[ericmacm]

I'm not too familiar with Sarnia like I am with the other major cities of southwestern Ontario, but I've been up a few times and I quite like what I saw. I'm glad to hear that it's heading back on track and experiencing some form of growth again. Aside from London, the rest of southwestern Ontario has had a pretty rough go lately, and it's good to see some good things finally happening in the region.

I suspect that Sarnia will have no problem reaching 100,000+ over the decade. The fact that a significant amount of new rentals are being proposed is a good sign. As the other forumers have said, a university for Sarnia is a must in order to help retain the population and reduce the amount of young people that move away. I believe that Sarnia will one day get a satellite campus of Western or UWindsor, with the former of the two being most likely, considering the presence of the Western Sarnia-Lambton Research Park, which indicates that Western is already putting some degree of thought into this.

I would also like to see a more direct road connection between Chatham and Sarnia start to take shape, assuming demand eventually warrants such a thing. Some parts of HWY 40 are already built up well enough, but it would be neat to see some kind of bypass system planned for Chatham and Wallaceburg. There is a really wide protected ROW along HWY 40 from Sarnia to Wallaceburg, so some twinning and eventual upgrades to a more defined freeway aren't out of the cards. Either way, it would be nice to have, Sarnia is relatively isolated as a spur in the provincial highway network. A triangular freeway connection between London, Chatham, and Sarnia could help this somewhat.

I'd like to see the downtown eventually expand, and the city boundaries sprawl out a healthy amount. I'd prefer to see some more inspired towers that interact with the streetscape better, but this will come in time. I hope that a "backbone" starts to emerge on either Wellington St or London Rd. It'll be hard to work around the scars of industrial lands, so I suspect the city will sprawl mostly eastward along the 402. I doubt there will be any significant non-industrial expansion below HWY 25.