King-Victoria Transit Hub

[kidgibnick]

Office space too risky atm? Perhaps they could have considered a small supermarket, especially convenient from commuters (eg. ReweCity, TescoExpress). Most reasonably sized rail-stations in Europe have a supermarket, and although most things in Europe are not open 24/7, the central-station supermarkets often are.

Madrid Atocha has amazing plant features inside the main hallway. What will ours have, a TimHortons to-go? :/

The region is not going to run a supermarket, nor should they. And to date, no supermarket chain has yet committed to putting an urban supermarket in DTK, and I don't see why the station would changes things substantially in the near term.

As for Madrid Atocha, they have some 300,000 passengers per day. Do you really think that's comparable to what Kitchener will be?

I don't really understand this comment. Most rail stations in Europe are landlords to commercial tenants. Commuters need food, coffee, shopping, and this is (or could be) a high traffic centralized place to provide that (if not now, then in coming years - planning for the future). Perhaps the difference is that most rail stations (at least in Germany, Switzerland) are joint/owned by the rail company (which is often nationalized; Deutsche Bahn, SBB, etc.) - this means it does not fall on the city or municipality to build a rail station, but the rail-company to build infrastructure (bridges, track, stations, etc.) from which they (intend to) profit. If the city is going to build an expensive transit hub, why would they not leverage it to create additional sources of cash-flow, eg. commercial space for a supermarket, or anything else (albeit difficult right now).

You don't need 300k/d passengers to create something interesting (eg. beautiful tree feature in the main hall, like in Madrid). To AC3R's point, we have tremendous talent in this city, but on street level, we could do better
Can we really expect city council members alone to be educated in matters of architecture or urban psychology? (let's leverage our local resource base). My point is that it lacks vision. But....let's see, the plans are likely to change.