I love these little “reveals” of “secret architecture”. A lot of cities have them: the Minneapolis Skyway; underground cities in Toronto, Atlanta, Houston, Chicago; Boston’s Emerald Necklace.
I think that’s a secret to continued, healthy city development, especially in an era increasingly marked by climate change and a rejection of car culture: how far can a pedestrian safely go within a controlled environment (climate controlled or controlled access, like a park system) in a city? Whenever I look at rankings of cities, I notice a consistent trend where cities with these sorts of features consistently rank higher than those without, because to build and maintain them requires cooperation between stakeholders rather than competition, and cooperation is at the heart of a healthy community.
Your definition of “safely” probably doesn’t match, but I’ve been enjoying Geowizard’s attempt to cross greater London without walking alongside a road or canal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4476uSeTsg8
The takeaway for me is how much parkland there actually is.
London is famously technically a forest. Though for all towns and cities in the UK there is gigantic difference in the leafiness of the "nice" bits and the normal-people bits.
Which is a shame because trees are a huge uplift to pretty much every measure of urban goodness except for long-term pavement maintenance costs.
Cities in Europe and Asia that are actually healthy, and have rejected car culture, don't have these tunnel thingies. Instead of moving pedestrian traffic away from streets, they improve their streets to make them friendly to pedestrians. The idea that climate issues necessitate this kind of divorce from the outdoors would be a strange concept indeed to people in Barcelona and Helsinki alike.
This is in fact a classic, 80s-90s North American car-infested big city band-aid. Leave the streets for the cars, leave the tiny sidewalks for the homeless and the trash, connect office buildings and plazas with pathways so the nine-to-fives can drive or subway in, go for their lunch or whatever, then drive/subway out without meeting the poors (because who else lives downtown anyway?) Et voila! Who needs to make downtowns actually liveable after all.
I have a slightly different take than others on this: I think the main contributor is the fact Toronto's financial district is extremely dense compared to most if not all European cities, and serviced by a highly trafficked subway line that loops around it. Many of the large office skyscrapers are built right on top of the subway, and so they naturally have a public underground connection, and usually it's a mini-mall with a food court and amenities for the office workers. Because of downtown's density these kind of just merged together into the larger PATH network.
The weather is of course also a factor. It's just incredibly convenient in the winter, or even in the summer when it's muggy out, for office workers. You just hop onto the elevator during your lunch or coffee break, wearing your office clothes, no need to throw on a jacket or bring an umbrella or anything. It's just an extension of your office building basically.
Toronto ALSO has healthy commercial streets all over the place that you access from street level and that DON'T connect to these tunnels. It's a very large city. The PATH tunnels are just one district.
Rebuttal to your post:
1. Many Asian cities have elevated pedestrian walkway systems.
2. Helsinki has underground pedestrian malls/tunnels.
3. Toronto's first PATH pedestrian tunnel was built before the post WW2 car culture explosion.
4. Toronto's winter cycling volumes are less than 10% that of the summer cycling volumes. Real statistics say that winter weather greatly affects people's decision on transportation mode.
I have used a couple pedestrian tunnel/bridge networks extensively in frosty Canadian winter climates, I really appreciate them plus I think they are a fun way to get from place to place - being able to travel at a different layer than street-level feels refreshing/novel!
Downtown LA's elevated pedestrian plazas on Bunker Hill, as depicted in the movie Her, are a great example of this. Office workers drive in, park in an underground garage below a skyscraper, take the elevator up to work, and walk around a multi-block radius to grab lunch, all without ever stepping foot on a city street.
This is not true in Asia. In particular, major Japanese cities, Seoul, and Hong Kong are quite famous for extensive elevated and underground pedestrian networks. The major difference is that density is so high in these areas that they do not run into the problems encountered when implementing in North America, namely that a second level makes the street level dead.
It regularly gets below zero in Chicago and Toronto. Europe is generally warmer than Canada and the northern U.S. Without these underground tunnels, there would be no pedestrians during months of the year, and no amount of "improving their streets" would change that.
As someone from the Great Lakes region, watching Californians try to speculate about why Great Lakes cities have tunnels or elevated walkways but major Asian or European cities don't is hilarious.
Come visit us in January and learn why for yourself ;)
> The idea that climate issues necessitate this kind of divorce from the outdoors would be a strange concept indeed to people in Barcelona and Helsinki alike.
Try going for a walk outside in downtown Toronto on both the hottest and coldest days.
If you're not in good health and appropriately dressed, you could suffer heatstroke on the hot day and simply die on the cold day.
> the poors (because who else lives downtown anyway?
You should talk about what you know instead of trying to come up with ways to hate something more than you already do.
Montreal is a lot less temperate (in both directions!) than Barcelona and Helsinki. Having a way to get out of ±35º weather really does make the city more livable.
I've actually never been, but saw it featured in a CanCon movie, waydowntown, where a group of office workers wage a month's salary as to who can stay inside the longest:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waydowntown
Fellow Calgarian here. I like how the term "plus 15" refers to any elevated path in Calgary. For example, the link between the new cancer centre and Foothills Hospital is often referred to as the Plus 15.
More northern cities like Montreal and Winnipeg also have very interesting indoor pedestrian systems. The one in Winnipeg is particularly useful, since there are approximately 72 hours per year that it's comfortable to be outside between the bone-chilling cold and the biblical swarms of mosquitos and flies in the summer.
My wife and I had a great time wandering around the Underground City when we visited Montreal. We were there in the fall, but it sunk in just how cold Montreal winters get when we went to a club that had a coatroom the size of my first apartment.
Montréal also has a nice 32km+ of underground network.
It includes :
4000+ shops, restaurants; 20+ museum; Universities, school, libraries, hotels, corporate towers, etc..[1]
One thing that I was surprised wasn't mentioned is the impact that I believe weather must have had on the development of the Path. Winters in Toronto get rather cold and snowy. Even with a dense downtown core, walking a few blocks outside can be rather unpleasant.
I've been told the intent of the PATH was to make sure that people from Montreal could take the train to Union, walk to Scotiabank Arena and watch the Habs beat the crap out of the Leafs without getting snowed on.
Toronto Maple Leafs played at Maple Leaf Gardens until Feb 1999. The PATH was created before then.
The portion of the PATH connecting Union Station to the ACC is a few hundred metres at most.
I can't see how anyone in Toronto would help people from Montreal enjoy a Habs win over the Leafs. :)
Torontonians call it the "ACC", (short for Air Canada Centre, before its current rebranding to Scotiabank Arena - Google Maps knows both). Also, it's "Skydome", not Rogers Centre. :)
Toronto is relatively balmy compared with every other significant Canadian city east of the rockies and it's not in the snow belt.
What it does get is vast seas of road snot a pedestrian has to wade through at every intersection. That alone is reason to stick to PATH between October and May.
Some years they vacillate between -10C and 4C causing ice to melt to water and then refreeze, nature's jackhammer to any surface cracks in the asphalt road resulting in a city budget line item for "springtime pothole fixing".
Once in awhile, the temps will drop to below -20C for several days/weeks. Not as bad as midwest USA/Canadian prairies winters requiring a heater for your car engine block, but going outside is laborious and painful for long periods.
Lol, I actually agree on the 'as far as Canada goes'.. but many of us in Toronto aren't Canadian. The winters are pretty bad to me as a foreigner. But to be honest, I'm not as impacted by the cold as I am by the darkness. I get pretty bad seasonal depression during the worst winter months and haven't found a great way to cope yet.
Many northern cities have the same thing, but it is above the streets not underground. Minneapolis has 15km of skyway (but note that the city mostly uses street level buses so this system isn't the direct connection to transit - it does have direct connections to parking garages though)
I lived in Toronto for several years. Certainly there are much colder places and I personally don't find Toronto winters terribly unpleasant, but I know a lot of people don't share the sentiment.
Lot's of comments here at the "micro" level: about the comfort of an individual pedestrian. There's also the "macro" view: how best to quickly and safely move a large number of pedestrians in a short window of time. The PATH mostly connects Toronto's financial district full of office towers and 9-5 workers with a transportation hub, Union Station, at its south end. Union Station gets around 300,000[0] passengers a day, most but not all are office commuters. Without the PATH, the sidewalks would be absolutely (and dangerously) jammed between 8-9am and 4:30-6pm.
> Montreal has a similar system, while Tokyo, Osaka, Seoul, Hong Kong, Singapore and Houston have systems that resemble the Path in some respects. A few European cities also make considerable use of pedestrian tunnels, including Helsinki, Stockholm and Munich.
Japan's northernmost major city, Sapporo, has a very extensive one -- of those I've seen, it's the one that's most comparable to Toronto's.
The other Japanese tunnel/undercity complexes are mostly subterranean malls around subway stations. (This also applies to all of the ones in Hong Kong.) But Sapporo's is seriously huge.
I think the common denominator is that people would rather walk in a heated underground space when it gets cold.
We were running late for our train in winter - the Sapporo underground system let us walk to the station so much faster than trying to navigate ice, snow and road crossings
Sapporo's one stretches for a good mile in a straight line. Quite convenient when going from the entertainment district to the train station with a suitcase in heavy snow.
The PATH network is great, especially in Toronto's freezing cold and windy winters! The beautiful 'underpass' pictured in this article, with the white marble, is on my commute to work, and it really is breathtaking when you turn the corner.
In the Financial District, the various bank towers can be told apart by the colour of the marble and other stones they build with. For an underground walkway, some parts of it are really beautiful, other parts are just what you'd expect for an underground passage in a big city (especially those parts connected to the subway transit system).
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I think that’s a secret to continued, healthy city development, especially in an era increasingly marked by climate change and a rejection of car culture: how far can a pedestrian safely go within a controlled environment (climate controlled or controlled access, like a park system) in a city? Whenever I look at rankings of cities, I notice a consistent trend where cities with these sorts of features consistently rank higher than those without, because to build and maintain them requires cooperation between stakeholders rather than competition, and cooperation is at the heart of a healthy community.
The takeaway for me is how much parkland there actually is.
Which is a shame because trees are a huge uplift to pretty much every measure of urban goodness except for long-term pavement maintenance costs.
This is in fact a classic, 80s-90s North American car-infested big city band-aid. Leave the streets for the cars, leave the tiny sidewalks for the homeless and the trash, connect office buildings and plazas with pathways so the nine-to-fives can drive or subway in, go for their lunch or whatever, then drive/subway out without meeting the poors (because who else lives downtown anyway?) Et voila! Who needs to make downtowns actually liveable after all.
The weather is of course also a factor. It's just incredibly convenient in the winter, or even in the summer when it's muggy out, for office workers. You just hop onto the elevator during your lunch or coffee break, wearing your office clothes, no need to throw on a jacket or bring an umbrella or anything. It's just an extension of your office building basically.
Toronto ALSO has healthy commercial streets all over the place that you access from street level and that DON'T connect to these tunnels. It's a very large city. The PATH tunnels are just one district.
I have used a couple pedestrian tunnel/bridge networks extensively in frosty Canadian winter climates, I really appreciate them plus I think they are a fun way to get from place to place - being able to travel at a different layer than street-level feels refreshing/novel!
Come visit us in January and learn why for yourself ;)
Try going for a walk outside in downtown Toronto on both the hottest and coldest days.
If you're not in good health and appropriately dressed, you could suffer heatstroke on the hot day and simply die on the cold day.
> the poors (because who else lives downtown anyway?
You should talk about what you know instead of trying to come up with ways to hate something more than you already do.
Montreal is a lot less temperate (in both directions!) than Barcelona and Helsinki. Having a way to get out of ±35º weather really does make the city more livable.
10 miles/16 km.
I've actually never been, but saw it featured in a CanCon movie, waydowntown, where a group of office workers wage a month's salary as to who can stay inside the longest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waydowntown
Called the +15 because it's 15 feet above ground
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_City,_Montreal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnipeg_Walkway
A full map is available here: https://portail-m4s.s3.montreal.ca/pdf/vm_16722_00_planreso_...
Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_City,_Montreal
[1] https://montreal.ca/articles/reso-le-reseau-souterrain-de-mo...
Perhaps they were talking about Maple Leaf Gardens? It is a more substantial walk.
The portion of the PATH connecting Union Station to the ACC is a few hundred metres at most.
I can't see how anyone in Toronto would help people from Montreal enjoy a Habs win over the Leafs. :)
Torontonians call it the "ACC", (short for Air Canada Centre, before its current rebranding to Scotiabank Arena - Google Maps knows both). Also, it's "Skydome", not Rogers Centre. :)
What it does get is vast seas of road snot a pedestrian has to wade through at every intersection. That alone is reason to stick to PATH between October and May.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnipeg_Walkway
Some years they vacillate between -10C and 4C causing ice to melt to water and then refreeze, nature's jackhammer to any surface cracks in the asphalt road resulting in a city budget line item for "springtime pothole fixing".
Once in awhile, the temps will drop to below -20C for several days/weeks. Not as bad as midwest USA/Canadian prairies winters requiring a heater for your car engine block, but going outside is laborious and painful for long periods.
Deleted Comment
[0]https://www.toronto.ca/services-payments/venues-facilities-b...
Japan's northernmost major city, Sapporo, has a very extensive one -- of those I've seen, it's the one that's most comparable to Toronto's.
The other Japanese tunnel/undercity complexes are mostly subterranean malls around subway stations. (This also applies to all of the ones in Hong Kong.) But Sapporo's is seriously huge.
I think the common denominator is that people would rather walk in a heated underground space when it gets cold.
In the Financial District, the various bank towers can be told apart by the colour of the marble and other stones they build with. For an underground walkway, some parts of it are really beautiful, other parts are just what you'd expect for an underground passage in a big city (especially those parts connected to the subway transit system).