Quote:
Originally Posted by Simplicity
That might be a fair assessment, but again, that's because that's how people want it. Is it really that detrimental if people have to drive 5 minutes to Costco and Sobeys? Or Canadian Tire and Home Depot? Why's this a bad thing? Shouldn't we be encouraging those sorts of relatively short trips? If you're going to have single family housing - and you always will - isn't this a decent modern model for it?
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First, I'll let Walkscore expound on some of the advantages of living in a walkable place.
https://www.walkscore.com/walkable-neighborhoods.shtml
Ideally, Waverly West might work out some kind of situation similar to what exists in a lot of mature neighborhoods where they feature a dense urban section with lots of services and a less dense single-family hinterland. We can see this in Osborne Village and Crescent Wood/River Heights, Central St. Boniface and Norwood, the central part of the West End and and rest of it, and so on. While this is what Waverly West's planners were going for, they've gone about it ass backwards by building a road to auto-centric services, building tract housing, then hoping that one day people will change their behaviour and go for a tiny neighborhood centre. It doesn't help that the first development in Bridgwater Centre is a truck stop.
As we've seen in the mature neighborhoods I mentioned above, as auto-centric development occurred on the outer fringes of these neighborhoods, people started taking many more--but not all--trips outwards, in their cars, to use these services. It's silly to expect that the reverse may occur in a subdivision where people move expecting to use their car for every single trip.
But, you claim people want that; that people love the inconvenience of having to use their car every single time they want to go somewhere. You paint a utopian picture of people taking 5 minute trips to score groceries and camping supplies. All the free lunches they can stomach.
Even in ideal conditions I doubt most people could even get out of their subdivision in five minutes, never mind if everyone else is trying to get their free lunch at the same time. Suddenly, something we've provided for free, that people look at as a natural feature of their landscape is overused and clogged and at least some of its costs become apparent. Then tradesmen and shipping traffic that actually needs to get somewhere on the roads can't because forty thousand people need to drive to Starbucks. Productivity losses abound.
People want whatever they can get for free. Ultimately, nothing is free. What you take as what people want is a significant market distortion. Look at it this way: if someone just left
anything worth hundreds of millions of dollars lying around, free to use, you'd be an idiot not to. As an economic agent, you have to take that, just like you have to buy into every bubble and risk the collapse. It's how we keep up with the market and race it to the bottom.
Here's an article about a study on how drivers get stressed out and enjoy their trips less than everybody else.
http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/...mmutes/406429/
Put a bird on this one about how much cyclists love their lives:
http://bikeportland.org/2013/01/30/b...-tidbits-82448
Even if single-occupancy vehicles worked as catch-free as everyone seems to hope, we'd be kidding ourselves if we thought they didn't have massive conflicts with every other facet of human life. We're talking about metal boxes weighing thousands of pounds, hurtling around at high speed, emitting noxious smoke and noise. Being around traffic is unpleasant.
Bdog's: what makes Kenaston different. There a lot of things that go into making some places better for walking than others. You hit on the speed of traffic and width of road, which are both important, but the number of intersections is probably the most important; massing of buildings and their proximity to sidewalks are as well.
Like you guessed, speed is a big factor. In dense urban areas speed limits are lower and cars often don't reach those speeds. The difference between 50km/h and 60km/h is huge. We know that walking around wide streets--which you're right to point out aren't the best--isn't that bad downtown where speeds are lower and crossings frequent. But as decent a walk as Portage ave. can be, it becomes fairly unpleasant not far west of downtown, even with wide sidewalks and large buildings abutting them, simply because the speed limit increases.
As for width of the street, you compare it to crossing Main street. Main is 122 feet across, including its wide sidewalks. Its 8 lanes are narrower than Kenaston's or Bishop's. It does have a median, even if it's tiny in some spots. You can leave the curb on one corner and walk directly to the opposite corner, directly in line with the sidewalks--no taking indirect paths across turning bays.
Kenaston and Bishop also have wide easements, in Kenaston's case crossing the street also means walking past retention ponds. Crossing either road is closer to walking 100 meters than 100 feet. Given that 400m is the sweet spot (about a ten minute walk) that planners accept as the furthest people will typically walk for things like errands and catching transit, using up 100m with a road crossing is a waste. Furthermore, the closest intersection to Kenaston and Bison in Bridgwater Lakes is close to 200m away from Kenaston. And Manitoba housing has already built side by sides for the first 100m inside Bridgwater Centre. We're already pushing 400m for the very closest Bridgwater residents who would cross Kenaston to visit whatever services Manitoba Housing pretends they'll build.
Bishop isn't a bad comparison. You say hundreds of people traverse its intersections on foot daily. Maybe they do. There is a high school and shopping mall nearby, both things that will never exist in Bridgwater and both things that have a captive, non-driving market in teenagers. The population density north of Bishop is also far higher than Bridgwater will ever reach. In any case, crossing Bishop on foot is unpleasant and given the population density nearby, I feel safe saying that more people would walk to St. Vital Centre if Bishop weren't in the way.
But we're talking about Bridgwater being urban. My point is that Kenaston is an impediment to that happening. South St. Vital is not urban and Bishop Grandin is an impediment to that happening.
The last point I want to make about the strict function of crossing Kenaston has to do with the number of intersections. More intersections make walking easier, since you can move in any direction faster. It's why medieval street patterns are better for walking than grids, and why grids are better for walking than curvelinear layouts. Like I mentioned earlier, the closest intersections to Kenaston by Bridgwater Centre are 100-200m away from Kenaston. These intersections are key locations in drawing pedestrians onto the routes that cross Kenaston. And remember, we're only working with a 400m ceiling here, 200m of which are used up by the time we've gotten out of BW Centre and across Kenaston to BW Lakes or Forest. There are also only three places to cross Kenaston. These crossings are about 300m apart. That means people can live directly across Kenaston from BWCentre and still live outside of a ten minute walk to its services. Hell, many houses that back onto Kenaston are a ten minute walk in the opposite direction to even get to an intersection that will get them to Kenaston.
Back to your comparison to Main, Main has far more intersections both on the street, and in its immediate vicinity, meaning it's easier and faster to cross on foot.
My final points are more aesthetic but no less important to whether people will walk. The built environment around the street are very important to how comfortable people will feel walking along it. We all know we'd rather walk right next to a building than next to a parking lot. Here's some information from the Scots on how walkable streets work out:
http://www.gov.scot/Publications/2009/01/27140909/6