03-10-2022, 12:05 PM
(03-10-2022, 11:31 AM)ac3r Wrote:(03-10-2022, 10:20 AM)danbrotherston Wrote: And how do I know such a thing to be true? We build the LRT in the city without first changing zoning. We are now retroactively fixing zoning in a lot of places.
That's one thing I never understood. The region/cities wanted to seize on the potential of transit-oriented development because it works well but then they went about it such a bizarre backwards manner by building a transit system first and are now just doing this weird patchwork of rezoning as new developers move in with projects. The smart thing to do, when they initially planned for rapid transit, would be to also tackle the problems with zoning first. The City of Kitchener developed its PARTs/planning around rapid transit plan which was good, but they never considered preemptively rezoning things so the transformation of the city could evolve more rapidly once the transit was operational.
I suppose, perhaps, one reason it is like this is because of our weird municipal politics. Everyone seems to hate the idea of amalgamation, but in cases like this it makes things easier to accomplish if you're one large entity. Instead, we have a regional government, followed by 3 separate city governments despite the 3 cities being physically one, indistinct metro area followed by a bunch of different township governments. It becomes challenging to agree on things and get things done. Single-tier municipalities can be a lot easier to manage in comparison. I mean, Toronto City Council has 26 members that govern the largest city in the country. All together, Waterloo Region has I believe 47 members. That's a hell of a lot of voices for such a small place.
I don't think "everyone" hates amalgamation. In fact, I hear a lot of people (including here) support amalgamation.
But I strongly disagree that a "larger" organization is easier to manage. Scale is in fact one of the hardest problems in human history to solve. Toronto's 26 members (which by the way was undemocratically cut by half in the last municipal election by our anti-democractic premier) is a great example of why this would be bad. Toronto is perhaps not the poster child, but a poster child of bad governance.
More voices is almost always better, and I haven't really seen the multiple tiers of government being a significant obstacle to the LRT, not like it has been problematic in other ways.
The NIMBYism we see happening re LRT station planning is happening at both a city and a regional level, and planning a geographic area like a station area is something which doesn't actually scale well, because local context should matter.