[URBAN NOTE] "The PATH defies navigation, just go outside"

[rfmcdonald]

I disagree somewhat with the hyperbolic title of Edward Keenan's Toronto Star article. My limited experience has been that that the PATH is navigable, but that the knowledge is not very portable. You need to learn, by trial and error and by paying close attention to all the maps.

What is today recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s largest underground shopping complex — and what Financial District BIA executive director Grant Humes says “has turned into probably our busiest pedestrian street in the city” — is just a series of basements of different buildings. It emerged from private landlords agreeing to link together the underground shopping concourses in their various buildings. It was not designed with an eye to people moving across the city through it — it was never intended to be the privately-owned neighbourhood that it has essentially become.

As Humes says, “There is no overriding set of rules. There is no one behind the curtain, quite honestly, thinking about it and pulling the levers on a regular basis.”

Though the city has, since the 1980s, acted as the “co-ordinating agency,” all the sections of the path are owned and controlled, as the city says on its website, “by the owner of the property through which it runs.”
Having twice this week attempted specific journeys through the PATH — from Atrium on Bay to WaterPark Place and from WaterPark Place to City Hall — and having twice gotten lost on the way, I can observe that this understanding of how the PATH evolved and functions is essential to navigating it using existing signage.

The “streets” in the underground have no names, and don’t follow the above-ground grid pattern most Torontonians are used to. Instead the signs and maps rely on knowledge of building names or addresses — and the signs present them to you one at a time.

So, for instance, to get from the Ferry Docks to City Hall, you enter at WaterPark Place, then travel through One York, Air Canada Centre, 25 York, Union Station, Royal Bank Plaza, Toronto-Dominion Centre, First Canadian Place, 121 King West, the Richmond Adelaide Centre, the Sheraton Hotel, and then finally into City Hall (through the parking garage).

If you can keep that list of names, in order, in your head, there’s still some difficulty in finding the signs that direct you to the next destination (especially in Union Station, which remains under significant reconstruction), but you can generally find your way once you do.