A new vision emerges for our Queens Quay. It's long, wide and ambitious

This marks the beginning of a series of posts on the Queens Quay redevelopment. Read on for the next few days as we digest all the information from tonight's meetings. Here are some newsstories on the facelift of Toronto's central waterfront road, Queens Quay.

When it's all said and done, and all the hyperbole and rhetoric fades, this plan that Waterfront Toronto says will make Queens Quay a jewel, a top-10 type of boulevard that can fight with other big cities, we'll be left with something bigger than you can stuff in a press release.

This vision, of a Queens Quay that's given back to the pedestrians, the cyclists, the residents and tourists to this city, will go a long ways toward changing this neighbourhood. It is literally a long sighted, horizontal vision that stretches a good four kilometres, from Bathurst all the way west to Cherry Street.

John Campbell, CEO of Waterfront Toronto, told the crowd at the Westin hotel tonight that our street is the "ugly duckling" of the waterfront." He's right.

Read a future post about the plans for development and transit for the East Bayfront (Queens Quay East) because it's big.

As a resident of Queens Quay, we were captured by many of the aspects that weren't mentioned in the media reports. Sure, we can mention it'll cost $192-million, hopefully break ground by 2010 and finish by 2012, but we'll leave that kind of numbers for another day.

It's the possibility that a road that takes so much concrete and acts as the central vein of our water's edge can finally give way to greenery that houses 300 trees and 4-metre wide lanes of an actual Martin Goodman Trail that connects Bathurst to Cherry Street and thus the East to the West. It's the possibility that there will be more crossing points to the south and water from the north. It's the slideshows that we saw tonight of show bustling sidewalks with imagined crowds or of a central LRT track that showed the colour green.

We're weighed with the gravity of the reality that time will tell whether they've done their homework. Will a two-lane street be able to move traffic the way a four-lane road does now? Will buses continue to cause congestion, will street parking be addressed in a meaningful way?

There are a lot of questions that the planners have no doubt considered. And tonight, they explained the best they could in a few hours about why they made their decision. For us, the headlines are that they've chosen a way forward that thinks about pedestrian traffic, about the TTC flow, about tourism, the environment and what's best for the city.

The worries from local residents are legitimate: Can I move in my own neighbourhood if you choke off the traffic? Will it hurt businesses? Will this plan make this a liveable and visitable neighbourhood in the winter? Are we still disconnected from the water if all we do is walk near its edge.

Questions, of course, to be answered in due time, but while we digest the news, and think about what that will mean for our property values or for our daily commute or our interaction with hordes of tourists, we at least have a picture to look forward to. It looks something like this: