Alan Pickersgill - The View From Here

(November 17) - A healthy body is a series of interconnected pieces that all depend on each other. As the old song sang, the knee bone is connected to the thigh bone. The liver connects to the heart. Feet are joined to the nose, often switching roles. It’s the same with a community. The connectivity becomes obvious when looking at Guelph’s stalled downtown redevelopment.

There were going to be two bookends to the downtown core: city hall to the south and the library to the north. They would be the pillars that hold everything between them together. The poles of a magnet that attracts business and people to St. George’s Square. The yang and the yin that pull us in. There are not enough clichés in the English language to do justice to the wonders we could have beheld.

Lots of people want to see a more pedestrian-friendly downtown. It’s a noble idea that requires a bigger and better transit system. It also needs parking garages where we can leave our cars while walking from one shop to another. Hence the Wilson Street Parkade. Baker Street redevelopment will bring a healthy mix of residences, offices, shops and a library. The city planners calculate that during construction, most of the Baker Street parking lot will be unusable. That’s one of the reasons they want to get Wilson Street done first. Another reason is the redesigned transit hub.

The garage on Wilson is tied, in some minds, to the GO train station that should come to Guelph in a few years. This linkage is a bit tenuous, though. It doesn’t seem wise to plunk the GO station downtown and use up valuable real estate for people to leave their cars while they leave town. If you look at a map of the GO system, most train stations are closer to the edge of town. Parking is right at the station, not a block and a half down the street. The York-Watson area seems a likelier commuter spot. Support for downtown redevelopment does not mean stuffing everything in, whether it fits or not. Parking in the core should be for the people who live, work or shop there.

Not everyone wants downtown to become a car-free and care-free pedestrian heaven. The Downtown Business Association wants to increase the traffic flow along Wyndham Street. They have compared numbers. In September 1993, 12,100 vehicles a day went through the Square. In October 1998, there were 8,300. By April of 2007 the daily total was 5,476.

They point to the traffic lights at the square as the cause of the drop. In 1998, the lights were changed to allow for all-way pedestrian crossings every time they cycled from green to red. This is known as a “pedestrian scramble” crossing. Guelph was well ahead of the curve when it was installed. Toronto set one up on the corner of Yonge and Dundas in 2008. A couple of weeks ago, London opened one in Oxford Circus, the very busy corner of Oxford and Regent Streets. About 32,000 people cross there every hour. Traffic stops every 90 seconds when all lights turn red. The world’s biggest is in Tokyo

Cars driving through town on Wyndham Street don’t put a penny’s worth of business into any of the stores. Pedestrians walking down the street do. Downtown businesses suffer from a lot of complex problems. The scramble in the square should be the least of their worries.

And what was that about the feet and nose switching roles? It happens every flu season when your nose runs and your feet smell.

# posted by Alan Pickersgill @ 4:57 PM