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Posted Feb 2, 2008, 1:11 AM
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National Capital Region
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Join Date: Nov 2005
Location: Eastern Ontario
Posts: 9,243
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Quote:
PERSPECTIVES
Yikes!; Rethinking the Hespeler Road strip - It can be done, planners say
KEVIN SWAYZE
RECORD STAFF
2958 words
19 February 2005
Kitchener-Waterloo Record
Final
P1
English
Copyright (c) 2005 Kitchener-Waterloo Record.
CAMBRIDGE
Everyone seems to have a reason to complain about Hespeler Road. It's a traffic mess with too many stoplights. It's an ugly place where pedestrians must watch their backs. It's an embarrassing example of automobile-centric planning that paints the city as a suburban backwater.
Some local visionaries, however, hope to transform this urban wasteland to an urbane centre that will be home to thousands of people. Hespeler Road could be a vibrant neighbourhood, they say.
Some day.
On desks in the planning departments of the City of Cambridge and Region of Waterloo, the first steps to remake Hespeler Road are being sketched out. Whether the dreams become a reality will depend on political will, getting changes to provincial planning rules and convincing businesses and land owners to put up money to make it happen.
"I think it's a great idea we do something. In my opinion, it's become a bit of a blight," says Paul Spencer, president of the Cambridge Chamber of Commerce.
"It's really a gateway to the city . . . you're intimidated with a sear of bright lights, confusing signs that go on forever. Just in general, I think it's an eyesore."
Cambridge council has started its five-year review of the city's official plan. Included in the process is something new: the beautification and reurbanization of Hespeler Road.
At Waterloo Region's administration centre in Kitchener, planners see Hespeler Road as a key part of a vision for growth across the region.
Today's sea of stores and sterile parking lots could be transformed by 2040 with homes for tens of thousands of people and with more shopping and entertainment options than exist today. It could all be supported by a light rail transit line down the middle of the road.
Hespeler Road is administered and maintained by the regional municipality, but Cambridge Mayor Doug Craig is pushing a co-operative city-region vision. The city controls land uses along the six-lane road, but its development rules must dovetail with the region's plans.
"I want it to be the prototype for the rest of the region," Craig says.
Regional planning commissioner Larry Kotseff shares Craig's optimism that Hespeler Road could be much more than it is today.
Starting points for discussion of Hespeler Road's future -- and some computer-generated images showing the possibilities -- should be ready by spring, so they can be considered at public meetings as the Cambridge official plan is reviewed over the next 18 months.
Even as Craig promotes the future of Hespeler Road, he is careful to say its transformation won't be at the expense of the city's historic core areas, which have long fretted over the growing commercial dominance the Highway 24 strip.
The Galt, Preston and Hespeler downtowns have historic ambiance that should be envied by developers along the strip, Craig says.
"The core areas offer that sense of stability and longevity. I think Hespeler Road will achieve that some day," he says. "This is not something to fear.
It's something to embrace because it's only going to make property values higher and make the (Hespeler Road) area more of a magnet for the entire area."
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Cambridge is home to a gleaming new touchstone of community design. The University of Waterloo School of Architecture opened last fall in a converted textile factory building beside the Grand River in historic old Galt .
But many visitors have to endure Hespeler Road to get there.
"We have this extraordinary environment of a heritage building, yet we're surrounded by sprawl city," says Rick Haldenby, director of the school.
"People have never failed to mention the ugliness of Hespeler Road."
Some colleagues from Toronto who regularly visit the architecture school spurn the strip, Haldenby says.
Instead of exiting Highway 401 at Hespeler Road, they drive two interchanges west to exit at Homer Watson Boulevard. From there, they take Fountain Street to Blair Road and enter Galt by the back door.
Haldenby says the school is ready to help eliminate the embarrassing welcome that most visitors to Cambridge endure.
"We're interested in it and quite self-interested in it."
*
It was easy to be an urban planner in Ontario 15 years ago.
People were having enough babies to keep the population growth rate climbing. Everyone wanted to live in single family homes in subdivisions at the edge of town.
The only challenge was to keep building enough schools and arenas to serve the growing tax base.
Not any more.
Today, the population is aging, the birth rate is dropping, and the cost of repairs to the hundreds of kilometres of roads and pipes built over the last four decades has become a ticking time bomb for taxpayers.
Then there are the proposals at Queen's Park to tighten planning rules, to reign in suburban development sprawl and to encourage denser development and redevelopment. There is talk of cities getting powers they never had before to push public transit over cars.
"We can't plan like we did before. Where that leads as we're looking forward . . . it's a guess. Hold on," says Kevin Eby, a community planning director for the Region of Waterloo.
All of the competing demographic and planning issues have planners trying to make better use of the wasted space in suburban developments.
"There's a huge number of Hespeler Roads waiting to occur," Eby says.
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Ken Hoyle hates Hespeler Road.
"It's one of the ugliest roads in southern Ontario," he says. "The more I drive it, the more I find it offensive."
A landscape planner, Hoyle came to Cambridge and opened an office downtown in 1996. He has long dreamed of ways to make better use of all the land that's wasted on parking and strip plazas, land uses that choke traffic.
Yet instead of seeing local governments take control, he sees opportunities lost.
If Hoyle had his way, Hespeler Road would be transformed into a people-oriented district over the next 30 years. It would be a place to live, work and play, a place with the amenities of a downtown, a place connected to expansive greenspace and a place with rapid public transit.
Hoyle would dearly like to have the job of designing an overall plan to reinvent Hespeler Road. Nobody, however, has put that job out for tender.
"It's not going to get better. It's going to get worse," he says.
He points to Waterloo Region's proposal to widen Hespeler Road from four lanes to six this summer between Dunbar Road and Munch Avenue.
That's the last thing Hespeler Road needs, Hoyle says. All it will do is encourage more vehicles in the area, causing more congestion, he says.
"The engineers would argue they're making it better. For what?"
Hoyle voiced his complaint about the widening project last month. The region subsequently budgeted $10,000 for extra design work to include trees and landscaping. The project is so far along that little more can be done to improve it before constructions starts in May, says Eby, the regional planner.
Hoyle scoffs at the window dressing. Instead of spending $3.1 million on more asphalt, the project should be scrapped and the money spent finding ways to get traffic moving north toward Highway 401, he says.
Ripping out some stoplights and closing mall driveways would be a good start and would allow the road to move vehicles as it should, he says. Then synchronize the remaining stoplights to give traffic a green wave.
In response, Egerton Heath, the region's traffic systems supervisor, says having fewer stoplights might well improve traffic flow, but there's no simple solution to so busy a road.
All 12 stoplights between Pinebush Road and the Delta intersection are there because traffic flows show they're needed, Heath says. Then there's the reality that the Pinebush and Delta intersections act as taps to let Hespeler Road traffic in and out of the commercial strip.
It takes more than two and a half minutes to give all traffic at the Pinebush or Delta intersections a green light. That's far more than is needed for the intersections between them.
So Heath sets those signals to work together to give motorists as many green lights in a row as the time of day allows.
"We do get compliments about (traffic) progression on Hespeler Road. We also get complaints," Heath says.
In Hoyle's view, local traffic should be pushed into connected parking lots or a service road system owned and operated by developers. That would leave Hespeler Road to function as the arterial road it is, he says.
That concept was pushed by the region in the 1980s, but municipalities don't have the power to force that kind of change on landowners. So today, a few parking lots are linked and motorists fume in traffic jams.
At no time does Hoyle suggest public money be spent to buy properties.
There's no need for that, he said, if public money is spent correctly inside the road allowance and if land-use rules are restructured to reward the right kind of intensive development.
With rapid transit and the addition of residential units to provide the customers, there would be much more money for developers to make along Hespeler Road, Hoyle says.
"You provide the carrot. It would be a financial incentive."
After 30 years of concerns about Hespeler Road killing the Preston, Hespeler and Galt downtowns, Hoyle says, transformation of the Hespeler Road strip can't come soon enough.
Provincial planning rules are about to curtail subdivision developments at the city's edge.
When that happens, developers will look for opportunities in areas where housing is already allowed. Right now, that's in the historic cores, says Hoyle, a member of Cambridge's heritage advisory committee.
So unless residential growth is encouraged along Hespeler Road, he believes, grand old buildings in the cores will start to come down within five years to make way for big projects to satisfy demand for apartments.
*
There are many ways in which Hespeler Road could be transformed, says Alain Pinard, Cambridge's director of policy planning. The most important piece of the puzzle, he says, is whether light rail transit goes down the road.
With rapid transit, Hespeler Road could support more housing and commercial intensification than it could without it.
"You don't want to go in with a certain design that you have to tear out later, when the LRT comes through," Pinard says.
A $2-million study to determine the best kind of rapid transit for Waterloo Region will get underway this year. Half of the cost of the study will be covered by Queen's Park.
The study will assess the best type of vehicle and best route for a rapid transit line that would run from Conestoga Mall in Waterloo to the Ainslie Street bus terminal in Cambridge. Until details are confirmed, Pinard says, it's premature to plan for a train to come down Hespeler Road.
Pinard, who is in charge of the Cambridge official plan review, says he agrees with Hoyle that there are huge opportunities for redevelopment of Hespeler Road.
For Pinard, the vision process is one of a series of steps in the official plan review.
Hespeler Road will be considered alongside other issues including heritage protection, scenic roads and redevelopment of contaminated industrial sites.
"The (official plan) is not a hammer type of document. We try to steer development to look certain ways, certainly design elements," Pinard says.
"You really need to know what the road is going to look like over time . . . it's not going to be easy."
*
Scott Snively looks out the front window of his A&W Restaurant on Hespeler Road and doesn't mind what he sees.
It may not be beautiful, but all that traffic streaming by is what pays the bills.
"I love the idea" of sprucing up the six-lane road to make traffic move better and look more appealing, he says.
"I think anything that puts a focus on what's nice to look at representing the city is fantastic."
Talk of encouraging housing units, however, raises questions in his mind. Nor is he warm to the idea of more planning rules.
Like other business owners, it's the traffic that convinced Snively to invest on the strip. His two-year-old drive-in has a 30-year lease. He worries what might happen if the landscape changes while he's locked in.
"We have long-term leases. When you look at property, you don't want to make a long-term commitment and plans and lease for five years."
Mayor Doug Craig wants to involve business and property owners in the transformation of Hespeler Road. Sometime soon he wants to pitch a new vision for the road and to suggest the business interests form an association that becomes part of the process.
Snively likes the idea of a meeting with the city.
"Any time you have people from council and businesses working together is fabulous."
Coun. Karl Kiefer likes the direction Craig is pushing for Hespeler Road, which forms the eastern boundary of his Preston ward. He says any redevelopment plan must include safety improvements for pedestrians and traffic.
"How far can we go with beautification? At what cost?"
Kiefer was first elected to council in 1991, at a time when the city was trying to bring more stores to Hespeler Road. He is unsure now if there's political will around the council table to transform Hespeler Road to something that brings pride to the city, but he feels it must happen.
"You can't not look at Hespeler Road. It's an important part of the city. It's certainly the core."
Karl Innanen, vice-president of the Colliers International real estate office in Kitchener, says he is "intrigued" by the idea of transforming Hespeler Road into a residential-commercial district.
"It's really going to take leadership and foresight. I think people are really going to have to be shown the way," the Cambridge resident says.
Governments may have to offer incentives to encourage the first developer or landowner to take the risk and build something different along Hespeler Road, he says.
"This business is a sheep business. Until someone sees somebody else do something, nobody is going to move."
HESPELER ROAD BY THE NUMBERS
1827 -- Year that Absalom Shade won a contract to build a dirt road linking Galt to Hespeler and the new settlement of Guelph.
2 - Number of lanes on Hespeler Road until the 1960s.
6 -- Hespeler Road lanes today from Pinebush Road to Dunbar Road.
12 - Number of stoplights on Hespeler Road from Pinebush Road to the Delta intersection.
180,000 - Square footage of the John Galt Centre (now Cambridge Centre)
on Hespeler Road when it opened in 1973.
2.6 million - Estimated square footage of retail space on Hespeler Road today.
56,000 - Number of vehicles that daily use the Hespeler Road intersection at Pinebush. It's Waterloo Region's busiest corner.
Source: City of Cambridge and Region of Waterloo
kswayze@therecord.com
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