Sidewalk sale

BY D. LAXMIDAS MAKWANA

Toronto is holding a sidewalk sale and transit shelters, waste receptacles and multi-publication boxes are first up for bidders.

The Vibrant Streets project, part of Toronto’s Clean and Beautiful City initiative, opened its request for proposals process. The result will determine which service provider will manufacture and maintain new public furniture on the city’s pedestrian right-of-ways. The city’s contract for shelters with CBS Outdoor expires in 2007, while the city will replace litterbins in two years.

The criteria set out by the city call for private sector funding to design and create new elements to replace many of Toronto’s dilapidated furniture installations. Ultimately, all of Toronto’s neighbourhoods will feature similarly styled furniture, adding a cohesion that has been absent from community-based projects.

Coun. Janet Davis spoke against the dangers of outsourcing the Vibrant Streets project during a Works Committee meeting in June. She warned those in favour of the ad-covered furntiure.

“Wait ‘til you have children,” she said, “and your children are bombarded, daily, everywhere, in every media, to buy buy buy.”

Coun. Davis’s scathing assessment, along with input from other community stakeholders, such as business improvement areas and local activist groups, helped shape the project that will close bidding in January 2007.

Co-ordinator Andy Koropeski credits public consultations for ensuring Vibrant Streets offers a co-ordinated street furniture program that isn’t billboards disguised as benches. He challenges Davis’s suggestion of publicly funding the capital project, leaving taxpayers to foot the bill.

“It’s a lot of money in a very constrained budgetary environment,” Koropeski said. “What program would you increase, your revenue or taxes? Or would you cutback on another program to fund something like this?”

The city looks to install 2,900 benches with complimentary waste receptacles in East York, North York and Etobicoke. Half of the benches will display advertising. The number of new transit shelters that will be ordered is still being determined.

Early estimates indicate purchasing the furniture, including shelters, would cost $120 million amortized over 20 years. Over the same 20 years $140 million is necessary for maintenance and repairs.

With a mandate from city council to maintain or reduce the 18,000-square-metres (roughly one third of the Rogers Centre site) of street furniture advertising, Koropeski said designs need to be streamlined.

“You won’t see what you see now, a garbage can with advertising, next to a bus shelter with advertising, next to a bench with advertising,” he said. “There will be one ad permitted per location.”

In Vancouver a program similar to Vibrant Streets is in its fifth year of application. Of 900 bus shelters ordered by the city, 675 have advertisements. Additional benches, waste receptacles and bicycle racks ordered through the contract are advertisement free.

Grant Woff, a civil engineer working for Vancouver’s Streets Department advises Toronto’s planners to negotiate flexibility into the offer the city accepts after Vancouver’s program encountered difficulties.

He said that even with potential to expand the public furniture program in Vancouver, the contract does not account for contingencies that may arise. Woff’s main concern is that the furniture styles will be dated as communities’ aesthetic tastes evolve.

“The challenge is that it’s a 20-year contract and as time goes by the city changes,” he said.

Koropeski expects similar bids that cover a 20-year span because investors will begin to see a profit in the latter half of the contract.

Toronto’s community-business leaders are anxious for Vibrant Streets to remove clutter from their sidewalks. Briar de Lang, general manager for the Bloor-Yorkville Business Improvement Area, has already installed a multi-publication box on the corner of Bay and Bloor streets.

“You had Astral, Eucan, newspaper boxes, you had so many companies that had a state in public space,” she said. “Now with Vibrant Streets we are looking forward to cleaning up spaces in front of our retailers.”