01-12-2016, 08:31 AM
It was only recently that I've ever seen the City of Kitchener have official ideation around Gaukel as a woonerf, so it's definitely a step in a good direction. But having now lived in Downtown, UpTown, and around various other commercial enterprises, we'll need a lot more people in the cores to make this work. Downtown definitely feels empty more often than I'd like, and while having more people living downtown (e.g. City Center, 1Vic, etc.), filling the streets is more dependent on good transit connections and the ability to get people to them.
One of the things that's stuck with me was an argument made about Yorkdale mall. The argument was that some of the parking lots should be removed to allow for residential towers to go up on the site. But the response was that even getting into dozens of stories of height, it was a net loss to see howevermany public parking spaces become tower+private parking spaces (or just tower, if you assumed you could sell a no-car development at that location). The 500-1,000 sqft apartment/condo buys groceries once a week, but the 3-6 parking spaces you can fit in that space turn over many times every day, generating far more sales. Now, depending on your beliefs, transit users can have a similar sales effect, depending on how far they're willing to struggle with their goods to get home, but the point sticks, that you really do need not just the eyes on the street and comfort of knowing you aren't in a dead, uninhabited zone, but you also need the ability for far more than just a localized population to be able to fill and support that area.
All that said, to turn even more of Downtown into a car-hostile area without not just good walk/bike/transit options, but well-used ones, is to risk getting things so far out of sync that both fail.
One of the things that's stuck with me was an argument made about Yorkdale mall. The argument was that some of the parking lots should be removed to allow for residential towers to go up on the site. But the response was that even getting into dozens of stories of height, it was a net loss to see howevermany public parking spaces become tower+private parking spaces (or just tower, if you assumed you could sell a no-car development at that location). The 500-1,000 sqft apartment/condo buys groceries once a week, but the 3-6 parking spaces you can fit in that space turn over many times every day, generating far more sales. Now, depending on your beliefs, transit users can have a similar sales effect, depending on how far they're willing to struggle with their goods to get home, but the point sticks, that you really do need not just the eyes on the street and comfort of knowing you aren't in a dead, uninhabited zone, but you also need the ability for far more than just a localized population to be able to fill and support that area.
All that said, to turn even more of Downtown into a car-hostile area without not just good walk/bike/transit options, but well-used ones, is to risk getting things so far out of sync that both fail.