Comment 114959

By mdrejhon (registered) - website | Posted November 19, 2015 at 11:01:22 in reply to Comment 114843

The loss of a few mountain drivers is actually being replaced by more-than-proportionate increase in urban visitors.

The downtown died a long ago but is revitalizing. 3 independent cafes just opened within walking distance of my Lower City home. Even an early canary of bright spots on poor old Barton, the 541 Cafe, is extremely packed with lineup on Saturdays at 11am.

I'm a Toronto transplant, and amongst many, and honestly would rather use public transit / bikes / etc in the Lower City. The problem is we've got to go through a painful transition of reformatting the transportation for the Lower City, and transit-oriented developments, in order to really revitalize.

What's already been done (e.g. James St N, International Village, etc) is only about 10% of what is going to happen to Lower City Hamilton over the next 20-30 years, also in parallel to LRT developments. It will, of course, indeed, be less attractive to driving, but residents that actually live nearby to these businesses, will more than make up.

You see, Gage Park is actually within walking distance of Downtown Hamilton (I timed it: just under 40 minutes walk!), yet very few residents walk/transit this distance. Unlike many other similar size cities who actually often do more walking and transit. It's so inhospitable and unenjoyable walking between these two points (walking an expressway or walking a zigzaggy route through alleys/residential neighborhoods) but that could no longer be once Main is a 2-way street, and the King LRT corridor. Small steps have helped, we've now got the Cannon Cycle Track (Which I use gradually more often now!) and it's now finally far more fun getting downtown without a car from where I live, 25 minute walk away from downtown.

The transition can be quite haphazard, however -- like the difficulties of the Barton Village BIA -- to broken-gapped bike lanes -- to very poorly designed bus lanes that eventually got yanked -- but there are a bunch of successes, obviously (James, Ottawa, parts of IV, Arts crawls, Supercrawl, Locke, etc). Our neighborhood needs to keep up the momentum while also working with the rest of the city, including better transit connections to the mountain.

Comment edited by mdrejhon on 2015-11-19 12:28:03

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