A transit-friendly place to live
Suburb designed to make personal vehicles obsolete
BY GORDON KENT, EDMONTON JOURNALJUNE 17, 2009 8:41 AMBE THE FIRST TO POST A COMMENT
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The LRT at the new McKernan and South Campus LRT stations.
Photograph by: Ed Kaiser, Edmonton Journal
Planning is underway for Edmonton's first major suburban transit-oriented development aimed at mixing homes, offices and shops.
The Heritage Valley Town Centre is expected to include two high schools, a recreation centre, an LRT station and a main street with small shops to serve the 100,000 people who will eventually live southwest of Anthony Henday Drive and Gateway Boulevard, senior city planner Tim Brockelsby said Tuesday.
To reduce the need for private vehicles, the centre will feature an LRT station when the line is extended south of 23rd Avenue, with many residents possibly working in nearby businesses or the post-secondary campuses and hospital under discussion for provincial farmland now used by the University of Alberta, Brockelsby said.
"That's not to suggest everyone will work there and live there...but the option is there," he said. "A lot of our suburban development is auto-oriented ... There's a shift to making communities more self-sustaining. Part of it relates to having more localized activity, the whole walkable notion."
But this "urban" feel requires higher numbers of people than were traditionally found in suburbia's big lots and single-family homes --the 116-hectare town centre near 127th Street and the future 28th Avenue southwest will have about 10,000 residents, many living in townhouses or apartment buildings.
Brockelsby compares the main street, with buildings up to three storeys high and angled parking at the curb, to downtown's burgeoning 104th Street.
"Imagine nurses and doctors living within walking distance of that (hospital) employment area...if you're a (post-secondary) instructor, you could live within a stop of campus," he said.
"On a Saturday morning, when (residents) are looking for a place to have a coffee and read a newspaper, I don't think they would find that in a big-box environment...They can buy something at a deli and walk home with it."
Developers hope to have a public hearing on the proposal at city council by the end of August, but Brockelsby cautions that, if approved, work might not start for a couple of years.
Coun. Don Iveson, whose ward includes the southwest, said the town centre could become a "magnet" for east and west transit service that would feed into the LRT.
While he questioned whether to build LRT in an undeveloped area, or wait until somebody lives there, he likes the increased population density the proposal offers.
"It's the only thing that could possibly justify bringing the LRT into the suburbs. What could happen over time is we have places with parking lots that are park-and-ride at first, that could become transit-oriented development later."
Reaction to the scheme was positive at a public meeting last month, part of a change in attitude among Edmontonians, Brockelsby said.
"Generally speaking, the city of Edmonton is reaching a threshold in terms of its urbanized nature. With this latest economic boom, talk on the streets is about how busy it is, how congested," he said.
"If we're going to live in an urban area, how are we going to do that and make it a full experience beyond just going to work and home?"
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http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/transit+friendly+place+live/1704444/story.html
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