Highway 7 - Kitchener to Guelph

[danbrotherston]

I think the general points you're making are great. I just don't think they really apply to this specific discussion.

I don't think I'd call the area between Guelph and KW huge. Certainly not on the scale of creating a whole new town/city like you're talking about.  

As for the growth planned for this area - it is planned to be much more non-car friendly. A GO station is already planned with a proposed site.  And yes, it will probably have a large parking lot, but that just makes sense.  Again we should strive to promote transit while still acknowledging the car has an important role to play for quite awhile.

And it's planned to be a mix of low to medium density housing. Including a few apartment buildings.  It's planned to have walkable trails and reasonable local commercial areas.

Lots of these things won't happen right away, or hell, even in the next 25 years. But it is part of the plan.

We're still talking about Breslau, and the next 15 years.  What I worry about, is that development isn't going to end at Breslau after 15 or 20 years, it'll keep going, 15-30 years beyond that, the 15 km from the edge of Breslau to the edge of Guelph, will get filled with homes, with similar development patterns.  If there is a GO station in Breslau, that certainly won't change development patterns 8 KMs away.  Maybe there will be more GO stations built, I don't know, but without planning, all there will be is the freeway.

For me, I just think it is important to keep in mind these types of decisions lead very long term changes in policies, not 25 years, think 40 years.  If you think about how we got to where we are now, the decisions leading here were made 40 years ago, with the expressway.  Within the city, in the next 20-30 (because we've been making decisions for almost a decade now), the city will look very different because of the decision to build the LRT, than if we had completed the ring road as a freeway, or extended Homer-Watson to Belmont, for example.

I do agree, I see the seeds of change, but I also see incredible pressures to keep the status quo.

As for sizes, one of the towns I stayed in the Netherlands, had 32,000 people in a space only 5 km wide, you could fit three of those between Guelph and KW.  It is a pretty big area between Guelph and KW, I've biked it a few times.