General Suburban Updates and Rumours

[dtkvictim]

I remember looking at a house out there and thinking it was incredibly far away.

The driving time between me downtown and friends I have who live way down there is 12-15 minutes... roughly the same time it takes for me to get uptown Waterloo on the LRT, which is not a distance (time-wise) that I would consider far. So for the vast majority of people driving they would find calling it far laughable, but transit users would definitely agree. As a cyclist I just wouldn't consider it at all from a safety perspective.

What I would consider far is the growing number of people I know who have moved to places like Listowel, Brantford, and Woodstock to have a chance at owning a home, while still centering their lives and working in KW. Frankly I find that far more damaging than opening up new land locally, but maybe the scale of people moving to these satellite towns is significantly smaller, and so it's still worth it?

Sigh. I’ve said this before, we aren’t making progress we build new sprawling suburbs faster than we fix them.

I don't think that's inherent to opening up new land. I would argue it's easier to build a quality urbanist neighbourhood from scratch than to try and fix the existing ones, and the suburbs need that for more than areas closer to the core. Some of the neighbourhoods down here even seem to have quite a lot of medium density housing, just completely drop the ball on land use and street design both enforcing car dependency.

Of course you are right though, they are just going to build more of the same.

https://www.therecord.com/news/waterloo-...b47fa.html

Side note, what is this map they are using that seems to show a rapid transit line down Ottawa (with the extension over the river to Breslau)?