Cities in Europe and Asia that are actually healthy, and have rejected car culture, don't have these tunnel thingies. Instead of moving pedestrian traffic away from streets, they improve their streets to make them friendly to pedestrians. The idea that climate issues necessitate this kind of divorce from the outdoors would be a strange concept indeed to people in Barcelona and Helsinki alike.

This is in fact a classic, 80s-90s North American car-infested big city band-aid. Leave the streets for the cars, leave the tiny sidewalks for the homeless and the trash, connect office buildings and plazas with pathways so the nine-to-fives can drive or subway in, go for their lunch or whatever, then drive/subway out without meeting the poors (because who else lives downtown anyway?) Et voila! Who needs to make downtowns actually liveable after all.

I have a slightly different take than others on this: I think the main contributor is the fact Toronto's financial district is extremely dense compared to most if not all European cities, and serviced by a highly trafficked subway line that loops around it. Many of the large office skyscrapers are built right on top of the subway, and so they naturally have a public underground connection, and usually it's a mini-mall with a food court and amenities for the office workers. Because of downtown's density these kind of just merged together into the larger PATH network.

The weather is of course also a factor. It's just incredibly convenient in the winter, or even in the summer when it's muggy out, for office workers. You just hop onto the elevator during your lunch or coffee break, wearing your office clothes, no need to throw on a jacket or bring an umbrella or anything. It's just an extension of your office building basically.

Toronto ALSO has healthy commercial streets all over the place that you access from street level and that DON'T connect to these tunnels. It's a very large city. The PATH tunnels are just one district.

Rebuttal to your post: 1. Many Asian cities have elevated pedestrian walkway systems. 2. Helsinki has underground pedestrian malls/tunnels. 3. Toronto's first PATH pedestrian tunnel was built before the post WW2 car culture explosion. 4. Toronto's winter cycling volumes are less than 10% that of the summer cycling volumes. Real statistics say that winter weather greatly affects people's decision on transportation mode.

I have used a couple pedestrian tunnel/bridge networks extensively in frosty Canadian winter climates, I really appreciate them plus I think they are a fun way to get from place to place - being able to travel at a different layer than street-level feels refreshing/novel!

This is not true in Asia. In particular, major Japanese cities, Seoul, and Hong Kong are quite famous for extensive elevated and underground pedestrian networks. The major difference is that density is so high in these areas that they do not run into the problems encountered when implementing in North America, namely that a second level makes the street level dead.

Downtown LA's elevated pedestrian plazas on Bunker Hill, as depicted in the movie Her, are a great example of this. Office workers drive in, park in an underground garage below a skyscraper, take the elevator up to work, and walk around a multi-block radius to grab lunch, all without ever stepping foot on a city street.

As someone from the Great Lakes region, watching Californians try to speculate about why Great Lakes cities have tunnels or elevated walkways but major Asian or European cities don't is hilarious.

Come visit us in January and learn why for yourself ;)

It regularly gets below zero in Chicago and Toronto. Europe is generally warmer than Canada and the northern U.S. Without these underground tunnels, there would be no pedestrians during months of the year, and no amount of "improving their streets" would change that.

> The idea that climate issues necessitate this kind of divorce from the outdoors would be a strange concept indeed to people in Barcelona and Helsinki alike.

Try going for a walk outside in downtown Toronto on both the hottest and coldest days.

If you're not in good health and appropriately dressed, you could suffer heatstroke on the hot day and simply die on the cold day.

> the poors (because who else lives downtown anyway?

You should talk about what you know instead of trying to come up with ways to hate something more than you already do.

Eh...

Montreal is a lot less temperate (in both directions!) than Barcelona and Helsinki. Having a way to get out of ±35º weather really does make the city more livable.