GO Transit

[danbrotherston]

But it's not automatically 10-15 minutes.  SW Kitchener to Breslau is 20 minutes (without traffic). St Jacobs is 20 minutes. Laurelwood is 25 minutes. Baden is 25 minutes. Add 5-10 minutes for traffic, or more, and now you are in the 30-40 minute range.

Do you see that as a reasonable time to drive to a GO station?

I know people that drive 60 minutes to the burlington GO station on Saturdays in the summer to see Blue jays games all the time. 20 mins to a GO station is nothing. when I lived in Toronto I walked 15 mins to get to a subway stop. 

Personally I would love to see GO expanded into west kitchener as well. It would be a fairly good location for transit, walkers, bikers and cars to access a station near the Boardwalk. It could even spur a future redevelopment of that crapshoot of a box store plaza. 

Just because Breslau would be a Park & Ride style station doesn't mean the Region or Township couldn't plan to build a mixed use space around the station that provides retail, commercial space and housing. I think the location picked for the Breslau GO also has the potential to have trails built to it from all the neighbourhoods in Breslau. So hopefully those residents would take bikes/ walk.

Geometry is a physical law. If you build a P&R facility then the station is surrounded by parking, not housing and businesses. Walking is inherently a slow mode. Things have to be very close together for it to be useful. But putting things very close together is geometrically impossible when you are planning on accommodating 1000 parked cars all day.

This is actually why cycling is so powerful. It lets you spread things out a little bit more without consuming the vast amount of space that cars require.

So yeah, it doesn't matter if the region surrounds the station in housing, and I have no doubt that they will. The fact will be even people living next to the station will probably drive to it, because the alternative is walking through acres of surface parking which is unpleasant on a cold winter night, or a hot summer day, or even pleasant spring day. Which means the development pattern of those houses will remain the same, they will mandate 3-4 car spaces per house (because every member of a household will need to drive) and then everything will be spread out and entirely car dependent.

This is WHY this kind of thing is fundamental. It is extremely hard to change things incrementally, which is why a new greenfield development like this is such a missed opportunity.

In other news, we just had a local election here in the Netherlands. While the previous government implemented a paid parking scheme across the whole city. A protest party ran to oppose this (and other*) policy. While they didn't win, they did come second. But the people who support this party would never want a city like Kitchener, but they cannot imagine how just allowing every single person to drive and park everywhere for free would lead to it. The same way most people in Kitchener cannot imagine how a city that doesn't have that could function.

People have a fundamental lack of imagination...

* For interest the other top policies of this party: More police, less immigrants, no wind turbines, no more apartments. Some things are very familiar here.