE place to live, an exciting new taste of an urban lifestyle you couldn’t find anywhere else. Yet every time I made the hypothetically quick trip there to pick up groceries or meet someone for drinks, I couldn’t get over the bizarre lack of access points, the long dark walks under railway overpasses, and the endless slogs across inexplicably hectic parking lots to get near any businesses. This week the girls in my Toronto-based group chat were complaining about the constant, impossible traffic congestion in Liberty Village, at the same time I was reading an article on what went wrong in building this neighbourhood (nearly) from scratch.

The author hit a couple of key obvious points: one major access road. A lack of connectivity outside the neighbourhood. One bus route that gets stuck in the same traffic as everyone else. Most of all, it was all just a little too… Toronto. Somehow, an extremely dense neighbourhood sandwiched between multiple commuter rail lines has no major transit station. Big box stores with parking lots larger than interiors are prolific. With a future subway line still (at least) a decade away from serving the area, Toronto’s pocket of car-oriented urban suburbia is already proving a major headache for city staff and politicians, and it’s not even finished yet.

-Written by Robert Brooks

(Photo credits belong to blogTO.com)