Recently in My Community Category

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The good folks at TriTAG bring to my attention this letter to the Waterloo Region Record where reader Cheri-ann Chowan expresses frustration at the lack of adequate transit service to Breslau, not to mention the lack of sidewalks along Victoria that could get a resident of Breslau to transit:

I am not the only parent in this predicament in Breslau. I know of one family that bought a house in Breslau and less than a year later sold their house because of the lack of transit for their teens. What happens to families in Breslau that cannot afford a vehicle? How would they potentially get to a job, doctors, and other very vital everyday life events?

(link)

When public transit was moved from the local level to the regional council back in 2000 and Grand River Transit was created, one of the benefits cited was the possibility that the satellite towns and villages might finally get a public transit connection with the main cities. Since then, the GRT has established a successful route to St. Jacobs and Elmira, and is considering services to Baden, New Hamburg and Ayr. It seems strange to me that Breslau, which is just across the Grand River from Kitchener, along one of the busier corridors leading out of the city, should not receive attention. The Route 15 comes so close, with morning rush and late evening service extended out to Centennial Road, right on the banks of the Grand.

Also, looking at the map, a service proposal presents itself that not only gives Breslau residents access to the downtown, but serves other areas in eastern Kitchener that are currently some distance from transit service. If Grand River Transit were to set up a route operating from the Downtown Terminal to King and Victoria and from there to Breslau via Victoria, Lancaster, Wellington, Shirley, Bingeman’s Centre Drive and Victoria again, the new industries setting up shop on Shirley and Bingeman Centre would finally see transit service. And that’s just filling in the gaps. Grand River Transit could conceivably simplify the layout of current services by running a bus along Victoria from King to Breslau, running a bus along Wellington and Bingemans Centre to loop in the Victoria/Lackner area, and a bus up Queen North and Lancaster to loop in Bridgeport, potentially giving passengers at the far end of routes 6 and 15 a faster ride to Kitchener’s downtown.

It may be that Grand River Transit hasn’t implemented the service because nobody has suggested it. Well, consider the suggestion made. The success of the Elmira route shows that demand exists outside of Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge for transit service, and the GRT need only continue the bus down Woolwich and Fountain Streets to give the residents of the Region of Waterloo public transit access to the regional airport.

• Brian at At Home at Hespelar reminisces about the last time the Canadian national anthem was changed, notes how some things shift organically, and wonders what all the fuss is about.
• Like many other bloggers, Far and Wide sees the Conservatives’ proposed change to the anthem as a diversionary tactic.
• Yikes! Urbanity posts a Google Map showing marijuana grow-ops in London. No similar map exists for Waterloo Region, yet. Locally, he has better news about a digital hub being set up in the old Tannery in downtown Kitchener.
• Planet June has yarn salamanders climbing the walls.
• Wonderful Waterloo launches a debate on which university library has the clearer windows. What, and let all the light shine in on our… (gasp!)… books?!
• Still with the universities, Psystenance criticizes how the University of Waterloo serves its pedestrians.
• Take the Lane wonders what the best bike route is to get from Mill and Queen to Riverbend and Lancaster. His readers offer suggestions.
• Be sure to check out the many fascinating late winter pictures over at Blog Guelph.
• And, finally, remember that Doctor Who returns to Canadian screens on April 17!

It happened on September 8 2007. It was a beautiful fall day. Anyone that knows me, knows I love to go for bike rides especially in Puslinch Township. So it was that Saturday in September I went for my 30km ride. I missed an event that still makes me wonder what the heck happened.

When I returned home a friend of mine, who came to visit while I was away on my ride, was real excited about what he videotaped on the other side of the Mill Pond in the Hespeler part of Cambridge Ontario. He and two young girls claimed they saw an alien. You see the park where he filmed the video is out back of our house.

Now I thought this was pretty funny, so I watched the short video clip on his camera and had to admit something was up. It was loaded on You Tube and the Hespeler News website and 2 years later over 54,000 people have viewed it and 172 people have commented on the video.

I really don’t know what to think about the whole issue as my friend has moved away and will not talk about that day. What I can say is I absolutely love the comments people have made about the video. I have burst out laughing reading them. Enjoy the video and comments it certainly makes for interesting conversation.

Here is the first edition of the Carnival of Waterloo-Wellington Blogs, a (I hope) monthly event where we trawl some interesting links from interesting bloggers blogging about or from inside the region. Without further ado, here is what we’re talking about:

• Regional Councillor Jane Mitchell loves the new Waterloo museum. I agree that the building is striking, and I would like to pay it a visit.
• Urbanity is talking about Kitchener-Waterloo amalgamation.
• At Home on Hespeler remembers the freedom of music and the vinyl LP.
• Right of Centre Ice considers the supreme court ruling on the constitutional rights of Omar Khadr.
• Record blogger Take the Lane considers the rash of pedestrian deaths in Toronto and how to stand out while crossing the street.
• The blog 59 Carden Street looks into the funding dispute between the City of Guelph and Wellington County.
• More great photography from an Insider’s Guide to Waterloo Region.

As always, to hear the latest from our local bloggers, consult this web page. If you have a local blog and would like to be added to the list, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

When Ellen and I went to Waterloo city council to talk about the whole ghetto thing, we were suprised to find ourselves in the middle of a two-hour debate on amalgamation.

Amalgamation debates are something you get used to in this town. Frankly, I’m amazed we managed to avoid the amalgamation fever of the 90s. Everybody knows about the Toronto megacity, but the fever also led to such strange political entities as The “City” of Kawartha Lakes.

Tim Jackson of Tech Capital Partners and Iain Klugman of Communitech went to city council to propose, not the amalgamation of the whole Region of Waterloo this time, but the amalgamation of the cities of Kitchener and Waterloo.

Except what they proposed wasn’t actually amalgamation, but a plebiscite on the next municipal ballot asking voters whether they were in favour of the two cities talking about amalgamation.

And here’s where it gets a little dicey. Who has a problem with the cities talking about amalgamation?

I remember, however, a referendum in Québec a few years ago, where the question wasn’t “Should Québec be a sovereign nation independent of Canada?” The question was “Do you agree that Québec should become sovereign after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new economic and political partnership?” Which is why we have the Clarity Act.

I missed Tim Jackson’s presentation, but when pressed, Iain Klugman made it clear that he felt that a “Yes” vote on this plebiscite was mandate to amalgamate the cities and no follow-up referendum was needed after the cities were finished “talking”.

Furthermore, the province gets to dictate the question after the city votes to have one on the ballot. Waterloo doesn’t get to make its own Clarity Act. And, except for the general distaste for the idea in the Region, there’s nothing stopping the province from forcing amalgamation at any time. Although I fear I might be drifting into conspiracy theories, a “yes” vote on a wishy-washy “talk about amalgamation” vote might be all the political clout they’d need to just amalgamate, regardless of what comes out of talking.

And finally, as far as I can tell (and I could be wrong here—like I said, I missed Tim Jackson’s presentation), the only reason TCP and Communitech are pushing for amalgamation is they think it makes their job marketing the region to the world a bit easier.

I don’t think I need to say I have some problems with this proposal. There was significant resistance from people at the meeting. And an unfortunately anonymous and confusingly named group called One Waterloo has popped up online to oppose it.

On idea of amalgamating cities, I’m a bit more on the fence. Kitchener and Waterloo are one community in a sense that, say, Kitchener and Cambridge aren’t. But the history of amalgamation in this province has created more losers than winners, and I think in general, smaller, decentralized organizations are easier to manage and therefore more efficient than bigger ones.

I don’t see a problem with the current set-up, except that it would make sense to upload more services (like fire or water) to the Region. I don’t think democracy or neighbourhood concerns would be better served by a huge municipal council in downtown Kitchener. I don’t think Communitech’s marketing problems are a good enough reason to tear down and rebuild a system that seems to be working. And most of all, I would like to see amalgamation come about because it’s clearly what citizens want, and not because some group managed to hoodwink them into giving the province an excuse to go ahead and make it happen.

And I hate that I probably come off as crazy by writing that, but that’s the only way I could interpret Mr Klugman’s statements to council a couple weeks ago.

Waterloo city council will debate and put the ballot question to a vote tonight.

Image courtesy ArcX.

A quick note today, but before I post, I’d like to mention that we’ve been having problems with commenting here on the Waterloo Wellington Bloggers Association blog. This has been mostly due to the changeover of the backend software to Movable Type 5.0, and issues with handling legacy blogging code. I have to say that I’ve found trying to update the templates here, especially those that I’ve custom-made, to be a bit of a fraught process. The problems with the comments here at the WWBA was just one symptom, but hopefully now it’s one less.

In other news, I have to report on the loss of a neighbourhood chain restaurant. The Pizza Hut sit down restaurant at the corner of Victoria and Westmount has closed down. The windows are dark, the signs are gone, and the place is up for lease. I hadn’t been in the restaurant for a little while (which is probably one reason why it’s now gone), but I had made use of it earlier in 2009 for my family pizza cravings. It was the one pizza joint within walking distance of my home. Now, if we need a quick bite to eat, the corner can only boast a Taco Bell and a Wendy’s.

I’ve always found the Victoria/Westmount intersection to be a rather odd duck. It’s not quite commercial, and it’s not quite residential. On one corner, you have a gas station and a convenience store. Behind it are a series of high rise apartments that, theoretically should provide some much needed foot traffic for the intersection — although in my experience, they’re more aligned away from that intersection and towards the Victoria Hills neighbourhood, which has its own little mall.

Stand on the corner of the gas station, facing the intersection and look to the corner on your right and you will see the beginnings of a shopping plaza, with a much needed urgent care clinic and associated pharmacy, the previously mentioned Taco Bell and shuttered Pizza Hut and an assortment of small scale commercial establishments, including a laundromat. Kitty-corner from the gas station is a Jewish cemetary, and on the corner to your left, you have a too-big parking lot and the aforementioned Wendy’s. This corner used to boast a gas station of its own, but this was demolished and, for the longest while, a sign promised the construction of a new William’s Coffee Pub — something we eagerly anticipated as a nearby place to retire to and write, and which we were bitterly disappointed about when it didn’t materialize.

This corner is struggling to define itself as a commercial draw for the residents around it. One block to the south, along Highland Road, there are many places to eat and shop. All of the big fast food joints, Tim Hortons, Swiss Chalet, East Side Marios and Angels Diner draw people in. People from around the Victoria/Westmount intersection can easily walk there and more easily drive there, and I think do so. I can’t help but wonder if the corner of Victoria and Westmount is caught in a catch-22: it doesn’t have the critical mass required to draw enough business in from the surrounding neighbourhood, and when a place like Pizza Hut shutters, and William’s never materializes, the chances of reaching that critical mass dim.

I don’t know what to suggest for the corner in order to turn things around, but I’m saddened here that there is potential for the corner to be a resource for the community around it, and that potential remains unrealized for the foreseeable future. Maybe if a business or a service could be encouraged to take up the empty space by the Wendy’s, things will improve, but I don’t know what we could do to encourage this, or even what business or service would be of best use to the surrounding community.

Those wanting Pizza Hut pizza still have sit-down locations at University and Weber in Waterloo, at Fairway and Manitou in Kitchener and (I believe) on Hespelar Road and Bishop in Cambridge. There are also take-out-only locations, such as the one I used last night at Fischer-Hallman and Ottawa.

Note: this piece reflects the personal opinion of the author, and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of other members of this community. Do you disagree? Do you agree? Say so! This post has been crossposted here.

Back in June, the Region of Waterloo voted in favour of an ambitious proposal to establish an LRT line running up the centre of Kitchener-Waterloo between Fairview Mall and Conestoga Mall. The line would be augmented by express buses running south from Fairview Mall into Cambridge. The total cost of this proposal is currently budgeted at over $790 million. The province has committed to covering a third of the cost, and the federal government practically tripped over itself in order to offer support for the line. In total, two-thirds of the cost would be covered by federal and provincial taxes, leaving the region on the hook for the remaining third.

The proposal appears to have widespread support. Despite the presence of a few residents expressing concerns, ordinary people turned out to encourage regional councillors to vote in favour of the proposal. And although the proposal has been approved, the conversation isn’t finished. We have work ahead in determining where exactly the line should run, where the stations should be located, how often the service should operate, and how fares should be collected. It will be important to pay attention to this process and lend our voice to ensure that this proposal, as adopted, serves the community to the best of its ability.

Unfortunately, a group of individuals who appear to be opposed to the concept of an LRT, are organizing to have yet another fight on whether we should build an LRT in the region. The thirty-member strong Taxpayers for Sensible Transit (T4ST) have set up a web site, and are speaking out in the local media. The community newspaper, the Kitchener Citizen ran an article on this debate, interviewing only Peter Gay, a representative of the group, rather than a wider selection of individuals.

As I said, it is important for the public to remain engaged in the process so that the details of the implementation of the LRT serve the community well. In this, T4ST has an opportunity to contribute to the good growth of the region. It is unfortunate that, in trying to drum up support, T4ST has resorted to series of talking points and contextless links which seem designed to create a climate of fear. By their approach, they appear to want to polarize the community, and rather than talk about how the LRT can best serve the region and how the design can be improved, they simply seek to oppose change, regardless of its merits.

The group is planning “an educational evening” this November where Andy Haydon, the former regional chair of Ottawa, will talk about his fight against an LRT plan in that city — a fight which culminated in the line’s cancellation. Oh, and a $36.7 million out-of-court settlement against Ottawa for breaking contracts with Siemens. Oh, and, best of all, a completely new LRT plan that operates over much the same route the old plan ran over in the first place. If T4ST want to talk about the mechanics of fighting a transportation proposal from the city, perhaps Mr. Haydon is a good expert to call. But in terms of working to ensure a smooth planning process, rather than jerking your knee and breaking your own nose by making costly decisions that you eventually have to go back on, there doesn’t seem to be as much forethought there.

The most disingenuous claim offered by T4ST is that the LRT operating down the middle of King Street will “essentially turn King Street into a one-way street”. So says Peter Gay, co-chair of the opposition group. This seems a silly argument, and he compounds it with such handwringing lines as “What will happen to the Oktoberfest Parade if King Street is made into a one way street?” Oh, yes, why won’t anybody think of the children.

Here’s the reality: the LRT plan calls for transit vehicles to operate north on King Street from Breithaupt to at least William along the centre of the street. To ensure that these vehicles can operate without being affected by traffic congestion, cars might be kept off these two lanes. One way to do this would be to build a centre reservation — essentially a raised curb — occupying the two centre lanes of King Street.

Essentially, the LRT might change this portion of King Street into a boulevard, no different from what exists on Queens Boulevard between Highland Road and St. Mary’s Hospital, and nobody sensible complains that Queens Boulevard here is a one-way street. People on one side of the street, hoping to turn turn left, simply turn right, until they get to the next intersection, at which point they do a U-turn. This is what happens already on centre reservation streetcar lines in Toronto, such as on Queen’s Quay and Spadina Avenue. It’s not a major inconvenience. So why is Peter Gay resorting to such a misleading term? The group also raises the old canard about the loss of parallel parking on this street, but King Street along this section has very little parallel parking. Most stores, like the Central Meat Market, have their own parking lot, which often stands mostly empty.

Moving on, Is Peter Gay worried about emergency vehicles being kept out of the centre reservation? Well, of course he is, as that’s the sort of attention-getting stuff NIMBY groups thrive on, but the centre reservation can actually improve emergency response times, since vehicles like fire trucks and ambulances can duck into it and dodge around stopped transit vehicles, without being blocked by competing automobile traffic. This is already in place on Spadina Avenue in Toronto. If you can hop a curb in a car, firetrucks can hop the curb leading onto the centre reservation.

And as for the Oktoberfest Parade, I too would hate to see it taken off of King Street, but there is no reason why it and the LRT have to conflict. Toronto’s Santa Claus Parade has operated for over a century and its big floats have had no trouble navigating the overhead wires of Toronto’s streetcar networks. I see no problem temporarily suspending service on the LRT while this civic institution takes place.

Gay goes on to get several facts wrong. He says, “the plan doesn’t even include stops at the major places people will want to go. It won’t stop at the airport, the high schools, the Centre in the Square, and it won’t go to either the Waterloo or Kitchener farmers’ markets or the Aud.” Well, the LRT plan does go past the high schools — two, in fact (Kitchener Collegiate and Cameron Heights). It most certainly passes the Kitchener Farmer’s Market and will include a stop there.

What the LRT does serve includes Fairview Mall, the Schneider Plant and nearby industries, Cameron Heights Collegiate, the Kitchener Farmer’s Market, downtown Kitchener, the UW School of Pharmacy, Kitchener Collegiate Institute, Grand River Hospital, Sunlife, Uptown Waterloo, Wilfred Laurier University (albeit, at some distance), the University of Waterloo, the RIM Tech Park, the residents of lower Lakeshore and Conestoga Mall. In short, some of the biggest employers and major trip generators across the Region.

It’s true that the LRT doesn’t stop at the airport, but no other transit service does: the airport is in the middle of nowhere. (And, unfortunately, it seems unlikely that any transit vehicle will have any reason to stop at the airport in the near future, given that the number of regular flights out each day can be counted on my hands.) It’s also true that the LRT doesn’t stop in front of the Centre in the Square, but other buses do, and the LRT is not designed to replace them.

Look, Mr. Gay: an LRT works best as a (pretty) short (pretty) straight line. LRT advocates would like to include the St. Jacob’s Farmer’s Market, Centre in the Square, the Aud, and Highland Hills Mall in the mix, but to do that, we’d have to add separate lines, and I’m sure you would agree that it’s best that we start small.

Finally, Peter Gay is quoted as saying “There is no other city of our size that supports an LRT,” but here he is wrong. While we would be the smallest city in Canada to operate an LRT when it opens, the city of Portland, Oregon today boasts a population of 575,930. Moreover, Portland opened its LRT back in 1986, it had a population of under 437,000 (Note: it is the centre of a wider metropolitan area of around two million, but the LRT largely serves just Portland). The City of Calgary opened its LRT in 1981, when it had a population of 591,857. It currently has a population of roughly 988,000. The City of Edmonton started construction on its LRT in 1974, when it had a population of 445,000. Today, 730,000 live in Edmonton.

Today, over 478,000 call the Region of Waterloo home, which if you’re looking for magic numbers, appears to be right in line. (Total population is not a great way to gauge transit need: the truly telling thing is that the iXpress bus the LRT will paralell is routinely jammed full.) More importantly, for the past ten years, the Region of Waterloo has been exceeding its growth projections. In 2031, the Region expects to house almost three quarters of a million people.

When that time comes, the people in the region will think one of two things: either they will thank us for having the foresight to build an LRT to serve the region’s needs, or they will curse us for being short-sighted, small-minded and fearful of change. Fortunately, I believe most residents in the region fall in the former category, not the latter, and I am confident that we will build an LRT, and that it will serve us well in the years to come. I hope that the members of T4ST will come forward with construction suggestions on how to improve the system, rather than simply standing firm and saying ‘not!’

(Update: Friday, 9:07 p.m.): Helen Hall publisher and editor of the West Edition of the Kitchener Citizen newspaper contacted me to let me know that the article I quoted was not the only piece they have done on the K-W LRT project. Indeed, they have been covering this issue since it went before council earlier this year, and have run a position paper by the Grand River Environmental Network endorsing the LRT. She was concerned that the wording of my article above implied that the Citizen was reporting only one side of the story with the article above.

My comments were related only to the article above, and did not take into consideration the other work the Kitchener Citizen has done covering the LRT issue. I apologize for giving that impression and would like to retract the insinuation.

Further Reading

• Taxpayers For Sensible Transit
• Facebook Page for Supporters of the K-W LRT. Current Membership? 1,628. Current membership of the T4ST Facebook page? 39.
• What is an LRT? Consult the citizen-produced Toronto LRT Information Page
• Light Rail Now
• MAX (Portland) Light Rail

Guelph has too many doctors.

I just managed to find a doctor in Kitchener after several years of being doctorless. I find it hard to believe that there’s a patient shortage anywhere in the region. Guelph, however, has this enviable problem.

They managed to bring in 10 new doctors, but have been having a hard time getting enough patients to sign on.

If you’re interested, check out guelph.ca/doctor, or tweet @guelphchamber and they’ll match you up.

This group blog has been growing in fits and starts. I regret that I haven’t had as much time to devote to writing articles for this group blog as I have for my personal blog, but that hasn’t meant that the community of bloggers in County Wellington and the Region of Waterloo is quiet. Recently, bloggers have been debating the merits of the proposal to build a LRT line and a rapid bus branch through the spine of the region. Ruth at Yappa Ding Ding has been arguing passionately that we should be seriously considering whether this proposal will do more harm than good and, today, regional councillor Jane Mitchell joined this group, with a blog that, among other things, talks up the merits of the LRT proposal.

I’ve said privately that, thanks to the onslaught of the media, I know far more about the goings on at Toronto City Council than I do Kitchener City Council or even Regional Council. That’s a shame, really. Because as you can see, this region can have passionate political debates of their own.

I’m about to head out to a bloggers gathering at the Huether Hotel, which starts today at 4 p.m. I know that a number of bloggers will be there. We have a strong regional identity. We may not have as large a blogging community as, say, Toronto, but like Stuart McLean says in the Vinyl Café: we may not be big, but we’re small.

This photograph is entitled Last Bus and is by Jeremy Ladan. It is used in accordance with his Creative Commons license. This article has also been crossposted to Bow. James Bow.

In the first part of this series, I talked about the desire on the part of certain citizens of this region to live car free, and in the second part I discussed the positive steps the region had taken in improving its public transit access in the past twenty or so years. In this part, I’ll highlight some of the challenges that remain and, more frustratingly, areas where the region has taken a backwards step.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been privileged to give a presentation on transportation to the grade eight students of The York School in Toronto. As the editor of Transit Toronto, I’m one of a list of speakers providing their take on the issue for the benefit of a project the students are working on.

In my presentation, I point out to them that, though I am an advocate for improved public transportation, I still own a car. I have nothing against car ownership. I think the automobile is a wonderful luxury that everybody should enjoy. I just wish it would remain a luxury only, and not become a necessity of life.

Think about your neighbourhoods, I tell the students, many of whom come from suburban climes with inadequate public transportation. Think of where you live and how it relates to where you shop, where you go to school, where your libraries are, your pools, your friends’ houses, your video stores, et cetera. And then think of what would happen if you or your family no longer had access to an automobile to get them.

And this is not some vague notion, I tell them. I tell them about how my wife, who until a couple of years ago suffered from a debilitating condition called Trigeminal Neuralgia, had her license taken away from the government, because as soon as any doctor or other official within spitting distance of the government hears the phrases “debilitating bouts of pain causing one to black out” and “without warning” in the same breath, it practically becomes their obligation to do so.

It is now two years after Erin has been cured of TN, and she still doesn’t have her driver’s license back. You do need to have gone through a year with no incidents in order to get your license back; the other year is either Dr. Vlad’s mad-scientist attitude to paperwork (“paperwork? what’s that? now where’s that new equipment I get to play with?”) or bureaucratic sticky-tape applied to the feet of civil servants at the Ministry of Transportation. Erin’s going to give them a call today to see what’s what.

But the point is, for the time that Erin was sick and lost her license, to today, she has been dependent on me to drive her anywhere. And this has made her feel sometimes like a prisoner in her own home. This phrase is commonly used in any household where two people can afford one car and one of the two tends to use it for his or her day-to-day work. In situations where we have chidren or younger teenagers in the home, the phrase becomes “a chauffeur mom (or dad)”. Recently, Erin picked up a bike at a garage sale, and used it to ride out to a library to get some time to herself so she could write. The hills were hard, but the burst of independence that this gave her was more than worth it.

(And I should point out that the loss of Erin’s driver’s license is no picnic to me either. I like to drive, and I do like the challenge of long drives, but it is nice to be able to spell each other off. As we are planning to drive to Des Moines this summer, it would be great if Erin could get her license back before then).

So, why doesn’t Erin take the Grand River Transit bus more often? Well, actually, she does. We are not in the situation that some people find themselves in where we’d be terribly isolated if we lost access to our automobile. We’re a thirty-minute walk from downtown Kitchener. We’ve a five minute walk from a bus stop featuring fifteen minute service during rush hour. Erin often picks up Vivian from pre-school and takes her on a bus ride home; it takes about forty minutes, and delivers us close to our door. And before we had the kids, we made do for two years without an automobile. We car pooled with friends, and we took groceries home on transit.

But the forty-minute trip back from Vivian’s school by bus takes only six minutes by car. The bus requires one transfer while the car requires none. Kitchener’s route 8 picks up students from the University and heads down Westmount, only to divert onto Belmont Avenue on the way downtown. Route 12 also travels on part of Westmount Road, but diverts over to Fischer Hallmann and runs up to the Keats Way, lengthening the trip. There is no through service on Westmount Avenue, providing a service to the University that would practically be door-to-door for some. although there are vague plans to get some. To get anywhere in the region, you will likely have to take a bus that will take you out of your way, and then transfer.

This wouldn’t be so bad, were it not for the biggest design flaw of Grand River Transit; that being the location of Kitchener’s Downtown Terminal. Although I can see why planners chose to locate the terminal where they did — in the middle of Kitchener’s long and thin downtown, rather than at either end — it does make for some frustrating commutes.

Consider a trip that I might take from my house to Uptown Waterloo or the University of Waterloo. At first glance, it might seem straightforward: take the Victoria Street bus (either route 19 or 20) towards the downtown, transfer at King Street to the 7 Mainline bus, and head north. And plenty of people make this transfer. However, the official transfer between 7 Mainline and the Victoria Street buses is at the downtown terminal, and Victoria Street buses must turn right onto King, travel south three blocks to Gaukel, then turn right again to make the one block jaunt to the terminal. Taking this full trip means doubling back over an eight block stretch.

If you are transfering from the Victoria Street bus to the King Street bus, this isn’t much of a problem; you can get off at Victoria and King, cross the street to the King Street bus stop, and be assured that a 7 Mainline bus will be along within five or ten minutes. Going the other way, however, is more problematic, since buses on Victoria Street travel at thirty minute intervals throughout the day (and fifteen minute intervals at rush hour). So, what do you do? Do you get off the 7 Mainline at Victoria and wait as long as 30 minutes for Victoria Street bus? Or do you continue on to the terminal, and run the risk that you’ll arrive just as the Victoria Street bus is pulling out? And what about transferring to the iXpress for trips north? Again, you are forced into doubling back.

Similar problems occur at the east end of Kitchener’s downtown, by Market Square. If you’re arriving from Fairview Mall, do you transfer from the 7 Mainline to 8 University via Weber, 15 Frederick, 1 Stanley Park or 23 Idlewood at Market Square? Or do you brave the three block jaunt to the downtown terminal? This is made all the more frustrating given that King Street between Frederick and Francis compresses to just two lanes, and buses crawl along this stretch.

It is a shame that we can’t have two separate terminals at either end of the downtown core, with some frequent, rapid connection between the two.

As frustrating as the location of the Kitchener Downtown Terminal was, at least it used to offer smooth connections between local transit and inter-city buses. Emphasis on “used” to offer. In the fall of 2008, Greyhound Canada made the boneheaded decision to suspend ticket sales at the downtown terminal, forcing riders to trek a new terminal that being set up at Sportsworld. This makes catching the bus to Toronto a lot less convenient for those of us who don’t have a car, or don’t wish to drive to Sportsworld. At least with the Downtown Terminal, you could be sure of using, on average, one city bus to complete your trip from the transit centre to your home. Not so with Sportsworld, which can only be accessed by buses from Fairview Mall. And just what are people travelling to Guelph (which doesn’t access Sportsworld) supposed to do?

It seems Greyhound has acknowledged the foolhardiness of this arrangement by stationing someone with a wireless credit card machine to issue tickets, but if they’re going to do that, why not just reinstate downtown ticket sales?

Mind you, there is some blame to be laid at Grand River Transit’s door as well. GO Transit has announced that bus service between Milton and Kitchener will start this October, and it will likely serve park ‘n’ ride stops along Highway 401. It seems to me very likely that this service will terminate at the Sportsworld complex rather than continue on into downtown Kitchener. If this is the case, perhaps it’s time for the region to add a stop on the iXpress at Sportsworld, so that anybody who has to transfer at the downtown terminal need only take one express bus to get to the Greyhound ticket office, instead of transferring to yet another bus at Fairview Mall.

Connections are also a problem between Grand River Transit and VIA Rail, which runs a popular commuter service into Toronto’s Union Station. Accessed only by the half-hourly Route 18 bus from the downtown terminal, passengers from other services again have to double back. I either travel to the corner of King and Victoria and walk the remaining blocks, or take a taxi.

These little inconveniences are what keeps cars in the driveways of most people who would otherwise happily do without them. I have lived in this region for eighteen years and have lived relatively car-free for almost ten of them, so I know that one can live in the region without one. The region still has a long way to go, however, before it offers mobility approaching a level of what people enjoy in larger, more transit and pedestrian friendly centres like Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver. Fortunately, steps do appear to be being taken. More on this later.