(03-10-2022, 10:20 AM)danbrotherston Wrote: And how do I know such a thing to be true? We build the LRT in the city without first changing zoning. We are now retroactively fixing zoning in a lot of places.
That's one thing I never understood. The region/cities wanted to seize on the potential of transit-oriented development because it works well but then they went about it such a bizarre backwards manner by building a transit system first and are now just doing this weird patchwork of rezoning as new developers move in with projects. The smart thing to do, when they initially planned for rapid transit, would be to also tackle the problems with zoning first. The City of Kitchener developed its PARTs/planning around rapid transit plan which was good, but they never considered preemptively rezoning things so the transformation of the city could evolve more rapidly once the transit was operational.
I suppose, perhaps, one reason it is like this is because of our weird municipal politics. Everyone seems to hate the idea of amalgamation, but in cases like this it makes things easier to accomplish if you're one large entity. Instead, we have a regional government, followed by 3 separate city governments despite the 3 cities being physically one, indistinct metro area followed by a bunch of different township governments. It becomes challenging to agree on things and get things done. Single-tier municipalities can be a lot easier to manage in comparison. I mean, Toronto City Council has 26 members that govern the largest city in the country. All together, Waterloo Region has I believe 47 members. That's a hell of a lot of voices for such a small place.