Hospitals in KW

[ijmorlan]

I'm no fan of the automobile but there are still lots of valid reasons why people either prefer to or are obligated to drive to one.

I honestly do not understand why you don’t (seem to) realize that people around here generally understand that some people will drive to the hospital. What hospital management clearly doesn’t understand is that insisting from the beginning on such a large site will cause the hospital to be in the middle of nowhere, which will cause severe trouble for people who would want to take public transit.

You claim that there is a reason for needing such a large site. What reason? We’ve already established that it’s larger than any other hospital campus anyone can come up with. We’ve established that you could build the Pearson Terminal 1 parking lot on a small fraction of the proposed site. We already have multiple hospitals; so if the city grows even more (2 million people in the Region of Waterloo?), don’t you think there should be multiple hospitals, not one mega hospital?

As far as I can see, all the reasons one might come up with for not just wanting, but insisting up front on, such a huge site have been completely refuted. Are there any others still hiding in the wings?

What we should be insisting on is a site with excellent public transit access and short driving distances (these go together). If that means it has to be 2 towers on 2 separate sites, that’s fine. We’re a pretty big city and it’s a good, not a bad, thing for the hospital to have a reasonable number of sites, with different functions allocated between them (and in some cases duplicated) carefully.