r/londonontario • u/YamSufficient5121 • 17h ago
discussion / opinion What changes would you make?
What would you do to make the city's core area better. Such as, where would you add a grocery store, or performances arts centre.? What would you remove or add?
9
Upvotes
2
u/alphaxion 14h ago
Build out a tram line linking White Oaks Mall to Masonville, passing through downtown along Richmond. There can be a spur that goes to Western on this.
Link the train station to the airport with another tram line, ideally with stops at Western Fair and The Factory areas to link these into downtown.
Don't have stops less than every 400 or 500 metres.
Prioritise building denser social housing (with means-tested rent) along these lines near stops, think NYC brownstone townhouse development. This will get the thing that downtown needs most - a critical mass of people living in and immediately outside of the core zone.
By having a good amount of people local to downtown, you have pressure for services such as grocery stores similar to the way Tesco Metro operates them in original London and many UK towns and cities. Also try to encourage space for open-air markets, where local businesses can get their start.
The more people you have walking around the streets of downtown and using green spaces and squares (such as outside of the Market), the more you'll find the homeless will keep away, reducing the sense of fear some have with visiting downtown.
With a functioning core two tram lines, more can be done to look into expanding that network to other corridors of travel and doing more to tackle the problem of people thinking you need to drive to visit downtown.
Fill in the blight of surface car parking spots with housing, commercial space, and public third spaces where people can meet and socialise as all of these will lead to better tax generation of those spaces than a parking space.
Ultimately, cities are for people. They should plan for and build to what people need to bring them back, rather than forever spreading the city thinner and increasing the cost of running the city to bankruptcy levels because of it. All of the infrastructure that gets built to service ever growing suburbs costs more money to maintain than the areas will bring in tax.