Toronto city council recently finished a debate about planned changes to a stretch of Yonge St. in North York.

Well, finished is the wrong word. An armistice was declared until an indefinite time in the future, possibly next year, pending more study and a report. I and others wrote about it at the time.

But this discussion, ostensibly about a couple kilometres of downtown North York, was only the latest chapter in a much larger, ongoing story. It’s familiar by now from countless past battles. It will come again in countless future ones.

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The details vary greatly in each case. But when you get into the guts of these fights, you find the similarity. In each case, you’re talking about a proposal or a plan to substantially redesign a street in a way that makes it safer for vulnerable road users, more pleasant for strolling or shopping or hanging out, more vibrant as a neighbourhood in general.

In each case, we spend a good portion of the debate talking about whether travel times for through traffic of cars on the road will be slowed by 30 seconds or a minute or two minutes. This question is actually besides the point. Or, at least, it should be besides the point by the time we come to debating the implementation of any given one of these plans.

The core question underneath these debates — which ought to have been answered before we get to debating design details — is a fundamental one: should we build a neighbourhood main street that is a good place to be (to live, work, shop, or play), or should we build a neighbourhood main street that is an effective route to travel through quickly in a car. Despite the premises adopted by many politicians seeking tweaked compromises to preserve lanes of car traffic, you can’t really do both.

Now, obviously almost every street functions as both a location and a travel route, by definition. But most function primarily as one or the other.

Kensington Ave. in the market, for instance, is almost exclusively a place to be — you wouldn’t drive a car onto it unless you were going somewhere in the market itself. The same is true of most suburban cul-de-sacs, designed specifically to keep traffic out by providing potential through commuters a dead end.

The 401, on the other hand, is a street you only drive onto if you are on your way somewhere else. Like all controlled-access highways, there are no destinations along the road itself, it is only a travel route.

If we were debating changes to roads at those extremes of the spectrum, you can see the terms of debate would be obvious: the speed and throughput of motor vehicles is virtually irrelevant to the conversation about any change to Kensington, while it is possibly the only relevant factor other than safety in a discussion of changing the 401.

Most roads don’t lie at those extremes. Still, most lean obviously one way or another. Bloor St. West near the Annex and Little Korea is a through street, but it is also a retail and restaurant strip, an entertainment destination, a place for students and families to stroll around.

Markham Rd. in Scarborough has a lot of great destinations on it (Real McCoy burger shop for the win), but the whole way the road is built — including that it is lined on both sides for most of its length by parking lots — makes it clear that the street itself is primarily a means of getting somewhere ASAP in a car.

We typically talk about rebuilding a road to be a “complete street” in places where enough people live, work, shop, and play that we’re looking at a “to be” road rather than a “to travel through” road. The transformation efforts are generally designed to make it better fulfil this function as a place, not as a route. This is even true in North York, where decades of concerted urbanization efforts have created a downtown-style neighbourhood of office towers, commercial centres, condo buildings, a subway interchange, and even a major theatre venue.

Meanwhile, the very presence of wide lanes of quick-moving cars and trucks makes the street unsafe and unpleasant as a place to be. Narrowing the road’s car surface, and possibly slowing the pace of those cars, is actually part of the desired effect. It pretty much has to be. That car through-travel times on the road itself might be slowed by a minute is not a bug in the plan, it is a feature. Which is why the kind of “compromise” that puts planter boxes on the sidewalk but moves bike lanes elsewhere so we can keep more lanes of cars moving faster defeats the whole purpose of such proposals.

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The city needs more effective ways for people to travel, for sure — on foot, by bicycle, by public transit, and by car. But it also needs more and better neighbourhood streets, where you can and might want to wander or hang around.

It would be helpful to keep that in mind whenever, and wherever, the next debate arises. These changes we’re discussing to our neighbourhood main streets need focus on the destination, not the journey.

Ed Keenan is a columnist based in Toronto covering urban affairs. Follow him on Twitter: @thekeenanwire