[omro]

Sorry, I didn't mean to start an argument about car parks, as there are a lot more suggestions in the interview than just parking. I mistakenly thought that there was a car park opposite and along from the Hunter GO which belonged to it. There is one nearby, looking at Google Earth, but it was a little further along than my memory had it. Only mentioned it because I thought that if this were turned into underground or multistorey parking then the ground level land could be used for buses as has been suggested elsewhere. However I was mistaken about the land around the site. There does seem to be a big car park behing the GO station though, whether that's remotely connected or not, I wouldn't know.

That said a lot of the car parks on King Street in the Downtown area really should be either turned into underground parking or removed and merged into multistorey parking at the periphery that would reduce the number of cars stationary in the Downtown area. In a lot of British cities the downtown areas have become pedestrianised with parking on the periphery to encourage shoppers, in effect turning the downtown into a large open air Mall. In a lot of places this has worked. Old flat level car parks were then either paved over to create a square with seating and shubbery, to add a touch of green, or were built over with more shops or turned into open air markets for fruit and veg (not many towns have the benefit of Hamilton's Farmer's Market). I'm not saying that you should necessarily pedestrianise Hamilton's Downtown, but the multistorey parking or preferably underground parking on the periphery to reduce the number of cars taking up space Downtown would certainly be a benefit.

Has Hamilton's local government actually formed any bodies that address or even look into development issues such as have been mentioned by Glen Murray and many people on this board in various other threads? Most cities here in the UK have some form of Development Committee, though their results vary. Is there actually some form of public forum where people can say to the city, "we'd like this done" as opposed to them saying, "we've had a great idea" which no one else actually thinks is and the people left to live with that decision for years later.