Charles St GRT terminal redevelopment

[danbrotherston]

Thanks for that info!

I think its twofold - increasing population that lives in DTK (and perhaps DTK peripheral), and increasing visitors. A vibrant downtown can consist in part by visitors/guests and shorter term stays (doesn't help there is a gross lack of hotels in DTK).

Both matter, but the latter only matters in certain context. Visitors matter only when they are going to Downtown itself, rather than something else, like work, or a play or a restaurant. In these other roles, they will reduce their interaction with downtown possibly even to become a net harm on downtown if their destination has parking, because they will drive through downtown, harming it, then park and never interact with downtown as a place.

People who live in downtown ALWAYS experience downtown as a place because it is the place where they live. But I don't think you can really make a downtown survive just on residents, there simply aren't enough people or at least, not without going to some Torontonian densities.

In our city here, relatively few people *live* in the centre. It's dense, but not high--mostly low rise. Relatively few people live there. But it's always busy. Part of this is cultural, people here don't demonize the centre as is very common in Canada. Nobody has ever suggested that you'd be unsafe to be in the centre (in fact, there are other neighbourhoods that people say this about). But at the same time, cars are heavily restricted in the centre. The main street has no cars, the inner ring has almost none, basically all the traffic is directed to the outer ring and a handful of access routes.

This means the whole centre, all 100acres of it or so, is acting like a power centre/outdoor mall. It has the same experience, shops, restaurants, food courts. The idea of the suburban mall certainly was a great analogue for a city centre (something I never experienced before coming here).

But compared with DTK, I can certainly see why it isn't a destination in the same way as here. It's dirty, rundown, noisy, polluted, and dangerous. And it is so for exactly one reason...the cars.  They create tire dirty which makes everything dirty, they hit signs, and posts and planters breaking them, they damage the pavement making the pavement look old and broken, they create the noise, they create the pollution, they endanger people. And yeah, people are gonna blame the homeless folks, and they aren't improving the experience, but only a naive fool (which is to say virtually everyone) thinks homeless people are more dangerous than drivers. No homeless person ever killed anyone while I lived downtown, but drunk drivers killed half a dozen. I made multiple statements to police about drunk drivers, and that's absolutely nothing about the constant non-drunk dangerous driving.

So yeah, I have nothing to contribute here, I'd like DTK to get better, but the only way I see it getting better is a complete non-starter. Maybe more cultural elements would help, I sincerely doubt an arena would do anything (it would be busy on game night (maybe) and an empty place otherwise, and that's if it doesn't have attached parking), but none of that would change anything about the things which I don't like about downtown.

And yeah, the Dutch aren't immune either. Vathorst, the suburb we live in, and built since 2000 onwards, has a centre as well, but that one permits cars in half the centre. It's certainly busy and eventful, but it feels a whole lot more like Kitchener than I'd like, and it doesn't even have through traffic, just a shit-ton of (free) parking.