Toronto Subway’s ‘yellow’ line runs in a u-shape, stopping frequently in the loop downtown and about once per mile as the two branches extend north. As a result you can easily tell where the stations are by looking down upon the city – they’re all marked by clusters of 20-30 story residential towers roughly a mile apart from each other. Go ahead and visit one of these distant stations. North York, York Mills, Yorkdale: all named similarly, which is appropriate considering their total lack of character. Just because they’re dense, transit oriented developments doesn’t make them pedestrian friendly or even remotely charming.

Vancouver appears to have fallen into this lazy development trap and that’s what you want to emulate here in Seattle as well? I’m all for TOD, but not density just for density’s sake.

The problem is, Vancouver’s SkyTrain and Link have long routes with large spaces between stations. This encourages developers to stuff as much housing to service the station as they can. A shorter line with many stations would be a much more intelligent means of creating dense development, see pretty much any European city as an example, but it just costs too much.

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