Why shouldn’t Overlea Bridge be a nice place?
High schoolers take councillor’s snub on chin, learn key civics lesson
Welcome to city hall, kids. Now go back to school and learn something.
Such was the condescending reception Grade 12 students from Marc Garneau Collegiate got when they presented their ideas to make the Overlea Bridge a safer and more welcoming place. The bridge connects the Thorncliffe and Flemingdon Park neighbourhoods, two interconnected communities divided by the Don Valley. A school project, most of the comments from the politicians and officials they presented to were encouraging of this kind of civic engagement, but one absolute grump was anything but.
“It’s a complicated problem,” said Denzil Minnan-Wong to the students. Minnan-Wong is councillor for Ward 16, an area that includes the east, Flemingdon side of the bridge where the school is located. “I would say that our councillors, the elected officials here, need you to send your plans over to your financial literacy class because this is going to be an expensive, expensive project. Quite frankly, we have to find a way to pay for any of these things.”
No guff: things cost money, a fact that certainly doesn’t escape teenagers about to graduate high school during a pandemic — young people who are likely thinking about postsecondary school or getting a job.
While the councillor’s get-off-my-lawn tone is like a technocratic version of Statler and Waldorf, the grumpy old men on “The Muppet Show,” telling students to learn financial literacy is rich coming from a councillor who supports spending billions of dollars rebuilding a short segment of the Gardiner Expressway, rather than exploring cheaper options with more returns on potential real estate investment around it. It’s a project that is sucking up 44 per cent of the Toronto transportation department’s capital budget over the next 10 years. Financial literacy, indeed.
The bridge is scheduled for rehabilitation in a few years so the students have timed their advocacy well and should not be dissuaded by one cynicism breeding response designed to put them off. Nearby, R.V. Burgess Park in the centre of Thorncliffe was revitalized by the Thorncliffe Park Women’s Committee after years of neglect by city officials, elected or not. The women got it cleaned up and had improvements added like new lighting, an outdoor tandoor oven, and started a weekly bazaar and even a café. All of that happened amidst Toronto’s culture of “no.”
“This bridge is our community sidewalk,” said Zanib Zaakia, a 17-year-old student presenter. Why shouldn’t the Overlea Bridge be a nice place? The students pointed out that 3,000 pedestrians cross the bridge daily and that the sidewalks are so narrow there’s no way to physically distance. There’s also bad drainage and vehicles routinely splash them with water and slush. Students also said their family and friend connections are located on both sides of the bridge.
The bridge is an uncomfortable pinch point, not just for the two adjacent neighbourhoods but for those beyond as it connects vast parts of the city. I’ve often cycled over the bridge and held my breath as traffic is so fast and the lanes so narrow, with no shoulder for safety, that I expect to be hit from behind and knocked over the side into the valley below. Imagine thinking or feeling this multiple times a day in your neighbourhood.
Tens of thousands of people live in Thorncliffe and Flemingdon, some of the densest parts of Toronto, but streets like Overlea Boulevard and Don Mills Road are designed like highways. In recent weeks and months at city council, humane redesigns for Yonge Street, both downtown and in North York, were approved after years of advocacy. As part of the new Eglinton LRT, the Eglinton Connects project promises an improved streetscape with better pedestrian and cycling infrastructure too. Where this kind of thing happens — and where it doesn’t — is interesting.
Think, too, back to last summer when big parts of the city were transformed overnight as part of either ActiveTO or the CafeTO pandemic programs. A continuous Bloor-Danforth bike lane installed almost overnight, with leafy patios greening up the street, and attempts were made to slow down traffic on local streets so people could enjoy their neighbourhoods safely.
In Thorncliffe, however, the ActiveTO plan didn’t move beyond being “under consideration,” a conspicuous omission in a neighbourhood of apartment dwellers.
The students are asking for safer walking and cycling conditions in the kind of typical postwar Toronto landscape where many collisions involving serious injury or death occur, as the city’s own Vision Zero data mapping shows.
In the middle of a pandemic, in strained learning conditions, these high school students have engaged with civics, a good thing in normal times. Surely not everyone at city hall is cynical, but one thing history proves is when smart, engaged people get this kind of condescending and negative response to their ideas they either give up — or they keep organizing and get stronger.
I’ll bet good, financially literate money that we haven’t heard the last of these kids.