Shops at Don Mills Sucks

 Despite living quite close to the 'Shops at Don Mills' outdoor mall, it's a place a rarely go to. Even during high school, I never met the question "Want to go to Shops?" with enthusiasm. In spite of my opinion, many people seem to love this place. So, I figure it's time to explore why I consider the Shops at Don Mills a failure. And yes, it deals with my hatred of cars.

A Brief History

The old Don Mills Centre was a strip mall that opened in 1955, at the southwest corner of Don Mills Road and Lawrence Avenue East, in North York. Successive expansions of the mall led to it being enclosed in 1978. This mall was a typical neighbourhood mall, not unlike Parkway, Agincourt, or Sheridan. I have a vague memory of this mall, but I was so young when it was fully open.

The enclosed Don Mills Centre mall.

In the early 2000s, owners Cadillac Fairview decided they wanted to renovate the mall and make it an outdoor lifestyle center. This opened in 2009. I would generalize this transition as being an upscaling, as a local needs were displaced for higher-end brands. The name was changed to the tacky 'Shops at Don Mills' moniker at this time.

The mall's model is like a commercial village. It's similar to outlet malls like the Outlet Collection at Niagara or Tanger Outlets Ottawa. Unlike those malls, however, I think it has been more thought-out in terms of making it feel like a real place, unlike a shopping utopia. It helps that Shops at Don Mills is located in a well-established area, with a wide variety of housing types within walking distance. The 'town square' in the center of the mall has restaurants lining it, giving furthering this feeling of it being 'real'.

My Beef with Shops

As I mentioned, my biggest issue with Shops is the parking situation. I think the parking provision takes away from the shopping experience, and is actually allocated worse than a regional mall. I do want to clarify that there is no good way to provide parking, but there are tradeoffs that can improve how it functions within an environment.

First, let's take a look at a nearby regional mall also owned by Cadillac Fairview, Fairview Mall, seen below. In this picture below, you can see that Fairview's parking is peripheral. While this has a negative impact in that it makes it difficult to walk into the mall from the surrounding area, similar to argument four from this past blog post. However, since everyone driving must leave their car in this lot (you can't drive into the mall!), the shopping space itself is universally foot traffic.

Let's also look at a view of Tanger Outlets Ottawa. Although it is an outdoor mall, its layout is not that different from Fairview; parking is peripheral. Since this location is super suburban, the impact of not being able to walk in is reduced, since there's a million barriers to even getting to the mall on foot first. I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it isn't exclusively the mall's fault.

Now let's look at Shops at Don Mills. Like the above two examples, the parking is peripheral, so it shares the same concern. However, it is different than Tangers Outlets Ottawa: car traffic is permitted through the mall. There is parking on the small local streets, and some people use the roads as shortcuts between Don Mills and the Donway West. This is my largest issue with Shops. Automobility is embedded as a barrier to a positive shopping experience. Getting from one store to another requires you to cross an active street, which gets very congested during busy times.

The vehicles moving is not the only issue. Parking forces people to stick to the sidewalks and cross at designated crossings (which I'll get to later). Additionally, pedestrians must dodge cars reversing in and out of spots onto busy streets (angle parking is never a good thing). I can excuse being outside during winter if the environment is fun, but avoiding cars is not fun. I genuinely do not know why people choose to subject themselves to this. 

Karl Fraser Road, looking north out to Lawrence.

You wouldn't really know it, but shops has a large parking garage that rarely fills. Why would anyone parking here when you can park directly in front of your destination? I think Shops encourages laziness to an extreme degree: sure, at Scarborough Town Centre, everyone wants to park close, but even the closest spot requires some walking to actually reach your destination. 

My other issue related to the designated crossings. Often times, the crossings are blocked by people doing a 'quick' drop-off, reducing the already slim offerings of legal crossing points for pedestrians. These crossings are only guarded by a stop sign, which is hugely concerning for me, as today, when I had to go, no one was stopping! 

One way to force a stop is with a raised crosswalk, as seen below near Broadway in Sydney, Australia. Since there's a steep speed bump, cars have no choice but to stop. However, by Shops not implementing this, it makes the mall a convenient cut-through, and the speed limits all but a suggestion. Car movement is an absolute priority, with people movement not even being considered.

I do give credit where credit is due. Since the start of the pandemic, the stretch of Aggie Hogg Gardens between Karl Fraser and Marie Labatte has been pedestrianized, as well as O'Neill Road. There is now seating and patio space here, and it has effectively expanded the size of the town square. While this is great, the scale at which it occurs on is far too small to have a significant impact.

The new-and-improved Aggie Hogg Gardens.

Why does it matter?

I think these issues frustrate me because the new plaza was built on a blank slate. CF could have done whatever it wanted, but it chose not to break the grips of automobility. While making the mall pedestrian-centric could still happen, it would just be patching mistakes from less than fifteen years prior. CF has no desire to do any of this anyways. Their commitment to driving is so apparent on the map posted near RBC in the plaza: all the parking lots are shown, but not even a simple symbol marking the bus stops on Lawrence, Don Mills, or the Donway West can be found. I don't want to read too far into this, but to me, it shows that alternative modes of transport are not even on CF's radar.

I haven't blogged about it yet, but Toronto could easily become a winterized city. This can't happen if we discourage active mobility in winter, even when there's an opportunity for an easy win.

What should happen?

Improving Shops at Don Mills is incredibly easy. Keep the peripheral parking, sure, use the garage more, definitely, but just block cars from using the internal roads. Deliveries can occur on the laneway that borders the parking garage's south and east sides, and cargo bikes can link this drop-off point to specific stores.

The above changes are simple, but would have a huge positive impact. Increased foot traffic means increased sales, and it would be a place where people would want to spend time. Especially as density increases near the mall, the opportunities cannot be ignored. Sure, the mall can get busy, but there is demand that the simply cannot be accessed with the status quo. At bare minimum, reducing the flow of traffic, removing parking spots, and raising crosswalks is imperative.

Conclusion

CF Fairview's needless embedding of automobility at the Shops at Don Mills is a huge negative on the mall's functionality. It's cool to see once, but making shopping there a chore of dodging traffic makes it way less attractive than nearby Fairview Mall for many people. CF needs to mend their mistakes from 2009 if they want to unlock the full potential of the Shops at Don Mills.