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  #201  
Old Posted Oct 7, 2015, 2:54 PM
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Originally Posted by RLS_rls View Post
^That's exciting! I'll miss the classic signage.
They've promised the flashing horse will be resurrected at the new location. With centre point, aptn and now this that block has really come alive. Too bad the former bargain shop is now a dollar tree. Silly me, I thought maybe a real business would go in there
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  #202  
Old Posted Oct 7, 2015, 3:14 PM
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They've promised the flashing horse will be resurrected at the new location. With centre point, aptn and now this that block has really come alive. Too bad the former bargain shop is now a dollar tree. Silly me, I thought maybe a real business would go in there
What's wrong with Dollar Tree? As for it being a real business, it trades at NASDAQ for US$62.88, revenue of US$8.6 billion (2015) and profitted US$599 million. What real business do you want?
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  #203  
Old Posted Oct 7, 2015, 5:40 PM
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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?
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
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  #204  
Old Posted Oct 7, 2015, 5:42 PM
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What's wrong with Dollar Tree?
It doesn't fit with this city's dream of a racially purified downtown.
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  #205  
Old Posted Oct 7, 2015, 6:02 PM
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It doesn't fit with this city's dream of a racially purified downtown.
Haha, that's about what it boils down to.

Remember folks, getting rid of dollar stores won't result in an influx of free spending yuppies.
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  #206  
Old Posted Oct 7, 2015, 6:23 PM
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Out of curiosity I did some walkscore for some of the areas we talked about above.

37 Chesterfield ave, near St. Vital mall, came up with a respectable 79. There are a lot of things within walking distance that aren't even across Bishop Grandin.

88 Arthur st, near Main in the Exchange scores an amazing 97. Remember the importance of having lots of intersections.

100 Bellflower, which backs onto Kenaston in Bridgwater Lakes scores 0. Fucking 0. Bridgwater will never be urban. And remember who to thank next time you're stuck in traffic on Kenaston or Bishop (Greg Sellinger) for putting all these people on the road.
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  #207  
Old Posted Oct 7, 2015, 6:38 PM
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They forgot the "e" too.
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  #208  
Old Posted Oct 7, 2015, 6:48 PM
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That was altogether way too much to rebut without taking a week off of work, but I don't really think it's that necessary anyway. The urbanist line about 'free' is tired. It doesn't apply and it ruins what's otherwise an argument made up of decent points.

The city sees huge amounts of taxation from the developments that abut Kenaston. Bridgwater (all four of them eventually), Lindenwoods, Whyte Ridge, Linden Ridge (mostly), and I suppose Southpointe, Richmond West, Ft. Richmond, and a lot of South St. Vital as well; all of these places have property values that outstrip the city's average by quite a bit. They are all paying into the taxation kitty at that clip. And leaving aside the rare instance of a cul-de-sac lots, those lots are taxed as a percentage of frontage and value. So when a home in Bridgewater - one you'd deem efficient comparatively - sits on a 40' lot and generates a $7k+ annual tax bill, it leaves itself more than twice as efficient as a home in, say, the West End that sits on a 33' lot and is worth less than half. Which is why I remarked the other day that these suburbs are becoming far more efficient than they have in the past. It's not uncommon to find 25' and 30' lots anymore with homes that are worth ~$375K. And that's a function of costs, not the least of which are affected by taxation. This argument about free is simply not true. You have to ask yourself why these places keep values at where they do. If nobody wanted this - if they were so frustrated by their lives in cars and much preferred to walk and ride their bike - we wouldn't see sustained and climbing values of single family homes in the suburbs, the one thing that keeps the taxes where they are.

And I'm not including every part of every suburb in my argument because it doesn't apply. A lot of the suburbs built in the 80s and 90s were built with huge lots in inefficient ways because you couldn't give the land way. But as a consequence, the infrastructure in the area was the shits. There were no services, the roads network was terrible, and people still flocked to these areas. Now that the areas have seen investment and the taxation base has increased to reflect that, there's commercial development and the infrastructure to support it. And a 50' or 60' lot is now sitting with a home in the $500-600k range.

But I could just as easily rail on about most of the inner city that has depressed real estate prices, huge vacancies, and dilapidated old stock that keeps the areas from returning too much of value where the city is concerned. The areas that have the urban design you speak of - while they don't need large arterials to access - don't have anybody interested in accessing them anyway. One could just as easily say that the inner city is subsidized by virtue of a requirement for more emergency services, or slumlords who drag down the value of entire blocks with total impunity, or just a generalized inefficient tax base. And the 'subsidy' (term used extremely loosely) might not be entirely true given that we haven't seen any real growth in those areas mitigating the need to spend money by upgrading services, but I wouldn't make an argument indicating prosperity by showing how little follow-on investment something requires.

Whatever it is, and CityLab can say what it wants, urban design and the affect on people's habits here are just not aligned in any way. At least not where it comes to actually living and not just partying. The lion's share of lots in the City of Winnipeg are 40' and up. Outside of a few areas, it's extremely unusual to find lots below that. And if we were having this discussion 70 years ago, we'd be talking about how detrimental it is to the city that they're going to pave Pembina past Jubilee because people don't need 50' or 60' lots and the city can't sustain them and why can't they live on a 25' in Crescentwood? So, again, nothing is new. If this city is in fact growing, it's not unrealistic or completely unsustainable to assume that land within the city limits is going to be developed. If people want a primarily urban landscape where they can walk to their services and pay $2800/year in property taxes on their 25' lot or their condo, they can have that; that world exists here too. But if they decide they want that 'free lunch', it's going to cost them 2.5 times every single year for that right and they can complain about a bus service few of them ever intend to use.
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  #209  
Old Posted Oct 7, 2015, 6:52 PM
Simplicity Simplicity is offline
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Out of curiosity I did some walkscore for some of the areas we talked about above.

37 Chesterfield ave, near St. Vital mall, came up with a respectable 79. There are a lot of things within walking distance that aren't even across Bishop Grandin.

88 Arthur st, near Main in the Exchange scores an amazing 97. Remember the importance of having lots of intersections.

100 Bellflower, which backs onto Kenaston in Bridgwater Lakes scores 0. Fucking 0. Bridgwater will never be urban. And remember who to thank next time you're stuck in traffic on Kenaston or Bishop (Greg Sellinger) for putting all these people on the road.
I never said it would be - I said it could be if that's what people want. It helps to remember it's not complete yet either.

But it was made to sound urban so that the city could get it through planning so that people who never intended to live there could complain a little less about things that won't be their problem. If somebody's worried about traffic in the area from the people who live there, I think we know where the entitlement lies. And if people cared about a walkscore, presumably a house that scores a 0 would have no value. As such, it's likely worth significantly more than the house on Chesterfield on a per square foot basis.
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  #210  
Old Posted Oct 7, 2015, 6:59 PM
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I wonder how long it'll take people to notice that this is still the true north square thread?
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  #211  
Old Posted Oct 7, 2015, 7:20 PM
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^^Hahaha. You're right.
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  #212  
Old Posted Oct 7, 2015, 7:43 PM
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For all the people hating on Dollar Tree, keep in mind if you want downtown to be more livable like the suburbs that means highly accessible Giant Tiger, Dollarama and Dollar Tree stores just like ever other residential area in the city. If anything Dollar Tree coming downtown should be viewed as a hugely positive thing...
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  #213  
Old Posted Oct 7, 2015, 7:55 PM
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That was altogether way too much to rebut without taking a week off of work, but I don't really think it's that necessary anyway. The urbanist line about 'free' is tired. It doesn't apply and it ruins what's otherwise an argument made up of decent points.

The city sees huge amounts of taxation from the developments that abut Kenaston. Bridgwater (all four of them eventually), Lindenwoods, Whyte Ridge, Linden Ridge (mostly), and I suppose Southpointe, Richmond West, Ft. Richmond, and a lot of South St. Vital as well; all of these places have property values that outstrip the city's average by quite a bit. They are all paying into the taxation kitty at that clip. And leaving aside the rare instance of a cul-de-sac lots, those lots are taxed as a percentage of frontage and value. So when a home in Bridgewater - one you'd deem efficient comparatively - sits on a 40' lot and generates a $7k+ annual tax bill, it leaves itself more than twice as efficient as a home in, say, the West End that sits on a 33' lot and is worth less than half. Which is why I remarked the other day that these suburbs are becoming far more efficient than they have in the past. It's not uncommon to find 25' and 30' lots anymore with homes that are worth ~$375K. And that's a function of costs, not the least of which are affected by taxation. This argument about free is simply not true. You have to ask yourself why these places keep values at where they do. If nobody wanted this - if they were so frustrated by their lives in cars and much preferred to walk and ride their bike - we wouldn't see sustained and climbing values of single family homes in the suburbs, the one thing that keeps the taxes where they are.

And I'm not including every part of every suburb in my argument because it doesn't apply. A lot of the suburbs built in the 80s and 90s were built with huge lots in inefficient ways because you couldn't give the land way. But as a consequence, the infrastructure in the area was the shits. There were no services, the roads network was terrible, and people still flocked to these areas. Now that the areas have seen investment and the taxation base has increased to reflect that, there's commercial development and the infrastructure to support it. And a 50' or 60' lot is now sitting with a home in the $500-600k range.

But I could just as easily rail on about most of the inner city that has depressed real estate prices, huge vacancies, and dilapidated old stock that keeps the areas from returning too much of value where the city is concerned. The areas that have the urban design you speak of - while they don't need large arterials to access - don't have anybody interested in accessing them anyway. One could just as easily say that the inner city is subsidized by virtue of a requirement for more emergency services, or slumlords who drag down the value of entire blocks with total impunity, or just a generalized inefficient tax base. And the 'subsidy' (term used extremely loosely) might not be entirely true given that we haven't seen any real growth in those areas mitigating the need to spend money by upgrading services, but I wouldn't make an argument indicating prosperity by showing how little follow-on investment something requires.

Whatever it is, and CityLab can say what it wants, urban design and the affect on people's habits here are just not aligned in any way. At least not where it comes to actually living and not just partying. The lion's share of lots in the City of Winnipeg are 40' and up. Outside of a few areas, it's extremely unusual to find lots below that. And if we were having this discussion 70 years ago, we'd be talking about how detrimental it is to the city that they're going to pave Pembina past Jubilee because people don't need 50' or 60' lots and the city can't sustain them and why can't they live on a 25' in Crescentwood? So, again, nothing is new. If this city is in fact growing, it's not unrealistic or completely unsustainable to assume that land within the city limits is going to be developed. If people want a primarily urban landscape where they can walk to their services and pay $2800/year in property taxes on their 25' lot or their condo, they can have that; that world exists here too. But if they decide they want that 'free lunch', it's going to cost them 2.5 times every single year for that right and they can complain about a bus service few of them ever intend to use.

I frankly don't give a shit about who's subsidizing who. That's not material to my point and your argument to that affect is a red herring.

This is a simple argument from economics: Roads are a common good with no price. That leads to overuse and congestion. If you can't accept that then clearly we've been wasting our time with regulations on fisheries, forestry, and hunting.

You argue that what people want is born in a vacuum, that it's axiomatic, and that it's somehow sacred. This is the same argument people make when they call congestion pricing and the like social-engineering, rather than the market functioning.

Yet you also argue that we ought to encourage short car trips. But which is it--are we just giving people what they want, or are we encouraging them to take on a certain lifestyle?

As for your claim about entitlement, it's a point of consensus around here that we need a good road system to move goods. People taking short trips to Starbucks and getting in the way of goods movement. If their neighborhood had been built in such a way they could just walk to Starbucks, their drain on what we all agree is an important function of roads wouldn't happen.
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  #214  
Old Posted Oct 7, 2015, 7:58 PM
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For all the people hating on Dollar Tree, keep in mind if you want downtown to be more livable like the suburbs that means highly accessible Giant Tiger, Dollarama and Dollar Tree stores just like ever other residential area in the city. If anything Dollar Tree coming downtown should be viewed as a hugely positive thing...
I'm sure CentreVenture has a plan to buy that building and the dollarama across the street for $50 million each so they can sell them for 5 to some made up parkade developer.
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Old Posted Oct 7, 2015, 8:32 PM
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With apologies to Optimus and BigG let's leave you with some photos of the (could be) Urban Utopia of BridgeWater...

Bridgwater Town Centre

cushwakeretail.com

Bridgwater Forest | live work play

now.winnipeg.ca


hopewelldevelopmentcorporation.com/
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  #216  
Old Posted Oct 7, 2015, 9:02 PM
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They do have quite the fountain out there. In the bottom left corner of the first picture. Fancy LED lighting and all.
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  #217  
Old Posted Oct 7, 2015, 9:05 PM
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I frankly don't give a shit about who's subsidizing who. That's not material to my point and your argument to that affect is a red herring.

This is a simple argument from economics: Roads are a common good with no price. That leads to overuse and congestion. If you can't accept that then clearly we've been wasting our time with regulations on fisheries, forestry, and hunting.

You argue that what people want is born in a vacuum, that it's axiomatic, and that it's somehow sacred. This is the same argument people make when they call congestion pricing and the like social-engineering, rather than the market functioning.

Yet you also argue that we ought to encourage short car trips. But which is it--are we just giving people what they want, or are we encouraging them to take on a certain lifestyle?

As for your claim about entitlement, it's a point of consensus around here that we need a good road system to move goods. People taking short trips to Starbucks and getting in the way of goods movement. If their neighborhood had been built in such a way they could just walk to Starbucks, their drain on what we all agree is an important function of roads wouldn't happen.
If subsidy isn't the point, then what is? Where is the problem here and how has it so direly manifested? Should the citizen who pays their property taxes be less entitled to their transportation network so they can pad the margins of the trucking company who's only 'moving goods'? Should somebody living in a small condo in the inner city be entitled to use the road network once per week? because they paid 1/6 of the property taxes as somebody living in River Park South? What kind of arguments are these?

The road system is not a 'free good'. It has a price. It's paid for by taxes stretching all the way from property taxes to provincial and federal income taxes and consumption taxes. It's paid for by nearly everybody. What you probably mean to say is that it has no variable component, but even that's not true given that taxation can be adjusted. I have no idea what you might call 'overuse' given that there are no roads in this city that are absolutely impassable at all times of the day and where traffic of any material nature is confined to more than an hour or so twice a day, so you're getting carried away with the point.

These arguments are fine if you want to speak strictly hypothetically. For one, you aren't going to walk back car culture at this stage of the game in winter cities, so let's dismiss that out of hand. But secondly, think of the logistics of this if productivity is so important. For starters, if you set up tolls, you'll end up with the collective action problem of people intentionally avoiding them putting more pressure on roads not designed for that traffic. But more importantly, how can anybody possible administer a user fee for a road system in any way other than what they're already done which is institute a consumption tax (the gas tax)?

The leftist economist at this point would tell you that you educate people. The right-leaning economist will tell you that people do whatever is most convenient and that you're wasting your time. I would take my cues from history and that tells me your ideas, while having merit, are theoretically a waste of your time and mine.
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  #218  
Old Posted Oct 8, 2015, 2:34 AM
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Biguc, while I don't disagree with some of your points, a quick sidenote: 400m is a 5 minute walk, not 10 minutes.

Here's a video posted in one of these threads a while back, of what Bridgwater Centre could be.

Video Link


I doubt it will develop exactly like this for lots of reasons (market demand, economics, retail trends, etc.). However, it's tough to argue that the idea behind it isn't a good first step. I mean, I'm not sure if you've ever been to Bridgwater (I doubt many have by the way they talk about it), but it's miles ahead of our 80s suburbs. I mean, this isn't Royalwood. It's a lot denser than anything we've seen in probably 50 years (in terms of lot sizes, patterns, and inclusion of pockets of 4-storey condos and townhouses) - density that may surprisingly come close to some of the oft-cited "inner-suburbs" lauded here. There are backlanes along some streets, and in many ways, it's the fused-grid that planners love. Connectivity in the grid isn't an issue, because there are tonnes of egresses that connect bays/streets - this isn't the cliche'd Florida example where a kid needs to drive 15 miles to his friend's cul-de-sac which he backs onto. Lots of pathways and cycling trails too.

As for the Centre shown in the video, isn't this what we're striving for in our new communities? Built to the street, higher density, mixed-use? It's basically as close as we can get to Osborne without building a community using 1900s standards.
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  #219  
Old Posted Oct 8, 2015, 2:37 AM
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I'm sure CentreVenture has a plan to buy that building and the dollarama across the street for $50 million each so they can sell them for 5 to some made up parkade developer.
LOL. Missed this before...
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  #220  
Old Posted Oct 9, 2015, 2:13 AM
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Came in to work for 21:00 tonight (Oct 8) and I see that there are Subteranian Foundation trucks doing test drilling in the parking lot.
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