General University Area Updates and Rumours

[Bjays93]

Yeah, if it’s a 15 minute drive to the nearest bus stop, I can’t imagine it’d be a reasonable cycling distance from UW. 

I can't imagine anywhere in Kitchener or Waterloo where it would take a 15-minute drive to the nearest bus stop, so I assume Bjays93 is living somewhere in the townships. Which means the issue is not really how our cities are built but where each person chooses to live.

Yes, my parents home is out in the townships. 

We aren’t even in a town, it is a 150 year old farmhouse on a 48 acre plot of land that is now mostly provincially sensitive wetlands. I obviously had no influence over where my parents chose to live, they bought the house before I was even born. It’s a gorgeous place and quite honestly, I’d take it over suburbs any day. Having also lived in a big city with great transit, I have absolutely nothing against big city living and honestly I really like it. But it’s either countryside or downtown, I definitely couldn’t do suburbs or sprawl. If you choose to live in the country though, then driving is a reality. 

It would be an hour and a half bike ride from my house to school which, isn’t economical to begin with but even if I could handle that bike ride every day, that means leaving at 6am for morning classes and depending on if I have a night class or not (like I do this term) I could be biking home at 11pm at night. 

That’s biking in the dark on unlit country roads, where people often drive way over the speed limit and doing that every day. Then in the winter you can add potentially unplowed roads into the mix. 

I love biking and I ride my bike a ton. If I was in the city and anywhere inside of a 30 min bike ride from UW I’d absolutely bike there often. Unfortunately it’s just not an option for me even though I wish it was. 

As Dan said, the alternative is I simply have to deal with the crappy UW parking setup, which is fine. The point of my initial comment wasn’t even complaining about the cost (which does annoy me) my problem has nothing to do with the parking itself per se, but rather going back to the original comment I made, I think surface parking lots are a terrible use of space. Beyond the long distance from parking lots to where you want to get on campus, my real issue is that lots should built underneath various buildings and the current surface lots converted to other uses. Heck, I’d gladly pay more for parking if that were the case. 

No idea how this spiralled into what it did.