Planning for Commuters: An Evaluation of Transit Oriented Developments in the Greater Golden Horseshoe

Urban sprawl has been at the forefront of the planning discussion for a long time, and rightfully so. It is an inefficient way of building out communities that only contribute to the autodependency that Canadians have. Transit-oriented developments (TOD) have been proposed as a way to combat urban sprawl by building communities that are compatible with high-order transit. The province of Ontario has made this way of building one of the key pillars in municipal growth through its Major Transit Station Areas (MTSA). Municipalities must conform to these provincial plans, so every municipality that is situated on a current or future GO rail line needs to build these communities. While there are policies that the province has provided, there are stark variations between municipalities when it comes to building these MTSAs. Furthermore, the province is using a one-type-fits-all approach to MTSAs, resulting in communities that do not complement the overall municipality or transit modes. In this paper, I explore these differences between municipalities for commuter TODs. A comparative case study of four different municipalities that are all building TODs around GO stations and all have high proportions of commuters. Mount Pleasant GO, Kitchener GO, Milton GO, and Whitby GO are used for this analysis. Within these case studies, a policy analysis, development review, and regression analysis using the Transportation Tomorrow Survey were completed to inform an evaluation of the sites. Each site is evaluated on three criteria: if it is a utopian TOD, a commuter TOD, and if it succeeds in the provincial policies. The findings are then used to inform policy recommendations for the future Caledon Station GO within Caledon and the province.