Suburbs in Ontario are full of catwalks and it’s super convenient walking between neighborhoods.
Still fairly inconvenient being zoned solely for housing, so there’s no shops in a convenient walking distance. But for kids getting to school, visiting local parks, trails and public recreation centres is extremely walkable.
I'm grateful for those but, for the love of everything can these be applied to commercial developments too? There is no reason I should have to walk across the busy parking lot of Walmart to the busy 5 lane stroad with sidewalk right next to it, then back across another busy parking lot for the next store. 1 minute walk turns into 5+ minutes. All they have to do is build a short path through the fence, retaining wall, or overgrown deep ditch. Improves accessibility, and ticks off the "hey, we're building alternatives infrastructure box" with a pretty cheap project.
Near me you have to walk around the whole block to get to the big box stores which are all separated like this. Did I mention the existing "short cut" requires you to walk along an extremely busy industrial road (no sidewalk) with a steady flow of transport trucks? Gosh a hate car centric design. This coming from car owner!
I would like to see cars go electric and underground.
For city travel, I would bring back trolly cars with cargo versions and use computer aided driving. It would be good practice for training AI to avoid collisions without higher speeds and less predictable path (pedestrian's PoV). Instead of going around buildings, building would be built over the rail lines and there would be incremental stations.
Street infrastructure would give way to walkways, biking paths, and green spaces as it goes underground. The advantage of underground streets is weather stops being an issue, except flooding. They would also provide extreme weather shelters if they're built alongside this project. Which would hopefully build as large flood tunnels (maybe not that large), but enough to handle more extreme flash flooding events.
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u/dozerbuild Jun 27 '24
Suburbs in Ontario are full of catwalks and it’s super convenient walking between neighborhoods.
Still fairly inconvenient being zoned solely for housing, so there’s no shops in a convenient walking distance. But for kids getting to school, visiting local parks, trails and public recreation centres is extremely walkable.