Victoria and Park | 25, 36, 38 fl | Proposed

[hellocharliewest]

I've long thought it would be nice to see wider sidewalks and a tree-lined boulevard down the center of Victoria (a la what the plans are for University ave?), but I doubt that would ever happen. Especially not if a potential Ion pt 3 might run down that way.

I'm half jesting and half serious when I say this, but we could bury it, especially in the DT core!

[ac3r]

Careful, you're not allowed to say that around here. Now the LRT foamers are gonna have it out for ya and tell you that it's too expensive to make the right choice, so we must settle on second if not tenth best.

Trust me I've tried making the argument for subterranean a sections and get told I'm crazy haha.

[taylortbb]

Trust me I've tried making the argument for subterranean a sections and get told I'm crazy haha.

It's not that you're wrong that buried sections are good, it's a question of political feasibility.

[tomh009]

Careful, you're not allowed to say that around here. Now the LRT foamers are gonna have it out for ya and tell you that it's too expensive to make the right choice, so we must settle on second if not tenth best.

Trust me I've tried making the argument for subterranean a sections and get told I'm crazy haha.

A subway may be possible in the future. But the point is that it would have never been approved 10 years ago when the LRT/BRT options were being considered. What we have is not the ideal system, but it's very close to being the best that was possible to get approved at that point in time.

[ijmorlan]

Careful, you're not allowed to say that around here. Now the LRT foamers are gonna have it out for ya and tell you that it's too expensive to make the right choice, so we must settle on second if not tenth best.

Trust me I've tried making the argument for subterranean a sections and get told I'm crazy haha.

You can have a couple of subterranean sections or you can have another LRT line somewhere. That’s not “foam”, that’s just how much different projects cost.

[ac3r]

A subway may be possible in the future. But the point is that it would have never been approved 10 years ago when the LRT/BRT options were being considered. What we have is not the ideal system, but it's very close to being the best that was possible to get approved at that point in time.

I'm not really even for subways in particular here, at least by the traditional heavy rail definition. Those are leagues more expensive for many reasons and our population doesn't warrant it. Something like Ottawa's Confederation Line or the Stadtbahn Köln would have been better, as these are both light rail networks that simply tunnel underground where it makes sense to (not sure how Ottawa was built, but I know many sections in Köln used simple cut-and-cover construction which lowers costs). It gives you the perfect way to balance rapid transit in a city with existing buildings/roads+car/pedestrian/bike/etc infrastructure above ground. Because, ideally, you want rail transport to basically exist in its own plane of existence where one can only access it by descending an elevator. It lets it move faster and not have to disrupt what already exists.

Though yeah I concede that the government basically handed us two options: an empty hand, and the ION as it is now. So it was better to take the latter, even if it was not ideal. I'm sure as the region grows in the coming decades and the need for more lines is there, we'll have more money and willpower to make future LRT lines properly grade separated where necessary. Time will tell. The pandemic really threw a wrench into this too. It opened up and then roughly 8 months later, the world shut down. Extremely bad timing for a new rapid transit system.

Nonetheless, back to this building project!

[KevinT]

Careful, you're not allowed to say that around here. Now the LRT foamers are gonna have it out for ya and tell you that it's too expensive to make the right choice, so we must settle on second if not tenth best.

Trust me I've tried making the argument for subterranean a sections and get told I'm crazy haha.

Lol, I dream of the top of Charles being a portal where the LRT goes underground, I just can't figure out where it could pop out farther 'north'. I have childhood memories of 6 week summers spent with Oma in Essen Germany riding streetcars that went underground through the core... I'd love that here!

Edit to add: I also dream of Block Line station looking like Pimisi in Ottawa, with ION hugging the rail corridor until turning to follow the hydro corridor to Fairway instead of the Hayward S-nail we have now.

[danbrotherston]

Careful, you're not allowed to say that around here. Now the LRT foamers are gonna have it out for ya and tell you that it's too expensive to make the right choice, so we must settle on second if not tenth best.

Trust me I've tried making the argument for subterranean a sections and get told I'm crazy haha.

Lol, I dream of the top of Charles being a portal where the LRT goes underground, I just can't figure out where it could pop out farther 'north'. I have childhood memories of 6 week summers spent with Oma in Essen Germany riding streetcars that went underground through the core... I'd love that here!

Edit to add: I also dream of Block Line station looking like Pimisi in Ottawa, with ION hugging the rail corridor until turning to follow the hydro corridor to Fairway instead of the Hayward S-nail we have now.

For Block Line, I absolutely agree, it seems like an absolute no brainer, the system would have been much faster much more efficient.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by the "top" of Charles, are you suggesting it should be underground north of Downtown? Why would the LRT need to be buried there?

You folks probably know I strongly disagree with grade separating the LRT. Block line I support because the topology of the area makes it natural to be grade separated. But the rest of the locations, I see grade separation as an expensive (and unnecessary) investment to make more room for cars.

Here's the question I'd ask you folks who think the LRT should be buried. Would you still believe the LRT should be buried if the downtown (or uptown) cores were car free? I.e., if there were no cars permitted in the area you want the LRT buried, would you still think it should be buried? What benefits would there be to burying it there? Because as always, there are disadvantages--and not just cost but accessibility.

[plam]

Lol, I dream of the top of Charles being a portal where the LRT goes underground, I just can't figure out where it could pop out farther 'north'. I have childhood memories of 6 week summers spent with Oma in Essen Germany riding streetcars that went underground through the core... I'd love that here!

Edit to add: I also dream of Block Line station looking like Pimisi in Ottawa, with ION hugging the rail corridor until turning to follow the hydro corridor to Fairway instead of the Hayward S-nail we have now.

For Block Line, I absolutely agree, it seems like an absolute no brainer, the system would have been much faster much more efficient.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by the "top" of Charles, are you suggesting it should be underground north of Downtown? Why would the LRT need to be buried there?

You folks probably know I strongly disagree with grade separating the LRT. Block line I support because the topology of the area makes it natural to be grade separated. But the rest of the locations, I see grade separation as an expensive (and unnecessary) investment to make more room for cars.

Here's the question I'd ask you folks who think the LRT should be buried. Would you still believe the LRT should be buried if the downtown (or uptown) cores were car free? I.e., if there were no cars permitted in the area you want the LRT buried, would you still think it should be buried? What benefits would there be to burying it there? Because as always, there are disadvantages--and not just cost but accessibility.

(huh, someone ate my post, let's try again)

I don't think LRT should be buried, but nevertheless: I have a suspicion that cores should be car-lite not car-free. That is, it should be really slow and inconvenient and expensive to bring your car into the core, but it shouldn't be impossible. There's the question of why there were car-free experiments in the 70s that didn't work so great, and I still don't have a great understanding of that.

[danbrotherston]

For Block Line, I absolutely agree, it seems like an absolute no brainer, the system would have been much faster much more efficient.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by the "top" of Charles, are you suggesting it should be underground north of Downtown? Why would the LRT need to be buried there?

You folks probably know I strongly disagree with grade separating the LRT. Block line I support because the topology of the area makes it natural to be grade separated. But the rest of the locations, I see grade separation as an expensive (and unnecessary) investment to make more room for cars.

Here's the question I'd ask you folks who think the LRT should be buried. Would you still believe the LRT should be buried if the downtown (or uptown) cores were car free? I.e., if there were no cars permitted in the area you want the LRT buried, would you still think it should be buried? What benefits would there be to burying it there? Because as always, there are disadvantages--and not just cost but accessibility.

(huh, someone ate my post, let's try again)

I don't think LRT should be buried, but nevertheless: I have a suspicion that cores should be car-lite not car-free. That is, it should be really slow and inconvenient and expensive to bring your car into the core, but it shouldn't be impossible. There's the question of why there were car-free experiments in the 70s that didn't work so great, and I still don't have a great understanding of that.

Car-lite vs. car-free I don't think makes a huge difference, most of our "car-free" places are "car-lite" anyway. Like city parks...they're car free right? I'd call them car-lite, there are service vehicles, drivers who think they should be there for like, weddings or picnics, lost idiots, assholes from time to time. Same with places like the uptown square, the UW campus.

Car-lite might be a spectrum, a place where residents are permitted cars is a lot less car-lite. I wouldn't call the parking lot of a complex car-lite. But clearly there is a grey area.

I am not sure why the 70s experiments didn't work. City Beautiful I think had a video about it with some speculation. I hope that part of it is just the timing. But some of it might also be the context, I think it was often seen as a solution to struggling downtowns, without fixing the real structural issues Even today, if you just close downtown to cars, without making other means of getting there, and without removing free easy parking at the outlying areas, and without having more people living/working downtown, and without giving the few people who do live in a depressed downtown the resources to spend anything, well, it's gonna be a bad result.  We have fixed some, but not all of those issues. We have many more people living downtown, downtown is in many ways thriving, it is relatively easy to travel downtown without a car for the vast majority of the population. So I think that is part of it. Whether the result would be different, I have no idea.

[plam]

Car-lite vs. car-free I don't think makes a huge difference, most of our "car-free" places are "car-lite" anyway. Like city parks...they're car free right? I'd call them car-lite, there are service vehicles, drivers who think they should be there for like, weddings or picnics, lost idiots, assholes from time to time. Same with places like the uptown square, the UW campus.

Car-lite might be a spectrum, a place where residents are permitted cars is a lot less car-lite. I wouldn't call the parking lot of a complex car-lite. But clearly there is a grey area.

I am not sure why the 70s experiments didn't work. City Beautiful I think had a video about it with some speculation. I hope that part of it is just the timing. But some of it might also be the context, I think it was often seen as a solution to struggling downtowns, without fixing the real structural issues Even today, if you just close downtown to cars, without making other means of getting there, and without removing free easy parking at the outlying areas, and without having more people living/working downtown, and without giving the few people who do live in a depressed downtown the resources to spend anything, well, it's gonna be a bad result.  We have fixed some, but not all of those issues. We have many more people living downtown, downtown is in many ways thriving, it is relatively easy to travel downtown without a car for the vast majority of the population. So I think that is part of it. Whether the result would be different, I have no idea.

Fair enough. Not many places in Waterloo are truly car-free. I can hope that we've fixed the underlying issues with the 70s failures so that we don't see that again today. Looking at other jurisdictions is helpful too. There are a lot of places in Montreal that are very light on cars.

[nms]

You did miss the affordable housing:

1. Affordable housing units:
The Owner commits to 50 residential units on-site as part of the development that meet the
definition as affordable housing per the 2020 PPS and Regional and Kitchener Official Plans
(ownership units at most $368,000). These are one-bedroom units distributed throughout
different floors of the podium and/or towers.

2. Affordable housing contribution:
The Owner is committing to a financial contribution to a non-profit affordable housing provider
to support the development of an off-site affordable housing project in Kitchener. This
contribution is meant to complement the above on-site affordable units by supporting the
provision of targeted “deeper” affordable units in the city. Details of the provider or contribution
has not been finalized at this time.

I can't see that LRT passengers from one group of buildings would overcrowd the sidewalks between Park and Victoria. But if you have the math that shows otherwise, please do share.

As for car traffic, if we assume 600 cars (90% of capacity) traveling in a three-hour peak period in the mornings and again in the afternoons, and half heading to Waterloo and the other half to Kitchener (via Park & Victoria), that's about an additional car and a half per minute at the intersection. I don't think it will be overwhelmed by that.

Where did you find the shadow impact analysis?

Thanks for finding the information on affordable housing. It's not great, but it's better than others are offering.

I don't have math on the sidewalk pedestrian capacity of the sidewalks (it may be buried in the traffic study, but I did not read it in detail as most of it was over my head).  I was more thinking of the overall pedestrian experience.  If every development between Park and Victoria (eg the main path of travel to the LRT station) assumes that there is enough space for their pedestrians without considering the other development that has occurred or will occur along that same sidewalk, then we could end up with some tight sidewalk spaces.  For instance, in this time of Covid, we are being encouraged to give fellow pedestrians space when we pass each other.  If two pedestrians meet (or for that matter, two groups of pedestrians that may include animals, baby strollers, wheelchairs etc), how do they dance around each other?  Most of the Region is at a point where there is flexibility in the built environment due to a lack of buildings right up to the sidewalk.  If there will be a need for more pedestrian space, now is the time to reserve it.  In the case of this development, it appears that there is some provision for more street-level pedestrian space rather than a wall right at the edge of the sidewalk.

[danbrotherston]

You did miss the affordable housing:

I can't see that LRT passengers from one group of buildings would overcrowd the sidewalks between Park and Victoria. But if you have the math that shows otherwise, please do share.

As for car traffic, if we assume 600 cars (90% of capacity) traveling in a three-hour peak period in the mornings and again in the afternoons, and half heading to Waterloo and the other half to Kitchener (via Park & Victoria), that's about an additional car and a half per minute at the intersection. I don't think it will be overwhelmed by that.

Where did you find the shadow impact analysis?

Thanks for finding the information on affordable housing. It's not great, but it's better than others are offering.

I don't have math on the sidewalk pedestrian capacity of the sidewalks (it may be buried in the traffic study, but I did not read it in detail as most of it was over my head).  I was more thinking of the overall pedestrian experience.  If every development between Park and Victoria (eg the main path of travel to the LRT station) assumes that there is enough space for their pedestrians without considering the other development that has occurred or will occur along that same sidewalk, then we could end up with some tight sidewalk spaces.  For instance, in this time of Covid, we are being encouraged to give fellow pedestrians space when we pass each other.  If two pedestrians meet (or for that matter, two groups of pedestrians that may include animals, baby strollers, wheelchairs etc), how do they dance around each other?  Most of the Region is at a point where there is flexibility in the built environment due to a lack of buildings right up to the sidewalk.  If there will be a need for more pedestrian space, now is the time to reserve it.  In the case of this development, it appears that there is some provision for more street-level pedestrian space rather than a wall right at the edge of the sidewalk.

I don't think anyone anywhere in the region has a concept of measuring pedestrian capacity of sidewalks or studying volumes on sidewalks. It just isn't a concept we have.

Many sidewalks in the region are extremely congested (University Ave. is the worst I've experienced) but if you asked our regional transport engineers whether they know about it, they'd give you a confused look. The concept of capacity isn't even applied to sidewalks.

They have a standard that says 1.8m wide (and they'll narrow to 1.5m or put utilities in the sidewalk, if they cannot fit their "preferred" and unnecessarily wide 3.65m vehicle lanes). They don't know, and don't measure, or estimate how many people use a sidewalk or how many ped trips will be generated from any development.

They might occasionally measure how many people cross a road, but usually only to justify why they don't want to put in a crossing.

[ijmorlan]

They might occasionally measure how many people cross a road, but usually only to justify why they don't want to put in a crossing.

Ah yes, I remember a crossing of Erb at Albert being rejected because “nobody crosses” there. Hmmm, I wonder why that might be? Maybe because there isn’t a safe crossing? Funny how that criterion never gets applied to road bridges over the river… What’s that saying, “sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice”?

[KevinT]

Lol, I dream of the top of Charles being a portal where the LRT goes underground, I just can't figure out where it could pop out farther 'north'. I have childhood memories of 6 week summers spent with Oma in Essen Germany riding streetcars that went underground through the core... I'd love that here!

Edit to add: I also dream of Block Line station looking like Pimisi in Ottawa, with ION hugging the rail corridor until turning to follow the hydro corridor to Fairway instead of the Hayward S-nail we have now.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by the "top" of Charles, are you suggesting it should be underground north of Downtown? Why would the LRT need to be buried there?

Between Eby and Benton would be a great place for a downtown portal, and my reasoning is to be much quicker getting through the downtown than all the short blocks and curves it has to navigate now. Part of that slowdown though is because of the sharp corners it takes to re-align to Duke and King, and burying it through the downtown wouldn't get rid of the need to at least align with King at some point. You can't take diagonals through building basements to reduce those curves, so burial is not a problem-solving option for the LRT alignments that we have now 'north' and 'south' of downtown Kitchener. My mental vision of LRTs gracefully ducking under Benton will forever remain just a vision.

I think that a concrete improvement for the LRT downtown though would be to improve the signal priority. It works fairly well on King between Moore and Allen, but for some reason the traffic engineers didn't see fit to roll those permissive signal waves around corners, and that's where the LRT gets hung up. Also having to pull the train out of a station and creep to the next stoplight to trigger the signal is ridiculous, drivers should be able to trigger them from the cab before (or at the very least as) they leave the station.

Here's the question I'd ask you folks who think the LRT should be buried. Would you still believe the LRT should be buried if the downtown (or uptown) cores were car free? I.e., if there were no cars permitted in the area you want the LRT buried, would you still think it should be buried? What benefits would there be to burying it there? Because as always, there are disadvantages--and not just cost but accessibility.

I'd be thrilled to see the downtown work as a transit mall, but don't think it's vibrant enough to convert both Charles and Duke where the LRT is routed, and punching car and bus traffic straight up King between them certainly wouldn't play well with that either (it's just too confining). I know the one-way Charles and Duke car loop of old was seen as the opposite of a city building idea, but I think (personal opinion, I'm no urban planner) that it would have worked well with fewer lanes on those two streets plus bike lanes and wider sidewalks to keep them from being the mini highways they were, while running the LRT straight up a King street pedestrian mall European style. Again, a pleasant mental vision I'll never see.