Quote:
Originally Posted by swimmer_spe
I am not suggesting towers out there. I am suggesting not having miles and miles of McMansion sprawl.
If low rises, townhomes and other types of non SFH were built and were lower than in the city, and the cost of commuting by bus, and eventually rail total was lower than living in the city, that would push people there. That is why places around Toronto grew the way they did.
Lets take Smiths Falls and Carleton Place. They are at about the same population Ajax and Whitby were when GO started up. I would suggest working with those places to avoid the horrible sprawl, but still giving them a way to grow and a way to stay vibrant.
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I'm honestly confused as to your post.
"I don't want sprawl, but I want mass transit to small places very far away"
That is literally the definition of encouraging sprawl, except sprawl 2.0, the exurb version.
These little towns ringed around Ottawa aren't some underused Northern towns that dropped 1/3 of their population and are just crying for more people as they continue to decline. They're reasonably stable population-wise. People who move there are done with the city, because one would be hard-pressed to move to such a location otherwise.
I'm speculating you want rural high-density (?), but I'm curious what exactly that looks like. It's not towers, fine, and it's not low-density SFH. So, what's the vision? How does the Ottawa region version of a better Ajax work? More to the point, does Ottawa even need an Ajax-like spillover in the next 50 years? (My answer: It doesn't, because the exponential growth of the GTA over the last 70 years isn't going to happen in Ottawa where the city just broke a million people fairly recently)
And why does that vision work somewhere like Smiths Falls instead of maybe just filling in the Greenbelt of Pointless actually around the city itself? Bonus for that plan: not much transit infrastructure required, because one can lean on existing city transit and services!