Highway 7 - Kitchener to Guelph

[danbrotherston]

Dan, I'm going to try to avoid rehashing stuff.  

"You're conflating two issues.  You claimed that some areas are better to serve with cars.  This is true, for very sparse rural areas, there isn't enough demand for transportation to serve with mass transit.  Guelph and Kitchener are not sparse rural areas, their medium sized cities."

I don't believe "very sparse rural areas" are the only places where mass transit doesn't make sense.  I'd even go so far as saying that there are a lot of areas where mass transportation makes sense for specific use cases (like commuting to/from work) but where it doesn't make sense to build out enough transit to remove the need for cars entirely.  And the reality is large portions of medium sized cities fall into this category.  Like I said, I lived in NYC and still owned a car because it was necessary for certain things I wanted to do.  And it would definitely NOT have been an efficient idea to try to build general mass transit to cover my use cases.

Yes, but read the rest of what I said. The places like suburban areas of Guelph which do not support effective transit are that way by design, not by geography. Anywhere there are lots of people living, we *could* use transit, or we can build in a way which makes transit difficult or impossible and provide ONLY for cars. The latter is what we've done. The point is, it's our choices which have lead to car dependent areas, not the geography, any area with a moderate number of people could support effective transit, if we made the choice to make it a priority. By building a freeway and NOT providing transit, we are doing the same thing that's gotten us into the situation you're using to argue to build the road in the first place.

Fifty years from now, there are going to be two people on the internet, discussing whether or not to build a highway to Elora (or somewhere), and they're going to be arguing how the Guelph/KW metro area needs a highway because all the people who live in the suburbs between the cities can't get effective transit. Unless we actually make a choice to develop differently.

The two things you're conflating are areas which we've chosen to make car dependent, and areas which simply don't support transit by virtue of sparsity.

A city like Guelph would support effective transit, no problem, go visit a hundred similar places in Europe. I've been in cities in Europe which were built after Guelph which still support better transit options.

"or if we built nothing, as before, those developments might not get built because people don't want to be stuck on old highway 7.  We cannot know,"

These are the kind of statements that lead me to believe you're not actually familiar with the situation we're talking about.  Do you have any idea the development that's already happened in the area?  It started happening long before the new highway 7 was anywhere close to a reality.  We can (And do!) generally know what would happen growth wise in this area.  It doesn't take a crystal ball.

I'm familiar with Breslau, I looked at a house there, but on the drive back on Victoria St. I figured I wouldn't want to spend my life doing that.

But I'm not talking about Breslau, that's relatively close to KW, it's accessed by Victoria, and Fairway now. I'm talking about the 15 km between Breslau and Guelph. Expect 15 km of housing tracts to go in, suburban sprawl all the way from Guelph to KW. This is what I think the highway will bring.