Quote:
Originally Posted by tyeman200
No I mean being on the upper side of Waterloo, all the way down to the 401 in Kitchener. The expressway system makes it fairly easy to get around that tri city area. It's something I wish London thought of, but never implemented.
|
Yes, it would be great for there to have been an expressway built in/around London. That said, the K-W Expressway is not a product of the cities of Waterloo and Kitchener getting together and plan, design, and construct the freeway there. It was done exclusively by the Province. This was primarily due to the streets (and street right-of-ways) in K-W up to the 1980's were mainly very narrow and not laid out in traditional grid plan as most Ontario communities are. Provincial highways 7, 8, and 85 ran through the centre of the community. Prior to WW2, this was not an issue, as the community was relatively small (approx. 45,000). In the post-war years however, there was significant population (and traffic) growth. With little ability to either widen the streets for capacity or straighten out the convoluted routes that the provincial highways took through the cities, the province looked to construct a bypass around most of the existing urban area. Kitchener had set aside some land for a ring road based on a planning concept from the 1930's, but was little more than an idea - and would have never been a freeway. The province used that relatively small amount of land, and acquired the remaining majority of (mainly rural) land for its bypass around most the urbanized area of K-W. Construction began in earnest in the mid-1960's and finished in approximately 1970. That bypass became the new highways 7, 8 , and 85. Since then, the cities have grown dramatically, and the expressways are now for the most part inside the urbanized area, and serves a a second valuable role as a traffic conduit through the cities, not simply a bypass.
The story here is that if the above outlined circumstances didn't exist, the freeway in K-W may have not have been constructed, and were for the most part not the doing of the local municipalities there. The cities were very, very happy for the province to build it, and co-operated in every way possible to assist in it's construction, but the K-W freeway is for the most part
not a product of visionary local municipal councils of 50's or 60's.
Prev
Linear Mode
