Quote:
Originally Posted by TheRitsman
I'm referring to the grass patch in the way platinum does not interact with the street. This development looks like it belongs in the suburbs somewhere, not in the urban core kitty corner to a development with against the sidewalk commercial. This reminds my of the old apartment blocks surrounded by useless grass that reduce walkability, and perform no park function except to collect garbage. That corner is ugly af as it's designed currently.
To be fair, I won't blame Darko as he seems to give negative shits about design, usability, modal share or walkability. The city shouldn't have allowed this type of design. Imagine they demanded the same thing of Platinum across the street.
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I agree with you that it's totally ugly and backwards planning. But the reality is - there isn't a way around it because the City wants even wider roads here, and that's the causation of those awful grass setbacks.
Here is a link to the
City's road widening document.
Let's look at the King Street West road widening (p4):
The City's policies require future road right-of-way to be 26.213 meters.
What is the current width of the right-of-way here? According to Google Earth, 18.1 meters:
And let's look at the Queen Street road widening (p7):
Again, the City's policies require future road right-of-way to be 26.213 meters.
And the current width of Queen Street here, according to Google Earth, is 12.2 meters:
So, it's not so much the City shouldn't have allowed it, it's in reality more so the City should not have demanded it. I am sure if these harebrained road widenings were not required, Vranich would've pushed his buildings out to the sidewalk so he could use the space as efficiently (and profitably) as possible. Of course, this would not have changed his indifference to budget architecture, but that's another issue for another day.
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