The Great Canadian Sprawl Thread!
 

A thread to celebrate our worst offenders! I'll start.

Edmonton, I love ya, but Stony Plain Rd in the west end is pretty brutal. 5 Lanes, all one direction, with 100 Ave a few hundred meters away on the other side of the strip malls going the other way also at 4 or 5 lanes.

http://i61.tinypic.com/2mo77g7.jpg

My main issue is essentially the entire suburb of Surrey.

Soak in the excitement of an eight lane arterial road!

http://i.imgur.com/NX1n3rQ.jpg

The enlightening eighteen lanes of FREEDOM!

http://i.imgur.com/7bT7QMH.jpg

The fantastic four stack interchange!

http://i.imgur.com/PiIJbar.jpg

The glamorous gated community!

http://i.imgur.com/lPbfyAH.jpg

And the superior shopping mall!

http://i.imgur.com/eQcppsD.jpg

To experience these, and many other modern marvels of suburban sprawl, take a visit to the GTA near you!

For us, it's Kenmount Road.

The main intersection in my neighbourhood:

http://i62.tinypic.com/24pwfuw.png

Is approximately 1 kilometre away from this:

http://i58.tinypic.com/33v2bzp.png

Kenmount Road is absolutely disgusting. The Avalon Mall, countless car dealerships, fast food restaurants, strip malls, hotels, banks, offices... many sections of Kenmount Road and its side streets don't even have sidewalks.

The city has a half dozen or more areas that look like the above. And they're growing in size and number all the time.

Then there are the suburban commercial strips. A lesson in poor urban design, but not as offensive as Kenmount Road:

http://i57.tinypic.com/wjrpz.png

And what is still, in my mind at least, the unrivaled ugliest university in North America - Memorial:

http://i59.tinypic.com/1626w5y.png

^ That's just auto oriented and light industrial areas; the East End of St. John's, as well as Cowan Heights-Mt Pearl-Paradise are the worst parts.

It's also quite scary to realize that Canada's largest and fastest growing city is comprised mostly of sprawl.

I didn't think gated communities were legal in Canada. I understood the only gated communities are ones that are part of a shared complex such as townhomes or condo where land is strata owned. An area maybe cut of but cannot be "exclusive" unto itself, or so I thought.

Also I second the comment on Surrey......an ugly crime ridden sprawl of a mess except South Surrey but people don't say they live in Surrey but rather White Rock.

I think Ottawa's biggest mistake is actually the greenbelt. It was too small to stop sprawl and just made commutes a bit longer.

That "gated community" appears to lack gates.

it has gates yes, and they operate as low fee condo corporations. The Condo fees essentially only pay for maintenance of the park. There are 2 or 3 around the GTA, that one in Markham as far as I know is the only one located within the sprawl of the GTA. the other couple exist in exurban locations outside of the suburban edge.

There are two entrances to the community, the first one looks like this:

http://i.imgur.com/BeFqAQz.jpg

Second one is newer and was constructed after the subdivision was built, as the adjacent ungated community went up. It just has a gate that maintenance people can open.

http://i.imgur.com/ZGx28vv.jpg

Surrey from my understanding is roughly the same sort of thing as Scarborough, correct?

The GTA is one of the worst offenders for sprawl. Everything is just basically everywhere, no organization of anything. I remember back when Canada's Wonderland (Vaughan) was in the middle of nowhere, now there's like a suburb on one side, a bunch of commercial stuff on the other.

This is completely my opinion, but I don't think gated communities should be allowed by city zoning.

condo towers are similar to gated communities imo.

Don't think you'll find too many on this forum who disagrees with you on that one.

I can't remember where I read this, but due to the limited entrances/exits, it actually causes emergencies to turn fatal far more frequently due to emergency vehicles not being able to enter/exit efficiently.

Toronto is a huge offender for sprawl, it rivals the likes of LA and Houston for its "epic" sprawl type areas. You don't get to having the busiest highway on the planet without it..

That said, it acts as the industrial and economic heartland of the country. In some ways you can't help but stand back and be impressed by the scale of it all. One of my favourite drives is coming back from Buffalo, Its an urban area from Grimsby all the way till I get off the highway, roughly 115km later. There is something to be said about driving through a city at 115km/h and it taking over an hour..

You're gotta be joking.

the bypass A-30 is roughly 85 km long, then you take A-20 East to exit the metropolitan area. It's a good 110km.

you can take A-40 in Montréal, then A-25 South, which becomes A-20 East. Again, 110km

if Montréal decides to complete the ring road, it would be almost 200km long.

That has more to do with the lower quantity of limited access roadways around Toronto compared to similar-sized U.S. cities. And far from being epic in sprawl, Toronto is quite modest in that regard, as it doesn't have a hundred thousand acres of estates on squiggly cul-de-sacs that places like Chicago do. Instead, Toronto is famous for having high-rises outside of the downtown area, which places like Chicago don't.

The Golden Horseshoe feels massive, but it's not in the American league. Consider this: the 401 doesn't feel much at all like the similarly-placed 294 in Chicago, which, aside from servicing the airport and various industrial zones, goes through large swaths of sparsely populated exurban residential development featuring large lots and golf courses.

Toronto's sprawl is denser than most (all?) on this side of the Atlantic.

Vancouver sprawl - this is the suburb of Coquitlam (pop.120K)
http://www.globalairphotos.com/image...h2014_0025.jpg
http://www.globalairphotos.com/image...h2014_0025.jpg

Yet the density of the GTA is the 2nd highest of any major urbanized area in North America, after (get this) Los Angeles...

Agreed completely.

Given the class disparities in Winnipeg, I'm (pleasantly) surprised that they haven't really caught on here. They would really play to the paranoia of many suburbanites.

In places where they are common though, it is downright depressing driving down an arterial street and all you see are 8 foot walls surrounding these communities. Phoenix has loads of them.