Willowdale East
The Light Up North
Welcome to Willowdale East
Willowdale East is a neighbourhood towards the North End of Toronto. The region stretches from Highway 401 in the south to Finch Avenue in the north and Yonge Street in the west to Bayview Avenue in the east.
Contents
Willowdale East is home to numerous green spaces scattered throughout the area. Massive malls including North York Centre and Yonge-Sheppard Centre are visible in the area. This area is also a food hub of the city with restaurants filling the streets including Yonge St., Sheppard Avenue, and North York Centre (Empress Avenue). The area has multiple routes for biking, trekking and just simply walking.Despite all this, Willowdale East is also extremely quiet in spite of the major streets and highways that are present in it.

Land Use
The planning mostly uses the major streets vs minor street layout where most of the commercial plots are near streets like Yonge Street and most institutional and residential are more within the communities. However, there is one significant feature that you can notice, there is a significant increase in elevation from around the Willowdale-Sheppard intersection towards the Bayview-Sheppard intersection. As we get closer to the intersection, the streets south of Sheppard and north of the 401 start to become more windy, most likely to keep the low speed limit while allowing easy access to higher elevation.
Population
Willowdale East is a fairly populous neighbourhood, with a population of 50,434 people, this is a 12% increase between 2011 and 2016. With this population the neighbourhood has 10,087 people/km2. The neighbourhood also has a huge number of immigrants, making up 61.8% of the neighbourhood, 10.6% more than all of Toronto’s. The neighbourhood’s male to female percentage is 47% to 53%.
Language
71% of the neighbourhood has a non-English mother tongue and 51% use that language at home. In this 8595 people have Mandarin as their mother tongue and 6730 speak it at home. 75% of the neighbourhood is a visible minority and 49% of the neighbourhood is from East Asia.
The TTC Issue
Many areas in the neighbourhood are not easily accessible with transit. For example, areas from Hollywood Avenue in the south and Byng Avenue in the North, also Kenneth Avenue in the West and Wilfred Avenue in the East. The closest subways are on Yonge Street and Sheppard Avenue and the bus service on Bayview Avenue is extremely slow.
There are 0 buses in the middle with the only chance of travel being on foot, bike, and car. This is mostly due to the presence of two subway lines close by, disallowing buses to travel within the neighbourhoods with a couple kilometres due to the small travel distance, but some areas are 2-3km from the nearest bus stop/subway station.
Parks and Rec
I would change the parks and rec development plan in the north-eastern part of the neighbourhood. I would most likely add quite a bit of new parks and rec areas.
Updated TTC
This would be an updated bus map allowing the areas between Willowdale Avenue and Bayview Avenue to have easy access to buses and the TTC. Allowing easy access to that area for easy buses and the subway service.
Bibliography
Toronto Transit Commission (2020), System Map [PDF File], Retrieved from https://www.ttc.ca/PDF/Maps/TTC_SystemMap.pd f
Toronto (2019), Willowdale East: Neighbourhood Profile [PDF File], Retrieved from https://www.toronto.ca/ext/sdfa/Neighbourhood%20Profiles/pdf/2016/pdf1/cpa51.pdf
Google (2020), Google Maps, Retrieved from maps.google.ca
Eastern Construction (2020), Empress Walk, Retrieved from easternconstruction.com/portfolio/empress-walk