Downtown Kitchener is getting some life to it, and it will be interesting to see what the new LRT adds to it, but it's still comparatively barren and unattractive as an urban destination. You know the old saying, "people get the governments they deserve?" I think you can paraphrase it for downtowns and urban amenities, too. North America's postwar suburban push hit KW particularly hard in terms of malaise and the utter lack of interest in doing anything other than hopping in a car to go somewhere with lots of parking.
KW is very Calgary-ish in terms of the built environment surrounding downtown. It is not Montreal, not by a long shot. The new LRT goes through downtown, but it is mainly servicing residential neighbourhoods that look like this:
https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.44334...7i13312!8i6656
Though there are some interesting new condo developments that are going up by the LRT line.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
Stratford impressed me for the beauty of the town but the kids my age there seemed very trashy - SHH would have called them skeets.
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I honestly don't know if there's any skeet shooting around here, but the redneck quotient here is very high, so it wouldn't surprise me. I've never heard anything about that, though.
But Stratford really is quite backwoods in many ways. And the rural kids coming here for high school tend to make it feel downright Appalachian. At the end of the school year they have an informal event called "Tractor Day," where the kids from the farms drive their tractors to school, filling up the parking lot for everyone to see and admire. They also careen all over town in their jacked up pickup trucks with massive wheels, and park at one end of the lake near the Festival Theatre to hang out, as kids do.
I almost got ran over by one once. The asshole driver had stopped in the middle of the street to talk to his oncoming asshole friend, also in a truck with six-foot-high wheels. I rode my bike onto the sidewalk to pass, and just at the moment I was about to regain the street in front of the asshole, said asshole finished his conversation and jammed on the gas to jackrabbit forward. I was literally millimetres from getting either flattened or hammered.
I raced down to their hangout after him and berated them as a group, as I couldn't tell who was who. Me, a somewhat portly middle-aged man in a garish cycling kit. They listened in silence, and didn't say anything. Which, I think, distinguishes Canadian rednecks from American ones, as I have it on good authority that cyclists accosted by assholes in pseudo-monster trucks in the U.S. cannot express any displeasure toward said assholes without being physically assaulted or threatened with firearms.
In short: in my estimation, 99% of the assholes who drive jacked up pickup trucks with massive tires are complete assholes. Stratford's got a lot of them.