Quote:
Originally Posted by EdwardTH
Everyone says this but there's really not much residential along Pembina. From Jubilee to McGillivray is entirely parking and low-rise retail, there's one single, small 3-storey apartment building on that stretch. Mcgillivray to Crescent/Chevrier there's a whole 6 more residential buildings, all 3-4 storeys max. The only residential density on Pembina is clustered between Chevrier and Plaza drive, where the dogleg comes back within a few hundred metres of Pembina anyway. The dogleg route really doesn't miss much, maybe 200 apartment units. One single TOD tower could make up for that
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Yeah I agree with this.
It's also all about cost-benefit ratios.
Consider the context of Winnipeg. We are a city that has no problem ponying up $1000 a month to pay for that brand new Ford F-150, Acura MDX, or BMW 3 Series, but the moment you ask Winnipeggers to pay an additional $100 a year in taxes to fund things like capital projects, they act like you are trying to steal their firstborn child.
This city values single-occupant vehicles almost as much as life itself, and so we have a real problem trying to fund a proper transit system due to both opposition to tax increases to fund projects and low transit ridership to begin with. As a result, the cheapest "rapid" transit options are selected, which meant the dogleg route. To expropriate properties along or near Pembina so that transit could be closer to that corridor would have only increased ridership marginally in the short run and would have been significantly more expensive.
In the long run, it would be my guess that the induced additional ridership from now having a "rapid transit" system will be pretty much the same, regardless of what route was chosen for the second phase. While Pembina may have more people living on it right now, the greenfield along the dogleg route provides new opportunities for TOD.