Highway 7 - Kitchener to Guelph

[danbrotherston]

It feels like the biggest problems are ones where highways divided existing neighbourhoods or were built without appropriate connections between those neighborhoods.

The new highway 7 doesn’t feel like it would be like that.  Development between Guelph and Kitchener should stay south of it and have regular connections.  It feels like it would facilitate better neighbourhoods in these areas (mixture of low/medium/high density residential with amenities). 

Right now every attempt to build anything denser than a townhouse is met with NIMBYs who scream about traffic, parking, and lack of transit.  Which we’ll never get as long as we keep building massive sprawled single detached home subdivisions.

It also feels like the new highway 7 avoids another terrible creation of a 4 land “high-speed” connecting road between cities that also tries to double as a local road for businesses and residents.

I'm confused why anyone would think that a highway would encourage a dense, car light, mixed use neighbourhoods. Highways are in fact the primary enablers of sprawl. A highway will create MORE NIMBYs not less.

As for whether a highway is a good thing or not, there is currently effectively zero transit between the cities with no real plan to implement any meaningful transit. Maybe go transit will be an option at some point, but for two cities so close there isn't even a bus.

So the idea that we should build a second highway before building even a single other option, is the problem.

Yeah, maybe a highway makes sense at some point, but improving highway 7 and adding a frequent bus connection would be a far more fiscally responsible (even conservative) option. But it's also one that questions the status quo.