General Suburban Updates and Rumours

[danbrotherston]

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.

So, when I was looking at this house, I still owned and drove a car (although I walked to work because it was a 10 minute walk), and I worked a 9 to 5 office job...when the idea of remote work was the thing a travelling salesperson did. Damn, I feel old realizing I was looking at houses that long ago.

So...yes, you can do the trip in 12-15 minutes, but I always did the trip at rush hour to see what the commute would have been like, and that took around 30 minutes...which would have been a significant hit to my travel time, given how close my work was before. And yes, it would also have removed any meaningful option for cycling or transit ever...no more drinking with my friends unless I wanted to pay for a taxi or drive drunk.

This is the problem with cars...when you look at something like a house that far away, and you see oh 12 minutes by Google Maps off peak....cars are amazing they allow us such freedom...and then reality come crashing down on you like a F-250 pickup driven by a drunk driver.

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?

I completely agree, but at least these places are..."different". Like, you might commute to KW for work, but your community, friends, social life is centred around the town you've moved into. This is because these places are themselves a community, they are their own "place". Maybe that happens when you move to a far off suburb too...or maybe your social life dies (and you become disconnected and easier to control /conspiracy theory).

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.

I completely agree...and if there was any sign that the city had any intention of building completely and less car dependent sprawling suburbs, I'd support it. I literally live in exactly that place. For the Netherlands, and our town, our home is really remote...people say this to me when I mention where we are. People don't want to come "all the way" out here (which by the way, for the record is 15 minutes BY BICYCLE!--no rush hour to delays at all, unless you come by car). But, in our suburb, we have schools, services, a shopping centre with all the necessities, a train station with 10-20 trains/hour, several bus routes with service to the city, the centre, nearby towns, the lake, the universities, and all that is all walkable/bikeable from our home, all built in the last 15 or so years (and still under construction now).

I'm not poo pooing suburbs. I'm poo pooing the shit Canada builds and is continuing to build.

You're right, it would be much easier if we build things good from the start, but there is virtually no appetite for that, and I don't even see advocates pushing for it much. So, like I said, we aren't making progress, every day we build more new bad stuff than we fix.

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)?

A fantasy map? In all seriousness, I think Ottawa was on some long long term planning documents for rapid transit, but but as like Phase 5 or 6...Phase 2 is barely going to be built at this point, so to put it generously it's just a fantasy map (to put it harshly, it's a lie council tells itself to help justify it's bad planning decisions).