Quote:
Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse
Automobiles are the solution to the problem of people living in low density areas that are difficult to serve with public transit and are therefore difficult to otherwise get around in without driving. You don't need to go to great lengths to include a solution to the problem of the difficulty of including the solution to a problem that doesn't exist. That is crazy...
My suggestion for cities so car obsessed that even developments that are impeccably dense, walkable and urban need to be altered to include parking spaces would be to simply forget the whole thing and build suburban developments with surface lots. I suspect such cities are simply beyond hope.
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You're from the North American role model for small walkable cities though, only a couple % of North America is that walkable... The Halifax Peninsula has 57% non-car commute mode share, whereas a comparably size section of central Kitchener-Waterloo has only 27% non-car commute mode share.
Saint-John for another example in your area comes in somewhere in at 40% non-car commute mode share for the central part of the city (smaller in population that what I used for Central K-W/Halifax but similar in terms of % of the Urban Area pop).
Victoria is the other highly walkable small Canadian city, the city proper (similar size to Halifax Peninsula) has 50% non-car commute mode share.
The least car oriented part of the Halifax Peninsula, the census tract around Spring Garden in Downtown has 79% non-car commute mode share. For K-W it's 47% non-car commute mode share for the student dominated Northdale census tract between UW and WLU followed by 39% for the Downtown Kitchener census tract. Uptown (Downtown) Saint John has 58% non-car commute mode share.
I don't think building urban in a place like K-W is futile, it still has walkable downtown areas, but there will be more challenges than in Victoria or Halifax.
And of course, while virtually all people who commute by car own a car, there is probably a decent number of those who don't commute by car that still own one, especially in cities like Halifax, Vancouver, Washington, etc where you have a lot of people who choose to walk or take transit but still have a car for trips to places outside the urban core.
And even if an individual development is very urban, a single development typically isn't going to radically transform how walkable a certain neighbourhood might be.