The nonsensical protest around Hillside Park

Protesters against paving Hillside trails, ironically standing on a spot where they've already been paved for a decade. (photo credit: James Jackson)

I recently read about protests against plans to pave the trail surface in Hillside Park, and I am disappointed. While the residents of Ferndale Place raise a legitimate concern about how city staff notified people about upcoming work, the complaints that a few unhappy citizens are bringing forward just don't make sense. 

One complaint is that upgrading the trail surface will ruin this park as a natural gem. As a daily user of the park, I can attest that the park is a beautiful natural oasis, but less than two years ago it was a muddy construction zone filled with heavy earth moving equipment. If the park can survive a sewer replacement, it can withstand a paved trail.

Sewer reconstruction in Hillside Park: where were protesters then?

Furthermore, worries about "environmental damage" completely ignore the current reality. I saw gravel trails washed out by stormwater three times in 2014 alone, and countless times before. After each incident, heavy vehicles truck in tons of new stone and sand to repair dangerous washouts that are sometimes a foot deep. With each new storm, this material is spread into meadows and silts up the creek. A hard trail surface will permanently solve this problem and prevent injuries.

Storm runoff gouged this gravel trail down to the foundation layer in 2014.

What is lost in these protesters' message is how Hillside Park's degraded, loose gravel trails make it inaccessible to many in our community. Paving the trails will improve accessibility for all: in wheelchair or mobility scooter, with stroller, as well as on bike or on foot. Virtually every other city park provides paved trails without diminishing the natural environment, including Forwell Creek Park which directly connects to Hillside, so that they are not a barrier to those of us who struggle with mobility challenges.

The concerns of a few residents who don't want any changes need to be weighed against the needs of everyone. Accessibility must trump aesthetics. Hillside Park is a public space, not a private backyard.

Election thoughts, LRT thoughts

I haven't posted here in a long while, because as the election got rolling, most of my energy went towards TriTAG, who I have been working with since 2012. Once again, we have a big LRT fight.

In the last few months, we've seen the rise of a well-funded anti-LRT crusade led by Jay Aissa. And as a result, it's the same old battles, the same old wounds reopened, and a lot more vitriol and no small amount of misinformation and unfounded arguments.

TriTAG's efforts this election were meant to be focused on the 2014 Election Candidate Survey, which has been very successful so far. That was back in the optimistic early days when we thought the election might be about tackling new issues. As time went on, it became clear that we needed to "mythbust the election" to deal directly with some of the myths being peddled by the crusaders.

On the eve of the election, I thought I would say a few words about why I got engaged with the LRT issue years ago, and why it continues to be the most important battle to win.

In 2011, we faced a choice between two very different solutions for "higher order transit". One was bus-based, and the other was rail-based. Despite the fact that LRT is more expensive, it appears to achieve its goals better: namely, shifting more people to public transit and also shifting development to focus on intensifying the core. It also provides better long term value by providing the capacity we'll need in a couple of decades.

I agreed that LRT was the better option, and that formed a large basis for my support. I also knew that to be successful, LRT alone isn't enough, but we need an entirely redesigned transit network supporting it. The fact that ION is not meant to stand alone and knowing what the central corridor would need to properly support a better bus network also made me favour it. But I also knew something else: that Light Rail would become a symbol for Waterloo Region. A symbol whose importance should not be dismissed.

We have a big problem in North America. We just don't really believe in transit. The car is king, and we can't really even conceive of how that will ever change. But time moves quickly, and as we've spent the last 60 years sprawling our cities ever outward, we need to spend the next 60 reshaping them to be viable, livable places.

Much more so than a rapid busway, light rail is a visible sign that we can alter a city's trajectory. It will be on almost every stock photo for the region, for UW, for Uptown and Downtown. It will quickly become an indelible part of our identity, and we will not tolerate anything less than success for it. Which means that LRT will open up the region to ongoing transit improvements. It will shift the attitudes of the entire population. That shift in mindset will also translate into ridership.

Whereas-- and here's the kicker-- it's unlikely that Bus Rapid Transit would be allowed to succeed.

Had we chosen BRT in 2011, I would be supporting it today. But it would face an uphill battle. The problem with BRT is its flexibility: a busway is a busway, sure... but too often, BRT systems are often watered down during the design phase. I have no doubt we'd face pressure here to cut the dedicated busway where it would be needed most. It's possible that the very definition of BRT, as a rapid bus operating on its own right of way, might even be rewritten by politicians unwilling to displace cars at all.

LRT, on the other hand, is much harder to erode. It stands a better chance of surviving to deliver on its promise.

I doubt that many of the anti-LRT crusaders are anything but just anti-transit. They'll tolerate what's there now, but if they can kill LRT while talking up BRT as "a much better option", I have no confidence they'll deliver anything like "gold standard" Bus Rapid Transit.

Helping Waterloo Region make a shift towards better mass transit is why I've been fighting so hard. We're really the first city in Ontario rolling out what transit expert Vukan Vuchic (see his Waterloo speech here) calls "medium capacity transit". LRT can bridge the gap (in terms of capacity, speed, and cost) between buses and subways, and there are half a dozen cities in Ontario that could benefit from it. But Toronto, which needs to get on building multiple LRT lines as the only affordable way to address its transit woes, has really poisoned the discussion with "Subways, subways, subways" and muddying the difference between LRT and mixed-traffic streetcars.

So it's on us. We can show the cities like London and Hamilton and Mississauga and Scarborough just how LRT can work. We can give form and value to something that some just can't imagine until they see it in action.

But first we have to finish building it.

Please vote on Monday. Vote for leaders who will make LRT a reality. A lot is riding on this train.

Help us reshape our Uptown

City looks at segregated bike lanes for Uptown
Waterloo councillors agree better infrastructure needed for cyclists
 

It's really quite amazing, isn't it? Enough to leave you thinking that we are on a road to a more human-friendly city, and that public engagement can have a real impact. But we're not there yet.

The Uptown Streetscape Improvement project originally started as a lighting replacement project but has grown quite a lot since. It was shelved for a few years while we answered the LRT question (and finalized the design). If the project hadn't been put on pause, though, we'd never have contemplated the current proposal for wider sidewalks and protected bike lanes.

But over the last few years, our collective consciousness seems to have absorbed some lessons from around Waterloo region and beyond. Streets in our city do not need to be designed for maximum car throughput over all other uses anymore. Instead, we need improvements to the pedestrian realm. We need cycling infrastructure that welcomes everyone, and not just a hardy few. Our main street should support these things, and that means big change for King St.

The current proposal for Uptown (interpreted by Mike Boos)

Some people, in particular a few notable business owners, would prefer to minimize changes. And there is an argument to be made for Uptown: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Uptown is a raging success, so why tinker? It's reasonable to be wary of the effect any change in parking and car access may have on a business's bottom line

But change comes anyway. By 2017, King Street South will be transformed from a 4 lane arterial to 2 lanes with transitway. And even before the arrival of LRT, our travel pattern is shifting: trips along King that are by car have dipped below 60%, with transit, walking and cycling making up 41% of the mode share at peak times.

And this is despite the fact that Uptown is actually broken and needs fixing. Cramped and worn sidewalks. Substandard lanes that are straddled by the many GRT buses that move through, constricting traffic. When free-flowing vehicles meet a dense pedestrian realm, the results are sometimes fatal. Plenty of bikes on the bike racks, but precious few on the street as cyclists avoid the lanes and instead opt for side streets or just the sidewalk. And yet, Uptown thrives! It does so despite these flaws, not because of them.

So let's imagine how much better it could be if King St were welcoming and accessible to all users.

Two lanes of traffic where four exist now means those lanes can be wide enough for the vehicles that use them, as well as providing enough extra room for emergency vehicles to move up the middle. This, along with a slight reduction in parking spaces (less than 1% of Uptown's parking supply!) provides the room for wide sidewalks for the many pedestrians, with the opportunity for sidewalk seating at cafes.

In addition, there is room to make a protected bike lane connection along King all the way from University to Erb. This will link Wilfrid Laurier University and the many apartments popping up along King to Uptown, while the LRT project will provide bike lanes (albeit unbuffered) through to downtown Kitchener. The Iron Horse and Laurel trails are nearby, along with the future Spur trail and planned crosstown on-street cycling links. These interconnections provide a useful cycling network within reach of the majority who are interested but concerned about using the bicycle for short trips.

A Chicago example of how a protected bike lane fits in the urban core.

And for those businesses along King whose owners are concerned about the effect these changes may bring, I would urge them to consider the upside. There are two to three thousand more residents coming soon within 500m of the King St. corridor who will live in buildings with low parking ratios and they will have easy, convenient access to Uptown thanks to these improvements. They'll be a virtually captive market for uptown retailers, in fact.

Automobile access will still exist, but pessimistically drawing a straight line from "reduced traffic lanes and parking" to "depressed business" ignores the realities that (a) drivers still arrive to King St. businesses on foot (even if they parked down the block) and will be influenced by the state of the pedestrian realm, and (b) once a potential customer is in the car, the Uptown business may have already lost as Uptown is now as close, or far away, as our malls and box stores. The key for success in Uptown is to be as accessible and welcoming as possible to people who have the option to not drive, because these people are growing in number.

And it's not so weird.

These people have a right to shape this city as they want. Businesses in Uptown are stakeholders in the streetscape redesign, to be sure. Their needs and concerns must be listened to. But they must be weighed against the needs and desires of all who live, work and play in Uptown Waterloo, as well as taken in context with the growing body of evidence that our city cores can be "complete streets" and vibrant and successful.

We have a unique opportunity to turn Uptown's King St. in to the kind of Main Street that Waterloo deserves, and with an project lifetime of 25 years, this kind of opportunity only comes around once in a generation. At the same time, we're recognizing both the need for walkability and for cycling infrastructure that the average person finds welcoming, and how these strengths tie in to the adoption of transit and the reduction of traffic congestion in a region that has grown by leaps and bounds. The stage is set.

A lot has to go right for the proposal to become a reality. Project staff need to feel confident about recommending this proposal, and that requires vocal popular support at the May 29th Public Consultation Centre. The city of Waterloo council needs to endorse the recommendation, and then (because it's a two-level project) the regional council needs to approve it. All of that could happen by this fall, if we are willing to speak up in favour of it.


So speak up. This is local, direct engagement with a real potential to shape this city in a positive way. How much more incentive do you need?

The Cost of a Costco

Edit: This post produced a... vigorous twitter debate, in which a critical friend made a few points. The chief point to concede is that a Costco may well be a good use for this site, infrastructure costs notwithstanding, especially given Costco's positive employment track record and the absence of other grocery stores out at Ira Needles. Also, the factors that led to the growth of big box stores out on Erb's Road were put in place years ago and may now be immutable.

And I can't disagree with that. What brought me to write this post was not "Costco is evil!!1!" but that we are seeing the engines of sprawl in action right in front of us, along with many of the downsides that come with it. What we should be concerned about is how we aren't doing enough to check the momentum of this outward expansion. Wilmot Line is the current west side boundary for urban expansion. It will only hold if it is strong enough to withstand the pressure. Reducing the pressure is as important as strengthening the line.

With that, I return you to the post as originally written...


A lot of people are discussing the prospect of a new Costco store on the west side of Waterloo, across from the landfill.

Between 1998 and 2000, I worked for a very small software company located in a converted house that lays just within Gate 1 of the landfill. (Unsurprisingly, the company's product was designed for waste management.) At the time, when I would drive my rusty '86 Honda CRX home, I would turn out of the gate, drive east past Westhill Drive, and the edge of the city was the recently expanded KW Bilingual School at the corner of Erb and Erbsville.

The amount of change in this area is remarkable. Both Westhill Drive and Erbsville Road are disconnected remnants of their former selves, as Ira Needles Blvd. is the main west side artery. The line of houses that faced the regional landfill in mute testimony to the foolishness of their purchasers (or so we joked at the time) now sit behind a new, even closer residential subdivision. And snuggled up to the landfill property are massive commercial developments, the largest of which is the Boardwalk. This euphemistically named strip of windswept parking lot and box store at the foot of Mount Trashmore II is as large as the entire downtown core of Kitchener.

And yet, Waterloo's expansion seems hardly content to stop here, and is about to envelop the landfill. Costco sees an opportunity in our growing region. With one busy store down in Kitchener, an expansion of the chain to Waterloo makes a lot of sense in principle. As retail employers go, Costco has a history of being very good to its workers. Why wouldn't we want them to come in with another store?

But Costco's expansion plan is bringing our community's sprawl problem into focus. Three football fields' worth of farmland stands to be paved over and built on. A massive lot with over 900 parking spots will be installed, presenting new environmental challenges as development creeps ever closer to the sensitive west side moraine. And as Waterloo councilor Vieth (among others) has pointed out, this development will strain the ability of our current roads on this side of town to move traffic.

It's worth considering that a bulk goods store like Costco is not the kind of place you'd expect many people to hop on a bus to go to. Costco's business model depends, as so much of our development pattern does, on its customers providing their own transportation in the form of cars and trucks. And yet, as is also evident in so much of our development pattern, our infrastructure is being stretched and strained, and ultimately the great commercial developments of the west side (of which this Costco would be the latest) are being subsidized as we expand roads to meet the traffic demand they generate.

Even as our regional government fights private developers in court to retain the right to draw our own urban boundaries, and redirects much of our growth inward where it requires less new infrastructure, it's clear that developers want to race to the "countryside line", which on the west side is Wilmot Line (map). And that is because greenfield development is easy and profitable. Given ample space and without historical site contamination risks, and with minimal pressure to design a working neighbourhood that isn't car-bound, it's not surprising that sprawl is so often the answer to the question of how to meet the market for growth. Forcing growth upward, rather than outward, takes substantially more effort and planning.

Unfortunately, this new westerly development could become a nucleation point for the next round of suburban sprawl. But the fault here isn't Costco's. It's ours. Yes, we're investing in our cores to make them viable sites for future growth, and to make our region more sustainable and affordable. But that's only part of the equation. We also need to curb our outward expansion, and put rules in place that force new heavily-trafficked commercial developments to be located more centrally, and more accessibly. And when a business comes along that's built on selling goods cheaply in large warehouses and parking lots on the edge of town, perhaps we should be a little more thoughtful about the infrastructure costs their presence will impose upon us.

If we don't take a deliberate approach to managing our growth, then the so-called countryside line will be just a brief hurdle in Waterloo's outward expansion. The environmental costs will be substantial as we'll need to reach towards the great lakes for our water, and when the infrastructure costs come due, it'll hit us hard in the pocketbook.

How many bulk boxes of chicken wings is that worth?

Why is it a war?

Well, it's approved.

Committees, lawsuits, submarine motions and council votes. Letters to the editor, blog posts, newsletters, emails to reps, calls to action. Misinformation, disinformation, feet in mouths and FUD. Meetings, phone calls, rumours and mysteries.

Done. For now, at least.

All of this is about establishing the foundation for a better transit system, the basis for moving around the region for the next half a century. That's all. Seems like so much struggle for such a comparatively simple thing. Why is it such a fight? How are we so conflicted about this?

With everything happening around us, how can we look each other in the eye and say "no, we don't want to react to change"? How do we consistently get stuck on this simple topic of how to move people around and make a war out of it, while we give a free pass to all the other monumental costs that come with civilized society?

What makes us so mad about transit?

We need to work this one out. Today we've cleared the hurdle, but it was a close run thing. We face many of the same hurdles to come.

How can we keep making progress on this track if we are at war with ourselves?

Transit for Cambridge: everyone's on board, almost.

Councillor Jane Mitchell recently laid out why Cambridge is where it is when it comes to transit, and why Mayor Craig's motion to area-rate Cambridge out of paying for LRT (rationalized as Cambridge isn't "getting anything out of it") displays an astonishingly selective memory on his part.

As Mitchell points out, Cambridge's transit has been pulled up by its metaphorical bootstraps since the region took it over. Before then, according to Cambridge regional councillor Brewer, it was raided for funds whenever things were tight. Since the formation of GRT as a regional transit entity, Cambridge has seen a huge service increase (more than doubled) while ridership in Cambridge has more than tripled.

It seems like Cambridge residents are interested in transit. It seems like the region is interested in bringing transit to the residents of Cambridge. But is Cambridge's own leadership interested?

Read Councillor Mitchell's post.

Reading for comprehension

First off, I Am Not a Lawyer. I do, however, practice reading for comprehension.

For those of you wondering about a certain Waterloo businessman's threat of legal challenge against LRT, based on the claim that it violates the region's current official plan, I offer you this:

11.2.3 The Regional Municipality of Waterloo, in conjunction with Area Municipalities as appropriate, will promote increased transit ridership, walking and cycling and reduce the need to make trips by automobile through such means as:

a) the provision of rapid transit service within the Central Transit Corridor with linkages to other transit corridors and nodes;

(...)

That's from "Amendment No. 26 - Introduction of New Transit and Rapid Transit Policies and Mapping" to the Regional Official Policies Plan. This is the plan in effect right now, as the new regional official plan (which also provides for rapid transit) is in legal limbo due to the appeal of an OMB challenge. The amendment was approved and adopted in 2007.

The claim against the region is that this rapid transit project violates Section 24 of the Ontario Planning Act which basically says all public works must conform with the official plan. The claim seems built on the fact that the new 2009 plan provides for rapid transit but it's not in effect, along with an impression that the old plan does not provide for rapid transit.

So what's the deal? Is there something else up this person's sleeve? Hard to rule out the possibility that sufficiently motivated lawyers may dredge up some loophole, but at the same time it beggars belief that a public project could be so easily tied up by a single disgruntled citizen with lawyers in tow. Especially a public project like this, more than a decade in the making.

What's worse, this person can still attempt to pursue this case, and our tax money will be spent defending it.

Well, the regional government is acting like there's nothing to be concerned about. I hope they're right. We've waited too long for this.

Edit: this CBC article includes a legal letter that states,

"The ROPPA 26 rapid transit policies currently in effect contemplates a further official plan amendment. Accordingly, entering into a contract which commits the Region to the construction and operation of the LRT does not conform to the existing policy framework."

So they're claiming that this part of the plan can't be pursued without the contemplated amendments, and the new plan is not in effect. I took a look. Amendment 26 says:

"This amendment will be implemented through the future approval of further amendments to this plan, amendments to the affected area municipal official plans and the approvals process for development applications in areas where application of the new and/or revised policies is appropriate."  (emphasis mine)

Does that mean we need more amendments before rapid transit is enshrined in the official plan? The lawyers writing that letter seem to think so. But arguments about Oxford Commas aside, there's a lot of wiggle room in the bolded text above.

I'm sure lawyers will be getting a workout.

Edit again: Waterloo Chronicle has a statement from Chair Seiling regarding the region's opinion.