Where is the Green in Transit-Oriented Communities? A Geospatial Analysis of MTSA Green Space Access

Abstract

Are Ontario’s Major Transit Station Areas (MTSAs) being planned to provide adequate green space for the populations they are designated to serve? Provincial policy mandates the density of people and jobs in MTSAs in absolute terms, but no equivalent standard governs the provision of green space that is assumed to accompany that density. Using a network-based, populationweighted geospatial accessibility analysis of 50 MTSAs across Richmond Hill, Vaughan, and Markham, this study calculates an accessible green space per capita score for each MTSA and evaluates this score against measures of distributional inequality, transit-mode and density patterns, spatial autocorrelation, and external provision benchmarks. MTSAs planned for higher density and larger populations tend to have less accessible green space per person, not more. Green space access is also far less equal across these MTSA’s than it is for existing green space across the City of Toronto. The shortfall is severe for the region’s three largest growth centres, Richmond Hill Centre, Vaughan Metropolitan Centre, and Langstaff GO-Bridge. Even at full build-out, Langstaff’s own Secondary Plans parkland allocation reaches only 2.9 square metres per person, a fraction of the 24 square metres per person recommended by the Fields in Trust benchmark. A supporting policy review traces this outcome to specific mechanisms, including the absence of a quantitative parkland target in Richmond Hill Centre’s Secondary Plan and Bill 23’s reduction of the municipal parkland dedication tools available to offset that shortfall. These findings suggest that Ontario’s MTSA framework has, to this point, mandated density with considerably more rigour than it has mandated green space. Green space provision therefore should be a binding requirement of MTSA planning, comparable in enforceability to existing density targets