Highway 7 - Kitchener to Guelph

[danbrotherston]

Dan, is it your opinion that we should have no new development at all?  That all future development should be based on increasing density?

Edit: To be clear, I think that's a reasonable opinion to have.  Although, I don't personally agree with it.

This is definitely not my position, and I hope I haven't lead anyone to believe I am arguing for this. Densification, while, there is plenty of room for it, right now, will only get us so far, and not everyone wants to live in a large city like we have here.

What @AViewFromThe42 said is exactly on point. I support the type of mixed and dense developments I've seen in Europe. And don't for a moment think they don't have new cities in Europe. I mean, even ignoring places in the Netherlands, which are built on land which didn't even exist until the 60's, there are new towns and cities developed on greenfield areas, as we have been doing here.

These towns include a dense core around a transit centre of some type (sometimes a train station, in the Netherlands, I even saw around a ferry terminal), that dense area includes mixed use buildings, generally, restaurants, shops, stores, meeting all your needs, with apartments and perhaps offices above. Beyond that, are lower density 2-3 story buildings, townhouses, and beyond that duplexes and single homes. Even staying in a detached home, we could walk to the transit centre and take a train or boat to a major city, or get food or do shopping, errands, all within about 15 minutes, or bike within 5. It seems like the entire area was planned that way. I'm sure, not every town looks like this, but those that do, provide a great mix of housing, choice of transportation (most were also surrounded by some type of highway, and bike lanes), and I believe sustainable transit.

But these places do not look like what we have been building. I do agree that there are some more density requirements for new housing developments, but these only go so far. There are few requirements to make transit a priority, nothing for biking, and little for walking beyond recreational purposes--the court and crescent development model is alive and well. There are some hints at mixed use developments but rarely is there enough density to support support all the services someone would need, instead simply including a strip mall type development, and everyone has to drive to the boardwalk anyway.

I think Waterloo Region has started to try to turn towards better development, but just take a drive through the areas north of Toronto and you'll see gigantic tracts of housing going in where there is no transit, no biking, nothing, you must own a car to live there.

Retrofitting this type of development in, is no doubt a challenge, but when we're talking about a huge area between KW and Guelph, we could start anew here, and plan something like this, but I just don't see it happening. Building a highway, with no transit, basically locks us into that type of development for this area. Then sometime later, we'll come in and try to retrofit some transit in, probably by building a GO Station outside of the developments and a giant park and ride lot.