How wide is your sidewalk?

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The upside to a day that’s -7 C (with the wind chill making it feel like double that), is that there aren’t many folks hanging around to question things when a hooded figure (that would be me) whips out a measuring tape to check the width of sidewalk in front of a house.

Do you know the width of your sidewalk? You should.

Today, I measured the one in front of the retail/residential building my wife and I own at 1781 Danforth Ave. in Toronto and was delighted that it is a whopping five metres wide. I then checked it against a colour-coded Google map, Sidewalk Widths Toronto (search for “sidewalk widths Toronto github” and it should come up), to confirm my number; this enabled me to compare the luxury of what I experience with sidewalks that are less than one-third the size.

Why? Because I spent my childhood a few blocks north of this part of the Danforth, and one of my most vivid memories is crowds of Italian men – mostly from Sicily – gathered in the street with espressos in hand as I’d walk with my mom to the Woolworth’s and Kresge’s near Woodbine Avenue. Or, on Sundays, the hundreds of families strolling after mass at St. Brigid’s, where I was an altar boy, and how there was room for everyone.

And, in 2018, rediscovering the Danforth after purchasing a building for my wife’s store (Ethel – 20th Century Living) and realizing how much more vital a city can feel with something so elemental, so basic, as wide sidewalks.

But before we walk my neighbourhood to compare concrete, a few things. Most of Danforth – from the well-worn sidewalks of Greektown near Pape and Logan avenues to the Ethiopian area around Greenwood Avenue, to the far-flung areas around Main Street and Victoria Park Avenue – sport sidewalks ranging from three to six metres wide (coloured yellow or green on the Google map), with only a few narrow passages of one metre or less here and there (red on the Google map). This suggests some sort of high street/wide sidewalk planning was in place when the Prince Edward Viaduct opened in 1918 and development began in earnest along the Danforth (my building, for instance, was built in 1922).

But it’s difficult to find long stretches of wide sidewalk anywhere else; other areas in the east end include portions of Leslieville and Lake Shore Boulevard East. In the west end, a few patches around High Park and Roncesvalles look welcoming and, moving north, Corso Italia along St. Clair Avenue looks good, as does Yonge Street for a nice stretch north of Eglinton Avenue. In the downtown core, however, there are many examples, with some sidewalks as wide as seven metres along Gerrard Street, Bay Street, University Avenue or Spadina Avenue (these appear as blue on the map). However, very long stretches are rare indeed.

In 2002, the City of Toronto adopted the Missing Sidewalk Installation Policy and the Toronto Pedestrian Charter. The charter, as one might expect, championed accessibility, well-being, and safety. In 2009, the city went further with the Toronto Walking Strategy, which added things such as design excellence and a 15-page report that examined how Torontonians use the sidewalks (9 per cent walk to work, 25 per cent walk to school, 12 per cent use the sidewalks for leisure/entertainment) and proposed ways of “fostering a culture of walking” via giving “higher priority” to pedestrians.

In 2012, the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act mandated that newly constructed sidewalks (or repaired older ones if possible) be 1.5 metres wide; the city one-upped the province with the edict that all new sidewalks should aim to be 2.1 metres wide.

So, with that in mind, I checked streets I routinely walk with my Chihuahua/Jack Russell mix, Bella, and headed over to the west side of Moberly Avenue, which Sidewalk Maps Toronto claimed was only 0.6 metre wide just south of Danforth Avenue. While it was indeed narrow, it looked much like the sidewalk of East Lynn Avenue one street over, which the map indicated was 1.3 metre in width and I was able to verify with my tape measure. So, with a quick flash of metal underfoot, I found that Moberly is, well, 1.3 metres in width.

Next, I headed north to Strathmore Boulevard near Woodington Avenue where the map suggested the sidewalks are a head-scratchingly tiny 0.3 metre, which for those of you who still use Imperial measure, is just shy of one foot wide. Since I don’t remember hopping on one foot along here, it was no surprise when the sidewalks turned out to be 1.4 metre on the north side and 1.5 metres on the south side.

This quick experiment, if nothing else, suggests some rather large errors can occur when combining the City of Toronto’s open sidewalk data (high-resolution aerial photographs that the city claims have an accuracy of plus or minus 30 centimetres) with the methods and code that were used from, says the website, “Meli Harvey’s Sidewalk Widths NYC project.” Perhaps long shadows ate away at portions of Strathmore’s sidewalk and resulted in false data.

But even if the map is only 70-per-cent accurate, it still provides an interesting lens through which to view the city; for instance, when I lived at Church and Adelaide streets, I always enjoyed walking in front of the Market Square condominiums. Looking at the map, I see that portions of the sidewalk there are 8.1 metres, which I’m sure had something to do with my mood.

But a word of advice if you pack a tape measure beside that water bottle: do your calculations in January and February to avoid unwanted attention.