Welcome Guest!
In order to take advantage of all the great features that Waterloo Region Connected has to offer, including participating in the lively discussions below, you're going to have to register. The good news is that it'll take less than a minute and you can get started enjoying Waterloo Region's best online community right away.
or Create an Account




Thread Rating:
  • 2 Vote(s) - 4.5 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
General University Area Updates and Rumours
(01-20-2022, 06:37 PM)ac3r Wrote: So that leaves roughly half of 620'000+ people who don't live in walkable or transit friendly areas. That's nothing to feel good about.

A good chunk of that 53% could still live along bus routes that only run every 30 minutes which is not viable for many people who may have to rely on things like assisted mobility, who are elderly, who have children and families to care for, who work multiple jobs and need as much time as possible or who may only have painted bike lanes to make biking a potential. You can't just look at statics and numbers you know.

85% of homes are within 400 m of a bus stop. If you pump that too 800 meters (walking distance) you'll hit even higher.

I'm not going to say our transit system is good, but our coverage is very good....which frankly, is part of the problem. Coverage is prioritized which leads to bad routes and inefficient use of funds. Especially when our urban planning and development plans are made without the slightest regard for transit service.
Reply


Well my point still stands. People still need to use vehicles. It's one thing to say people can go from home to work on the bus/LRT or ride a bike. That's fine if you're just doing that. But people often need to do other things in their day - pick up groceries, friends, elderly parents, their children from daycare etc. You can't carry home a ton of groceries on the bus, nor can you carry your child home on a bike. They may come from out of the region as well, as many do, so looking at how far homes are from a transit stop is not a particularly useful metric all the time. It's easier to take your car and do whatever errands one needs to do in 1 trip than to go back and forth. They could solve the need for ugly, wasteful surface lots by building parking garages, but unfortunately those cost millions of dollars to construct, so many developments don't utilize them.

Until the cities/region become one a utopia of walkable communities with good rapid transit, this stuff is still going to be necessary. It's going to take us decades to get to the point where you can live, work, do your shopping etc all within a couple hundred meters of each other. But we're not Toronto, Berlin, Tokyo or New York City, so there will always be a need to meet in the middle while advocating for change but while understanding the necessity for traditional vehicle transportation and the requirements that come along with that.
Reply
Purely anecdotal, but my great-grandfather did not drive. He lived in a single family home, walked to work and church, and walked everywhere to do his banking and pay his bills (in the days when you could walk in the front door of your utility company and pay your bill). Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge used to be that way; the urban form is largely still there.

One thing that I have noticed during this pandemic is the rise in stores offering delivery and people willing to have things delivered to their home. Back in my great-grandfather's time (and really up until about 40 years ago), stores did home delivery because there was usually at least one person home during the day. Now, with the rise of remote work, there are more people at home during the day. No longer will we need to head to a store to bring home a mountain of groceries or other parcels; we'll be able to place and order and have it delivered to our door.

The one sticking point in this new order is high-rise buildings that may not have planned for large-scale parcel delivery and delivery companies that have dramatically shrunk the delivery window for each parcel (I've heard 45 seconds from vehicle to door and back again)

The future is looking more like the past again.
Reply
(01-20-2022, 09:10 PM)ac3r Wrote: Well my point still stands. People still need to use vehicles. It's one thing to say people can go from home to work on the bus/LRT or ride a bike. That's fine if you're just doing that. But people often need to do other things in their day - pick up groceries, friends, elderly parents, their children from daycare etc. You can't carry home a ton of groceries on the bus, nor can you carry your child home on a bike. They may come from out of the region as well, as many do, so looking at how far homes are from a transit stop is not a particularly useful metric all the time. It's easier to take your car and do whatever errands one needs to do in 1 trip than to go back and forth. They could solve the need for ugly, wasteful surface lots by building parking garages, but unfortunately those cost millions of dollars to construct, so many developments don't utilize them.

Until the cities/region become one a utopia of walkable communities with good rapid transit, this stuff is still going to be necessary. It's going to take us decades to get to the point where you can live, work, do your shopping etc all within a couple hundred meters of each other. But we're not Toronto, Berlin, Tokyo or New York City, so there will always be a need to meet in the middle while advocating for change but while understanding the necessity for traditional vehicle transportation and the requirements that come along with that.

You can pick up groceries with a bicycle or by transit. I've been doing it for nearly 30 years. You might be surprised at how much you can get into a decent set of panniers. I know of some that can fit two each of those big reusable bags with the double set of long and short handles. I can easily bring home enough for meals for two for a week with just two of those bags. I also have a two-wheeled cart in which I can fit 6 of those bags.

You can also get your children from day care or school by transit or a by bike, too. There's these awesome things called child seats and bike trailers. Or the really neat Dutch-style cargo bikes, which can also be used for grocery shopping.

You are objectively wrong about most of your claims about what you can and cannot do with a bike or transit.

Plus, you also seem to be assuming that once they make a choice on mode, they are limited to only that mode.
Reply
Coming at this from the position of a household that just purchased a cargo bike to reduce our family's car use in the city:

I think the takes stating the obvious that people will still use / will need to use cars is stating a fact. We should ask for policies or planning that makes it less easy to cater to that choice (e.g. - car garages are expensive, but maybe that should be the cost of allocating parking and all the infra demand that induces in urban areas), but I also think that its reasonable to say that even with a huge mode shift overall, there are still going to be laggards or people with other circumstances. A few more pain point on the ease of use can help incentivize that change, but I've never quite subscribed to the idea that its best to force a change by extreme restriction.

To get the average commuter and resident to by into the facts is partly an education campaign and exposure to those options and fighting for changes in design and priority that make those services a pleasure instead of a choice by need or activism. I don't think its unfair to say KW still has a distance to go in that regard, as much as I think the cities are making some positive progress?
Reply
(01-27-2022, 08:44 PM)Bytor Wrote: You can pick up groceries with a bicycle or by transit. I've been doing it for nearly 30 years. You might be surprised at how much you can get into a decent set of panniers. I know of some that can fit two each of those big reusable bags with the double set of long and short handles. I can easily bring home enough for meals for two for a week with just two of those bags. I also have a two-wheeled cart in which I can fit 6 of those bags.

You can also get your children from day care or school by transit or a by bike, too. There's these awesome things called child seats and bike trailers. Or the really neat Dutch-style cargo bikes, which can also be used for grocery shopping.

You are objectively wrong about most of your claims about what you can and cannot do with a bike or transit.

Plus, you also seem to be assuming that once they make a choice on mode, they are limited to only that mode.

Dude...I know you love bikes but you fail to see the bigger picture most of the time. You can cite all the studies and anecdotes you want but those don't matter to most people. Using your logic, horse and buggy is still viable. And sure, technically it is, but how many people in this century are going to use that? Or dump their car and haul their groceries home from Costco?

Cars have their faults for sure, but they are also extremely useful. Most people enjoy they convenience. They don't care about emissions, gas, maintenance, road congestion etc. They should, but they don't. And that's fair. People are still going to drive and that's their right.

We can promote public transit and alternative transit methods like biking, walking, the bus, the LRT etc and we ought to do so. We need to create a culture where people can accept that such forms of transportation are useful. But people are still going to use and need cars and trucks. It doesn't matter wherever or not they live within walking distance of a bus stop or whatever. Vehicles are convenient and at the end of the day, that's all most people are worried about...not emissions and traffic. You have to create a balance between the two which is what we try to do in urban development. We promote density, transit, alternative methods of transportation while still giving drivers what they need in the form of parking and roads. That's just how it works. You may have some mental idea of a car free utopia but real life necessitates having more than that. Which is why developments still have surface parking. It's just naive and ignorant to think you can just cut all of that out and force everyone onto bikes. Doesn't matter how many studies you want to dig up and link, you're not going to get everyone out of their car and so parking is still required for an endless list of reasons.

A lot of posters on this forum have truly never studied urban development in depth and it shows. Things aren't as black and white as you imagine them to be. Call me objectively wrong all you want if that helps, but I'm really not. My entire career is devoted to researching this stuff. I've written a thesis on alternative transportation, but the truth is people still need and want vehicles and we need the infrastructure to support that.
Reply
(01-28-2022, 05:38 PM)ac3r Wrote: Dude...I know you love bikes but you fail to see the bigger picture most of the time. You can cite all the studies and anecdotes you want but those don't matter to most people. Using your logic, horse and buggy is still viable. And sure, technically it is, but how many people in this century are going to use that? Or dump their car and haul their groceries home from Costco?

Cars have their faults for sure, but they are also extremely useful. Most people enjoy they convenience. They don't care about emissions, gas, maintenance, road congestion etc. They should, but they don't. And that's fair. People are still going to drive and that's their right.

We can promote public transit and alternative transit methods like biking, walking, the bus, the LRT etc and we ought to do so. We need to create a culture where people can accept that such forms of transportation are useful. But people are still going to use and need cars and trucks. It doesn't matter wherever or not they live within walking distance of a bus stop or whatever. Vehicles are convenient and at the end of the day, that's all most people are worried about...not emissions and traffic. You have to create a balance between the two which is what we try to do in urban development. We promote density, transit, alternative methods of transportation while still giving drivers what they need in the form of parking and roads. That's just how it works. You may have some mental idea of a car free utopia but real life necessitates having more than that. Which is why developments still have surface parking. It's just naive and ignorant to think you can just cut all of that out and force everyone onto bikes. Doesn't matter how many studies you want to dig up and link, you're not going to get everyone out of their car and so parking is still required for an endless list of reasons.

A lot of posters on this forum have truly never studied urban development in depth and it shows. Things aren't as black and white as you imagine them to be. Call me objectively wrong all you want if that helps, but I'm really not. My entire career is devoted to researching this stuff. I've written a thesis on alternative transportation, but the truth is people still need and want vehicles and we need the infrastructure to support that.

The reason so many people view living without a car unviable is because we have built cities around the car instead of around people. We build vast tracks of low density housing instead of higher density walkable neighbourhoods. We put the grocery and other stores in areas far from where the housing is and surrounded them with vast parking lots, rather than putting the stores in the neighbourhoods where people live as used to be done before the car ruined cities. There are other cities in the world that are not built this way.
Reply


(01-28-2022, 05:38 PM)ac3r Wrote:
(01-27-2022, 08:44 PM)Bytor Wrote: You can pick up groceries with a bicycle or by transit. I've been doing it for nearly 30 years. You might be surprised at how much you can get into a decent set of panniers. I know of some that can fit two each of those big reusable bags with the double set of long and short handles. I can easily bring home enough for meals for two for a week with just two of those bags. I also have a two-wheeled cart in which I can fit 6 of those bags.

You can also get your children from day care or school by transit or a by bike, too. There's these awesome things called child seats and bike trailers. Or the really neat Dutch-style cargo bikes, which can also be used for grocery shopping.

You are objectively wrong about most of your claims about what you can and cannot do with a bike or transit.

Plus, you also seem to be assuming that once they make a choice on mode, they are limited to only that mode.

Dude...I know you love bikes but you fail to see the bigger picture most of the time. You can cite all the studies and anecdotes you want but those don't matter to most people. Using your logic, horse and buggy is still viable. And sure, technically it is, but how many people in this century are going to use that? Or dump their car and haul their groceries home from Costco?

Cars have their faults for sure, but they are also extremely useful. Most people enjoy they convenience. They don't care about emissions, gas, maintenance, road congestion etc. They should, but they don't. And that's fair. People are still going to drive and that's their right.

We can promote public transit and alternative transit methods like biking, walking, the bus, the LRT etc and we ought to do so. We need to create a culture where people can accept that such forms of transportation are useful. But people are still going to use and need cars and trucks. It doesn't matter wherever or not they live within walking distance of a bus stop or whatever. Vehicles are convenient and at the end of the day, that's all most people are worried about...not emissions and traffic. You have to create a balance between the two which is what we try to do in urban development. We promote density, transit, alternative methods of transportation while still giving drivers what they need in the form of parking and roads. That's just how it works. You may have some mental idea of a car free utopia but real life necessitates having more than that. Which is why developments still have surface parking. It's just naive and ignorant to think you can just cut all of that out and force everyone onto bikes. Doesn't matter how many studies you want to dig up and link, you're not going to get everyone out of their car and so parking is still required for an endless list of reasons.

A lot of posters on this forum have truly never studied urban development in depth and it shows. Things aren't as black and white as you imagine them to be. Call me objectively wrong all you want if that helps, but I'm really not. My entire career is devoted to researching this stuff. I've written a thesis on alternative transportation, but the truth is people still need and want vehicles and we need the infrastructure to support that.

I don't think anyone anywhere is suggesting that tomorrow cars are banned and everyone must get on a bike. That's a straw man.

What is clear is that with the proper incentives and disincentives, and the proper infrastructure to support it, a majority (at least in most urban places) would very quickly start cycling for at least some of their trips. Carrying kids, groceries, other cargo is not an obstacle, it is our incentives and infrastructure which is the obstacle.

And you can put up your credentials all you want, but the Netherlands exists to demonstrate that this is clearly true.

The question of whether we accommodate drivers is separate from whether we subsidize and incentivise drivers.

If we spent billions of subsidized dollars making driving cheap, easy and convenient at the expense of making walking uncomfortable and inconvenient, and cycling downright dangerous in many cases, then we are obviously going to convince people to drive. The exact same follows if we make driving less convenient and much more expensive, those same people will get on a bike or put on a pair of shoes.

But when we continues to prioritize driving, while trying to invest a tiny bit into making cycling and walking less awful, and we don't get a mass exodus, you can't say it's just the natural order of things, literally nothing is the natural order of things because we are literally defining nature we get what we build.
Reply
(01-28-2022, 05:38 PM)ac3r Wrote: People are still going to drive and that's their right.

It is in no way a right to drive on a massively expensive taxpayer funded road network that is free at the point of use.
Reply
Free ? I think fuel taxes were implemented in the past specifically to offset road construction... Nothing is free... one look at the amount of money the government takes of my pay is good evidence things aren't free..
Reply
(01-28-2022, 05:38 PM)ac3r Wrote:
(01-27-2022, 08:44 PM)Bytor Wrote: You can pick up groceries with a bicycle or by transit. I've been doing it for nearly 30 years. You might be surprised at how much you can get into a decent set of panniers. I know of some that can fit two each of those big reusable bags with the double set of long and short handles. I can easily bring home enough for meals for two for a week with just two of those bags. I also have a two-wheeled cart in which I can fit 6 of those bags.

You can also get your children from day care or school by transit or a by bike, too. There's these awesome things called child seats and bike trailers. Or the really neat Dutch-style cargo bikes, which can also be used for grocery shopping.

You are objectively wrong about most of your claims about what you can and cannot do with a bike or transit.

Plus, you also seem to be assuming that once they make a choice on mode, they are limited to only that mode.

Dude...I know you love bikes but you fail to see the bigger picture most of the time. You can cite all the studies and anecdotes you want but those don't matter to most people. Using your logic, horse and buggy is still viable. And sure, technically it is, but how many people in this century are going to use that? Or dump their car and haul their groceries home from Costco?

--snip--

A lot of posters on this forum have truly never studied urban development in depth and it shows. Things aren't as black and white as you imagine them to be. Call me objectively wrong all you want if that helps, but I'm really not. My entire career is devoted to researching this stuff. I've written a thesis on alternative transportation, but the truth is people still need and want vehicles and we need the infrastructure to support that.

You're 100% right.

That is a problem here -- you have some that are so hardcore with their bikes and belief that everyone can -- and should -- be riding one. Reality, the majority own personal vehicles because of their convenience, protection from weather, they're self-employed, they take care of elderly parents, multiple appointments per day, etc. Public transit doesn't cut it either, especially with its very limited service.

In regards to public transit, as I had mentioned before, my daughter was molested on GRT, and no one f*cking cared. She had to take the GRT to school as it was out of our boundaries (we're in Forest Heights territories, she was going to KCI) -- but in the end, the WRDSB and STS got her a yellow bus. She's not alone with the assaulting and molestations that occur on transit when you have rift raft using it and zero policing. My guess is that most of the posters on here (not all, but most) are male and likely never have had to deal with things that young females have to deal with.

I am good with infrastructure spending on bike lanes and transit, but the very vocal minority (though seems like a majority at this site) need to respect those of us that have to drive, for whatever reason.
Reply
(01-29-2022, 11:13 AM)Rainrider22 Wrote: Free ?  I think fuel taxes were implemented in the past specifically to offset road construction... Nothing is free...  one look at the amount of money the government takes of my pay is good evidence things aren't free..

Free at the point of use, as I said. But raising enough money from various taxation sources to pay the bill is difficult, leading to a constant cycle of undermaintenance and complaints about high taxes.

Anyway, if that’s really true, it makes no sense. Fuel use is correlated with ongoing use of the roads, not with the construction of new roads. But policies don’t have to have justifications that make numerical sense.

Anyway, my point is that driving, especially driving on massively expensive infrastructure, is not a right. We as a society have decided to expend massive resources in making it possible, but we can change policies whenever we want without violating anybody’s rights. Whether that is what we want to do and in what way specifically to do it if so is a matter for political debate, preferably informed by engineering and economics knowledge.
Reply
Every thread on this site turns into a bike vs car thread. Every one is different, and there is no right vs wrong answer. I drive my type-R to the mail box which is 200 metres away, not ideal in many eyes but I don’t care. I also respect anyone who wants to ride or walk for whatever reason they choose.

I say we leave the transit topics to the transit threads, this is the university general rumours thread
Reply


(01-29-2022, 01:05 PM)jeffster Wrote:
(01-28-2022, 05:38 PM)ac3r Wrote: Dude...I know you love bikes but you fail to see the bigger picture most of the time. You can cite all the studies and anecdotes you want but those don't matter to most people. Using your logic, horse and buggy is still viable. And sure, technically it is, but how many people in this century are going to use that? Or dump their car and haul their groceries home from Costco?

--snip--

A lot of posters on this forum have truly never studied urban development in depth and it shows. Things aren't as black and white as you imagine them to be. Call me objectively wrong all you want if that helps, but I'm really not. My entire career is devoted to researching this stuff. I've written a thesis on alternative transportation, but the truth is people still need and want vehicles and we need the infrastructure to support that.

You're 100% right.

That is a problem here -- you have some that are so hardcore with their bikes and belief that everyone can -- and should -- be riding one. Reality, the majority own personal vehicles because of their convenience, protection from weather, they're self-employed, they take care of elderly parents, multiple appointments per day, etc. Public transit doesn't cut it either, especially with its very limited service.

In regards to public transit, as I had mentioned before, my daughter was molested on GRT, and no one f*cking cared. She had to take the GRT to school as it was out of our boundaries (we're in Forest Heights territories, she was going to KCI) -- but in the end, the WRDSB and STS got her a yellow bus. She's not alone with the assaulting and molestations that occur on transit when you have rift raft using it and zero policing. My guess is that most of the posters on here (not all, but most) are male and likely never have had to deal with things that young females have to deal with. 

I am good with infrastructure spending on bike lanes and transit, but the very vocal minority (though seems like a majority at this site) need to respect those of us that have to drive, for whatever reason.

Again, I don't think anybody here has ever said, everyone must ride a bike. What we say is that given the right infrastructure, MOST people WILL ride for at least SOME trips. And excuses made of why you cannot ride doesn't apply to most people for all trips. Again, even people who care for elderly parents don't make every single trip with an elderly parent. And multiple appointments per day is easy to do on a bike, in fact, it's very easy, because you might only use the bike for some of them, as I often do.

Again, I find this a very common blindspot of people who drive for their transportation, the idea that you must use the same means for every single trip you ever take is a strange one, and one that is only held by people who use a car for their transportation.

I'm sorry about what happened to your daughter. Our society, and especially our police force does not take sexual assault seriously. It makes me very angry. You're right that I don't experience it, but I do see it, I've seen my partner get cat called while we were cycling. It's infuriating, and it's not right, and I want us to do something about that. But if the solution is to just stick everyone in cars, well then I feel we have truly failed as a society.

Please define "respect". I don't disrespect anyone for driving, I don't think it's a choice they're making, they are responding to the incentives we've built into our society. I do argue we should stop subsidizing driving. Do you think it is disrespectful to suggest that drivers should pay for the resources they are consuming? And I'll admit, I do disrespect people for making toxic choices like driving an excessively large pickup truck in an urban environment, largely as a result of advertising appealing to toxic parts of our culture.
Reply
(01-29-2022, 05:21 PM)Lebronj23 Wrote: I say we leave the transit topics to the transit threads, this is the university general rumours thread

☝️
Reply
« Next Oldest | Next Newest »



Forum Jump:


Users browsing this thread: 2 Guest(s)

About Waterloo Region Connected

Launched in August 2014, Waterloo Region Connected is an online community that brings together all the things that make Waterloo Region great. Waterloo Region Connected provides user-driven content fueled by a lively discussion forum covering topics like urban development, transportation projects, heritage issues, businesses and other issues of interest to those in Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge and the four Townships - North Dumfries, Wellesley, Wilmot, and Woolwich.

              User Links