[phil235]

Originally Posted by Richard Eade

“Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics” Yes, statistics can be produced to prove anything that you want.

On the ‘42% of households in the Central and Inner Area don’t own a personal vehicle’ stat that you used; that area is made up, in a big part, by the two biggest universities that are in Ottawa. And, pulling more numbers from that Website, 48% of households earning under $30,000 per year have no vehicle. Most university students would, likely, fall into this ‘low-earner’ category. Ergo, I would certainly expect students to tilt the statistics. That is why I said that grocery stores exist along Rideau Street – because there is a high density of (more or less) captive customers.

Now for the other side of the stat: if 42% of households within the area do not own a vehicle, then 58% DO own at least one vehicle. However, I was talking about the downtown area, of course, not the area that you brought forth the statistic for. Your area extends down to Heron Road, between Prince of Wales and the Rideau River, so, again, the number is skewed in favour of non-ownership because of the student population of Carleton U. being included. I suspect that if students from the two universities were removed, the statistic would look very different.

That said, perhaps I over-stated things when I said that “almost all” living downtown have a car. I’m willing to modify my statement, with input from your ‘correction’, to ‘MOST households in downtown have access to at least one vehicle’.

As for people in Centretown/Downtown/Sandy Hill preferring to stay in their neighbourhood, I would agree with that. Most people, even suburbanites, would, likely, prefer to stay in their neighbourhood also – if they could get everything they wanted from within the area. That is not surprising. HOWEVER, it is obvious that people living in the core currently DO leave their neighbourhood for the necessities of life. For example, there is no Costco downtown for those Re residents to go to – they must drive to a suburban location to get their 48-pk of toilet paper.

If it were economically advantageous for a ‘big box’ store to open downtown, it would have happened. As long as people from that area are willing to travel to an area outside of their neighbourhood, corporations will take advantage of that and built the biggest, cheapest, ‘box’ that they can and simply have their customers travel to it.

I'm not sure that university students actually count as "households" in the census data, but I can't find anything definitive. In any event, I'm not sure why university students without cars wouldn't count as people who need to access services nearby.

As someone who lives in a core neighbourhood and doesn't go to Costco (because Costco and smaller homes don't really mix), I can assure you that lots of people do not leave the neighbourhood regularly to head to the suburbs for groceries etc., either because they can't or won't on principle (me). My non-scientific estimate would be that a large majority shop locally.

You are absolutely right that it isn't economically viable to build a big box store downtown, but land value is only part of the reason for that. Not insignificant is a tax system that encourages land-intensive development in far-flung locations, and partly due to the fact that we spend an exorbitant amount of public money building and maintaining the massive road infrastructure that is required for those stores. Change the policies that create those factors and I think that the equation changes enough to make downtown stores competitive.

In no world are we a better city because urban residents have to drive (or gulp, take transit) to the suburbs for basic needs. We should be doing everything we can to stop that from happening. The idea that everyone prefers to shop in a big box store and give up a bunch of their time to save $5.00 doesn't make sense to me. Though admittedly I am basically terrified of Costco.