On Tuesday the 19th, TriTAG will be hosting our almost monthly pub night to chat with anyone and everyone interested in transit and active transportation in Waterloo Region. We generally hold these the third Tuesday of every month.
Stop by and bring your friends – we’ll be at McCabe’s at King & Francis in downtown Kitchener. You should see us straight ahead past the entrance, but if not, ask when you enter. (If you like, join the Facebook event.)
A number of things are happening in the next two weeks, which you shouldn’t miss!
Next week is the Commuter Challenge, aimed at getting people to rethink their commutes. Check that link for details on all the constituent events. On Monday, June 4, is the launch event, which is also an open house and consultation for both the King/Victoria transit hub walking/cycling access plan and for the Region’s active transportation master plan. If that weren’t enough, there will be a presentation by Hans Moor on developing a cycling culture, including a discussion of the successful Dutch approach. The event is from 4:30pm to 8:00pm at the UW School of Pharmacy, with the presentation at 6pm. (It is not entirely clear whether the public consultation / open house continues through the presentation.) You should attend. More information is available from the Region and from Sustainable Waterloo; people are encouraged to register.
The following week is the final one of three week-long public forums on the Central Transit Corridor development strategy. The topic for the week is how the LRT can strengthen existing aspects of the community. It will include two open houses, one in Cambridge and one in Kitchener. The first open house will be followed by a keynote talk by Sue Zielinski; if it’s anything like the previous two, it is well worth attending. Details are in this document; you can also check the project website as well as the storefront office by Kitchener City hall. There is a Facebook event for the talk that can help you spread the word.
Ottawa St, from King St to Mill St in central Kitchener, currently a two lane road flanked by driveways, single family homes, and some industry, is about to get a whole lot busier.
On the books for this 1 km stretch, according to the Region of Waterloo, are plans to:
In total, 1 LRT lane, 4 car lanes, and 2 bike lanes (if not better, segregated biking infrastructure).
That’s an awful lot to fit in the 20 metre right-of-way (pg 7). Comparing to road layouts planned for other sections of the LRT, it is apparent that this is a large amount to fit in the 30 metres between the front doors of the houses lining this stretch.
It is admirable to intend Ottawa St to serve all of these purposes, and there is no doubt that it is ripe for a rebuild and redesign, but there needs to be a holistic review of what we want to do with the corridor, and what we need to do with it, before we start digging.
If we blindly move forward with current plans for all of the road uses, it is likely that there will be great impact at great cost to the homes on Ottawa. At best, many homes will lose the majority of their lawns, and at worst, an entire side of the street will be expropriated, just as is happening on Weber St. Either way, this would be unnecessarily disruptive to an otherwise stable neighbourhood.
What can be done to mitigate this? Something needs to move, and that should be the LRT which would be rerouted to Borden Ave.
We need your help and creativity. There’s a development proposal in Waterloo right by a planned LRT station. It’s for a second tower on the block bounded by Caroline, Allen, Park, and John streets, in addition to the one currently under construction at the corner of Park and Allen. (Details of the submission are here, along with slides from a recent meeting.). Apart from the egregious planned amount of parking either required by the city or desired by the developer at what should be a transit-oriented development, there is a bigger issue. The developer wants to build on top of the current Iron Horse Trail and replace it off to the side, lengthening it and making it worse as a transportation corridor. Chris Klein has written about the need to think carefully before trading away a main transportation corridor for a developer’s benefit. But more on that later.
Here’s where you come in. We want to see what ideas people have for how to develop this parcel and make the Iron Horse Trail better at the same time — by bringing it back to the original rail corridor alignment and taking out the current 90-degree turn. This is what I mean:
View Iron Horse Trail and Allen/Caroline in a larger map
Let us know in the comments or email us your depictions (or examples from elsewhere) of what could be done with that area, perhaps with some creative use of the space above the Iron Horse Trail. We don’t have much time to get this out to the developer and Waterloo City Hall, so e-mail us your ideas or examples to protectthetrail@tritag.ca . We’ll put up the submissions in a follow-up.
Next Tuesday the 17th, TriTAG will be hosting our monthly pub night from 6:30pm to 9:00pm to chat with anyone and everyone interested in transit and active transportation in Waterloo Region. Our plan is to hold these the third Tuesday of every month.
Stop by and bring your friends – we’ll be in the Harp Room at McCabe’s at King & Francis in downtown Kitchener. (If you like, join the Facebook event.)
This weekend was the official launch of the Central Transit Corridor Community Building Strategy (CBS). (The launch was webcast, as other Regional proceedings now are, and should be soon available in the archive.) This Tuesday the 27th, there will be a CBS open house from 3 to 6pm at Knox Presbyterian Church (at Erb & Caroline in Waterloo); there will be a presentation from 5:30 to 6:15 and a workshop from 6:15 to 8:15pm. (Details from here.) We encourage everyone to attend the presentation and workshop.
Though the name of the project is daunting, the idea is both simple and rather important. The Rapid Transit / LRT project is designed to function as a regional transit spine and to attract and handle a large amount of development as urban infill along Waterloo Region’s central corridor instead of as sprawl. The CBS will set out the vision for land-use planning and street networks around stations.
LRT is already attracting development near station areas, but with the zoning currently in place and without a coherent strategy for LRT corridor development, those buildings may not be creating transit-oriented and human-scale places. The “Northfield Station” development is a likely example of a missed opportunity. It isn’t a given that LRT changes its station areas much by itself. For example, outside of Calgary’s downtown, its LRT appears to have primarily influenced the land-use around its stations through the copious provision of parking.
So that the line can create dense, urban, transit-oriented places along the line, the zoning needs to change so that it allows for density, so that it does not require off-street parking, and so it allows and encourages a built form that makes for pedestrian-oriented neighbourhoods. The attraction of a new light rail line is going to result in much development interest of various kinds along the entire line. The CBS should be a guiding mechanism to turn that interest into city-building along the LRT line.
It’s important stuff, and crucial to the Region’s reurbanization and growth management priorities. Attend the Tuesday workshop if you can, and if not, send your comments online or stop by the storefront the project will be opening soon in downtown Kitchener.
One of the main goals of rapid transit is to decentralize the bus network from a system of hub-and-spoke routes to a system of cross-corridor bus routes which connect to rapid transit stations. However, the current planned LRT station locations in Waterloo between Uptown and Northfield are not optimally placed to achieve this goal.
Currently, stations in the University area are planned at Seagram Drive and mid-block between University Avenue and Columbia Street:
Current station locations at Seagram and UW Davis Centre with 600m walking radius
The issue with the above setup is that it would divert cross-corridor routes off their corridors and into a terminal station in front of UW Davis Centre. Diverting trips from these corridors would result in longer cross-town travel times, and would reduce the amount of mixed-use development potential at the cross-corridors. Anyone who has travelled on Routes 7 and 8 through Charles Street Terminal knows the frustrating experience that even a minor route diversion can have on your overall travel time. Time wasted sitting at a terminal is time spent thinking about how much quicker it is to drive or even walk.
As such, TriTAG supports altering the University station locations to the following:
Modified station locations at University Ave and Columbia Street with 600m walking radius
Placing a station at the street provides many benefits over a station mid-block: (more…)
Amidst the talk of GO trains (or the lack thereof) between Toronto and Waterloo Region, GO Transit has quietly and steadily been increasing service on its Waterloo-Mississauga Route 25. Starting March 31, when university-related service is cut back, it is actually adding an extra regular weekday run in both directions. (At the same time, it is cutting back on some Friday express runs and extending others to run on Thursdays as well.) Details are available at GO Transit’s schedule page, as well as on Google Maps when you ask for transit directions.
That will bring us to pretty much all-day hourly scheduled bus service between Kitchener and Mississauga on weekdays and Saturdays. It’s less than hourly in the early morning, evening, and Sundays, but still pretty impressive for a service that doesn’t seem to get much media attention. Yet, GO is increasing the service likely because there is high demand for it.
Why would you want to go to Mississauga, apart from the city itself or the Square One mall? At the Square One terminal, there are regular buses to Toronto-Union station (Route 21), to York University (Routes 45, 46, 47), and mostly commuter runs to Yorkdale and North York (Route 19).
In addition, with a Presto card you can easily ride both GO buses and MiWay local buses without buying tickets (and with a transfer discount). MiWay routes 26, 3, and 20 will take you from Square One to Islington station on the TTC Bloor-Danforth subway line. Routes 107 (weekday only rapid) and 7 both go to Pearson Airport — the 7 goes directly to Terminal 1 and the 107 stops at the Viscount LINK train station. Apart from being dropped off and picked up at the airport, GO + MiWay is by far the cheapest way of getting to Pearson from Waterloo Region.
On Tuesday, March 20, TriTAG will be hosting our now monthly pub night to chat with anyone and everyone interested in transit and active transportation in Waterloo Region. We’ll be there from 6:30pm to 9:00pm. (Facebook event here.) Stop by for some food, drink, and friendly conversation. (Food and drink at your own expense.)
We’ll be in the Harp Room at McCabe’s at King & Francis in downtown Kitchener. There will be a digital projector set up for those who want to share something on a larger screen.
We hope to see many of you there!
Waterloo Region has a position open for “Manager, Rapid Transit Community Relations” (main job site), and we’re linking it here because effective communication with the public and numerous stakeholders is one of the most important aspects of the LRT project’s success. If you have the necessary background and care about effective transit, growth management, and reurbanization, please consider applying.
Oh, and the perhaps also important position of LRT Project Director is now available (no listing). As is this interesting (and new?) position of “Coordinator, On-Street Passenger Amenities” for Grand River Transit.
