On a wickedly frigid November morning, Toronto lawyer Albert Koehl laced up his new hiking shoes, zipped his yellow jacket over a carefully layered wardrobe and set out in search of adventure.

Although he had travelled extensively — crossing the Atlantic by freighter, journeying by bus to Guatemala, and crossing Africa by barge, bush taxi and bus — this time he wanted to explore new ground closer to home, and he wanted to do it on foot.

“With driving you don’t get the smells, the sounds. You remember things when you walk. It’s a pace at which you can absorb things,” he explains.

His self-imposed mission was to visit all four corners of Toronto to test his downtowner’s perspectives against the city’s true size and varied landscapes.

He expected it would take three to four days to trace a path around Toronto’s borders, about 120 km. In the end it took five, walking seven to eight hours a day — 175,000 steps, according to the pedometer he carried.

The journey that began about 8 a.m. under a bitter Wednesday sun ended on an unseasonably balmy Sunday about 6:30 p.m.

Click here for a map of Albert’s journey

Koehl, 54, hadn’t anticipated the vast stretches of rural terrain in northeast Toronto. It was snowy there, and he veered into Pickering near the outer edges of Rouge Park. He could occasionally hear geese honking, but it was an otherwise nearly silent stretch. Where sidewalks existed, they frequently weren’t cleared.

The odyssey, he says, gave him a visceral sense of the city’s size and the problems of traversing its distances; its inequities of space and opportunities for simple human contact.

“In a sense, almost everything I saw was new to me — or at least seen from a new perspective,” he said.

“We always hear that Toronto has more construction cranes in the sky (than any other North American city). That’s not the reality for 90 per cent of people.”

Track Albert Koehl's journey

Once you get out of downtown, you can walk many kilometres without seeing a single crane.

Walking east along the lakefront, Koehl, was astonished by the pace of new construction rising on the waterfront — the bustle of the trendy Distillery District and the development of Corktown and Cherry St.

Less than 48 hours later, tracking west along the top of Toronto on Steeles Ave., he found himself yearning for the sight of even a garbage bin to relieve the monotony of the suburbs.

By the end of Day 2, when he arrived at Markham Rd. and Steeles Ave., Koehl says it was like “happening on an oasis in the desert,” he was so starved for signs of human occupation.

It’s not that he didn’t know what to expect. Koehl’s knowledge of the urban realities that divide and unite Toronto should have prepared him for the contrasting views of city life. A cycling and pedestrian activist, he was among the experts who assisted with the Ontario Chief Coroner’s Pedestrian Death Review in 2012.

He decided to walk Toronto fresh off the loss of his first municipal election campaign, where he was among the 21 candidates who lost to Joe Cressy in the Trinity-Spadina council race. Central to Koehl’s platform was the idea of turning King St. into a transit mall to get the perennially delayed and overcrowded 504 streetcar moving.

While the city’s news agenda focuses mostly on the downtown — its design, its condos, its transit and its congestion — Koehl says the walk brought home the truth that, for most residents, those issues are only peripheral to where they live.

Here are some observations from Koehl’s journey around Toronto’s borders.

On pedestrians

One of the images that stayed with Koehl was that of a wary pedestrian anxiously peering over his shoulder as he crossed a right-turning channel leading to Highway 400 off Finch. It was an expression he saw over and over again, akin to a person being chased by zombies in a horror movie.

What he describes is a kind of civic betrayal. A person can be walking along, and all of a sudden the nearby cars begin speeding up. But there’s nothing to indicate to drivers that they might see a pedestrian — no crosswalk, no sign to slow down.

“The message (to pedestrians) is, this road isn’t built for you,” says Koehl.

At Steeles and the Pickering-Scarborough town line, Koehl wondered if he was the first person to ever use the pedestrian crossing signal.

At Finch Ave. and Driftwood Rd., where a woman was killed in the intersection only hours before Koehl arrived there, he watched a dump truck run a red light “at a fair clip.”

When a pedestrian is killed by a car, the reports frequently focus on that person crossing in the middle of a block or against the light, he said.

“I was amazed at how many unsafe conditions I found in my walk.”

Near Bridlewood Mall, near Warden and Finch Ave., Koehl stopped to help a man push his scooter up a path that hadn’t been cleared of snow two days after it fell.

“The roads were cleared and salted, but there was no effort to clear the sidewalks,” he said.

Along Finch, clear sidewalks were the exception rather than the rule.

Space

The prospect of adding about 2 million more residents to the Toronto region in the next 20 years preoccupies the city’s agenda. Where will they live? Where will they drive? How will they cram on to the subway?

This is nonsense, says Koehl. There’s plenty of space outside the downtown, particularly if we rethink the use of public realms such as roads — many of them dead space for most of the day.

Over time, the market will take care of reorganizing private space, including the vast front lawns of the suburbs that serve no purpose other than to set off homes that virtually no one sees.

Roads and parking lots

There are lots of reasons to move away from our car-based model of transportation — climate, health, safety and cost. Roads represent an inordinate amount of the public realm, says Koehl.

“We don’t think of roads as public space, we think of it as car space and that’s where there’s so much opportunity – for green space, for shops – that’s a really exciting opportunity that’s presented as more people move in,” he said.

“You don’t feel crowded because there are more people, you feel crowded because there are more cars.”

Parking lots only serve motorists, he said.

“For everyone else it becomes a burden.... All that parking space becomes a place you have to cross to use the bus, walk or get anywhere,” said Koehl.

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The TTC divides and unites the city

Koehl says he couldn’t help being impressed by the reach of the TTC.

“There were buses on the loneliest stretches of road in the city and those buses usually had a fair number of people,” he said.

“For most of five days I wasn’t close to a subway station or streetcar track and yet subways and LRT dominate our municipal transport conversations,” said Koehl.

He doesn’t know why suburban dwellers are so fixated on subways.

“Leaving aside the financial issue, why would you put (transit) underground when you’ve got so much space?” said Koehl. “It would just enliven those areas. It only makes sense to put things underground if you’ve run out of space above ground.”

In some areas, he said, “The bus stop is the loneliest place on Earth.” On stretches of road where there was nothing but the occasional car and no homes visible from the main road, there might be a single person propped against a lonely bus stop.

Suburban myths

They aren’t all quiet, tree-lined streets and not everyone who lives in the ‘burbs owns a car or drives.

Koehl saw lots of people from high rise rental towers huddled at bus stops or dashing across wide avenues to their jobs or shopping at the local mall, which is the hub of suburban life.

Even though a lot of those people clearly didn’t have cars or didn’t want to drive to their destinations, they lived in buildings that were clearly built for motorists with big parking lots separating the typical cluster of three buildings.

“They have got those big lawns that really don’t serve anyone. It just makes the distances between you and where you want to go, farther apart,” said Koehl.

“Many of those people would struggle with the estimated $10,000 annual cost of a car and would benefit most from improved transit, cycling and walking facilities, as well as more attractive streetscapes,” he said.

“The irony is that a pre-condition for the quiet, leafy, clean suburban neighbourhoods is the very congested, noisy and unhealthy arterial roads and highways they want to escape,” said Koehl.

“We sometimes push ourselves to find reasons to say the suburbs are different,” he said. “My observation was that I don’t see that the suburban areas are different from downtown in terms of the desire to have more activity, more transit, to be nearer to things that are interesting to go to.”

Human encounters

Koehl isn’t the kind of person to strike up a conversation with a stranger in a cafe. He nevertheless missed the nods and eye contact that are part of everyday downtown life.

It’s not that there were no people, it’s just that most of them were in cars.

“We’re social beings. There’s something more pleasant and exciting to see when there are people around,” he said.

The receptionist at the Maple Leaf Motel on Kingston Rd. where Koehl spent his first night massaging stiff feet, made an impression, even if the establishment itself didn’t. It is rated one star out of five on the TripAdvisor website.

When he remarked on how many motels were in the area, his host assured him none was cleaner than the Maple Leaf.

Later the same morning a man busking outside a Tim Hortons offered to pray for him.

When Koehl finally arrived at Finch Ave. and Yonge St. early Friday afternoon – roughly the halfway point of his walk -- he appeared as a man stumbling out of the wilderness, gazing up at the towers and the faces that rushed by on the corner.

Parks

Koehl wasn’t looking for a nature experience but the city’s parks made a deep impression. Some of them came as a surprise. Wandering a bit among the maze of highways in the northwest of the city Koehl was amazed to discover the Claireville Conservation Area, hundreds of acres of forest on the border of Toronto and Brampton.

In Marie Curtis Park, he exchanged a few words with a man who helped direct Koehl to Toronto’s southwestern border at the mouth of the Etobicoke Creek and Lake Ontario.

“You actually saw people in parks, whereas on the sidewalks there were long stretches where you didn’t see anybody. When people are walking in parks they tend to be more friendly and approachable.”

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