Toronto Is Building What URF Standards Work Foresaw
Author: Bern Grush
Date Published: September 20, 2026
Inside the $30 Billion YZD Urban Development Plan - infrastructure designed for accessibility & PMRs URF members fund ISO standards drafting for future municipal issues that only a few cities currently experience and no cities were designed for. ISO/TS 25614 formalizes robotaxi curb pickup and drop-off. ISO/TR 4448 addresses a full suite of behavioural issues for public-area mobile robot fleets (for delivery, security, maintenance and other use cases) that share sidewalk space with pedestrians and cross roadway intersections among cars and cyclists. Both standards are being developed for mobile robotic technologies initially expected to operate within existing urban infrastructure.
But these standards and the robotics they are drafted for, can change the way we build new communities from the ground up. And Toronto has just started building a very large one of these new communities.
YZD is the 370-acre redevelopment on Toronto's former Downsview Airport lands. I toured the site and wrote up what I saw for Andrew Miller's Substack, “Changing Lanes.” Northcrest Developments, a PSP Investments subsidiary, is leading the build: $30 billion, thirty years, seven neighbourhoods. The first, the Hangar District, has broken ground.
Every rendering in Northcrest's Experience Centre shows wide pedestrian streets, courtyards, and a two-kilometre public spine where the runway used to be. None show a car and that absence is the point. Cities have spent a century building around household car ownership. YZD asks a different question from day one: can a neighbourhood this size skip the assumption that every household must have a garage, a driveway, and 1.5 cars?
The ISO standards weren't the only anticipation
The End of Driving, the book I co-wrote with Andrew Miller and John Niles, gave this idea a name: Car Zero Communities. A proposal on paper is one thing. A pension-funded developer committing $30 billion is another. YZD is proof the concept has moved off our pages through a real drawing board and into funded shovels-in-the-ground.
YZD can lean on what those standards cover: delivery robots for last-kilometre errands, and automated vehicles for curb pickup and drop-off. Get it wrong at 60,000 residents on 370 acres, and we are back to gridlock on every street and curb.
Two questions from the tour stuck with me. I address both in the full piece.
First: Toronto repealed its minimum parking requirements in 2021. Northcrest owes the city zero parking spaces. So what happens to a 30,000-home construction budget when a developer need only build a tiny fraction of the customary amount of parking? The savings is larger than most readers will guess, and it reshapes what YZD could offer residents instead.
Second: Robotaxis aren't running in the Toronto region and won't be at scale for over a decade. So, what gets YZD’s first residents comfortable living without a household car years before automated fleets exist? The answer isn't one technology. It's a specific combination of design choices. School placement is one.
Car Zero Communities: A Global Trend
I set YZD against two of its clearest precedents. Culdesac Tempe, in Arizona, proved a thousand residents could choose zero-parking living. Merwede, in Utrecht, is testing dramatically fewer cars for 12,000. YZD, at full build-out, would test it for seven clustered communities housing 60,000 residents in total, inside one of the most car-saturated metro regions in North America.
None of this is guaranteed. A thirty-year build, across seven neighbourhoods, needs a governance answer as large as the opportunity: who holds Northcrest to a low-car vision once units close and properties change hands? I lay out the mechanism comparable projects use, and where YZD's plan risks falling short.
The piece draws a hard line between "car-free" and something else. That line decides whether YZD's implied promise survives thirty years, not just its opening day.
Although standards drafting came first, YZD is the kind of future community that can leverage them. Toronto will not get many 370-acre second chances to get this right. Nor will many cities. Read the full piece on Changing Lanes for the numbers, the comparisons, and what Northcrest has implied but not yet committed to.
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