Downtown Kitchener Fire Station | 19 fl | Proposed

[BormanConstruction]

The rendering looks great and a new downtown fire station is desperately needed.

[tomh009]

Too bad the whole site wasn't reserved for an urban park.  Missed opportunity, istm.  That said, it's not a bad looking project.

Need to put the fire station and the affordable housing somewhere, too.

[ZEBuilder]

Too bad the whole site wasn't reserved for an urban park.  Missed opportunity, istm.  That said, it's not a bad looking project.

The city has acres of land purchased along Schneiders creek for the creek restoration, a large portion of the lands they have purchased are not required for the restoration and will likely be kept as parkland, so there is parkland coming to the area just a slightly different location.

[Silie]

This looks like a really nice addition to downtown.

General question, not specific to this project: is there any sort of rule in place that requires developers to "reserve" a parking space for a service like Communauto if they're forgoing any other parking? I'm happy to see buildings like this exclude parking to keep the housing costs down, but I think it would still be nice to have space for a carshare.

The only way the cities could require that is if they made it a requirement of the zoning bylaw where they basically state one parking space shall be reserved for carshare for every X units. 

However where this gets complicated is within MTSAs, the province made the minimum parking requirement within MTSAs zero spaces (Kitchener already had this stipulation), as such requiring a singular car share spot as a requirement would go against the province and that is bound to cause problems.

One could definitely get around that by writing something in terms of parking spaces, for example, for every X parking spaces one must include a car share space. However that could easily be circumvented by a developer by having less than X spaces provided since they legally require zero. The other glaring problem I could see developing is with access to such a spot especially when it's in a private parking structure, so I could see developers trying to get out of it and really fighting it.

Communauto has a three-vehicle station at Cameron and King, literally metres away. They could probably put another three in at that location, and between that and the Kitchener Market Ion stop (to say nothing of being less than a ten-minute walk from nearly everything an urban resident could want or need), parking is almost a moot point

[the_conestoga_guy]

The only way the cities could require that is if they made it a requirement of the zoning bylaw where they basically state one parking space shall be reserved for carshare for every X units. 

However where this gets complicated is within MTSAs, the province made the minimum parking requirement within MTSAs zero spaces (Kitchener already had this stipulation), as such requiring a singular car share spot as a requirement would go against the province and that is bound to cause problems.

One could definitely get around that by writing something in terms of parking spaces, for example, for every X parking spaces one must include a car share space. However that could easily be circumvented by a developer by having less than X spaces provided since they legally require zero. The other glaring problem I could see developing is with access to such a spot especially when it's in a private parking structure, so I could see developers trying to get out of it and really fighting it.

Communauto has a three-vehicle station at Cameron and King, literally metres away. They could probably put another three in at that location, and between that and the Kitchener Market Ion stop (to say nothing of being less than a ten-minute walk from nearly everything an urban resident could want or need), parking is almost a moot point

You're totally right, that's why I included my disclaimer that my question wasn't related to this project. I was just piggybacking off of the discussion because the topic of "parking free residences" was relevant. 

Like, theoretically in 100 years if all buildings in MTSAs have been replaced and have zero parking, where would the car-shares go? Just a dumb thought experiment rather than a serious question!

[ijmorlan]

Like, theoretically in 100 years if all buildings in MTSAs have been replaced and have zero parking, where would the car-shares go? Just a dumb thought experiment rather than a serious question!

And yet, it actually has an answer, which is that it (zero parking) wouldn’t happen unless there was no demand for parking.

It’s a bit like asking what will happen theoretically in 100 years if all the buggy whip makers close. Remember, we’re starting from a situation in which a massive excess of parking is legally required to be provided by property developers. So as we get rid of that market distortion, the amount of parking can be expected to revert to some approximation of how much it actually makes economic sense to have; much less than now, but not zero unless transportation changes in as fundamental way as the replacement of horses by motorized transport.

[Bjays93]

This is a great looking project I must say. More of this please!