King-Victoria Transit Hub

[danbrotherston]

This whole building should have been demolished in 2015 when the original Transit Hub was proposed. It is not a special factory building and its built way too close to Victoria.  The building is also the reason no developer touched the site with a ten foot pole. My prediction is nothing is built on the rest of the site for 20+ years and it eventually gets torn down due to neglect.  The Region Staff working on this project have done an awful job with the development of this transit hub. I know this is crazy to say, but I think Metrolinx would have done a much better job at building this hub. Having the City of Kitchener, the Region and Metrolinx working on this has caused countless delays and waterdown designs.

Victoria is going to be rebuilt in from King to Weber, provided the Province doesn't cancel it with their bike lane hatred. This will allow a cycle track and sidewalk in front of the existing Rumpel Felt meaning it won't be as narrow, you'll have significantly more width (roughly a car lane).

Why would you demolish something that is considered historical? There's definitely some buildings on the heritage registry that I personally don't agree with but this building is not that. It does have some worth to it. It is by no means difficult to incorporate an older building into a podium with full retention. You do need to design a building differently, for example you may need to use helical piles as you're bearing locations instead of a raft slab or standard footing. You'd likely need a significant transfer slab to deal with the different foundation layout but it's not as if this is a foreign concept in the engineering world, it's used very regularly.

I don't know if you've ever worked with Metrolinx but much like the MTO they can be difficult to work with especially on anything that isn't their primary goal (Ontario Line for example). This was ready to go for multiple years, the problem was Metrolinx dragged their feet on the station portion. The Region cannot do their work without the Metrolinx work so don't go blame the Region. There's various retaining walls which are part of the Metrolinx contract which touch the Regional portion so the Region can't do their work without Metrolinx.

I always find historical stuff dubious at best.

Leaving aside absurd stuff like the Victoria Park residents forcing the city to install black "super-sharrows" (which make them really just regular sharrows, that they then park their oversized luxury SUVs on because of "heritage".

To me, we're missing the point of heritage. If we wanted to maintain the historical context of that area, we'd narrow all the roads to two lanes and heavily limit traffic, and restore and main the building in a form that the public can learn about the historically significant features/events.

If instead we only care about the aesthetics of heritage elements, then simply put requirements on the style of the new buildings that get constructed.

Instead we force buildings which have dubious historical value to be preserved (like, it was a manufacturer from a century ago...so what...do you also think the Google building, or the Toyota factory should be preserved, both have equal importance to the city's industry today as Rumpel Felt had a century ago) but not in a way that benefits the public.

It's like a lot of regulations in Ontario/Canada...good intentions, questionable execution, and heavily hijacked by regressive interests that seek to do nothing but stop progress of any kind.