General Urban Kitchener Updates and Rumours

[dtkvictim]

While that could happen, I don't think it's a given. Increased density along Victoria could just as easily make it more unpleasant (at least, as we're discussing here, subjectively). North American cities are full wide, high speed roads with narrow sidewalks, blocked in by towers, and personally I despise that environment.

I could see it happening. The city/region knows Victoria is an ugly, old road. At the very least, the thing is in serious need of repaving. I think if more development gets approved along here, they'll eventually redesign the road, likely with some better bike infrastructure and improved streetscapes for pedestrians.

But it's a bit of a challenge. Victoria South is not as bad because it has a lot of single family homes facing it. It feels alright to walk down, if not a bit noisy in parts. South then turns into a 2 lane road at around Victoria/Walnut. But North is an arterial road connecting Highway 7 and it sees a lot of traffic from people going to and from Guelph. Weber and Lancaster also intersect with it, so essentially it's 3 heavily used arterial roads in one area with a lot of traffic converging. It would be nice if it could be reduced to two lanes with bike infrastructure and wider sidewalks for pedestrians, but with that amount of traffic, I'm not sure how much they could change without a long term attempt to reduce car dependency or appropriating some of the property on the businesses that face the road in order to add in bike lanes and wider sidewalks.

At the very least, reducing speed, repaving it and putting in new sidewalks, curbs, trees and plants could at least make it feel better (and with a bit of time, maybe some of the stripmalls and parking lots can get redeveloped). You could even install some nice metal guardrails to divide the sidewalk and road, something like the bottom right one with planters on it seen below. It may not actually provide a lot of safety, but it can at least help beautify what is otherwise an ugly, wide road:

These are everywhere in Tokyo, and very often accompanied by trees and plants growing on them. It makes such a big difference on large, busy roads, and I'd love to have them here. I get there is an argument that it blocks pedestrians from freely crossing the street outside of designated intersections, but I think it can improve the streetscape enough that it's worth it.

Mind you, as long as we don't create something like this: https://www.google.com/maps/@33.2953841,...8192?hl=en