Re: City Staff’s Light-Rail Strategy | Unpublished
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James OGrady's picture
Ottawa, Ontario
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I am the founder of Unpublished Media Inc., a company I started in 2012. I am also a communications professional and community activist, living in Nepean, Ontario. And, I am a hockey goaltender, political hack and most importantly, an advocate for grassroots, participatory democracy at all levels of government.

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Re: City Staff’s Light-Rail Strategy

February 2, 2013

If that’s the case then they obviously have no imagination because the potential economic upside to redeveloping Carling Ave. is far greater than Byron simply because of its length and the number of properties that will be redeveloped. I see a 100 years of redevelopment ahead for Carling with LRT.

50 years of redevelopment for Merivale Rd. as well if Staff understood how great the Merivale triangle would be as a LRT hub… Which is only really possible if LRT runs down Carling with a transit hub at Westgate.

By the way, the Fisher Heights Community Association supports redeveloping the Merivale triangle into a mixed-use LRT hub, just as I did in the 2010 municipal election. Unfortunately, the current strategy to redevelop the Merivale triangle is the traditional tired old commercial strip approach with relatively low to mid-rise buildings.

In this instance, mixed-used high rises are possible because the ‘triangle’ isn’t in the middle of an existing community. There are communities near it who would benefit from its redevelopment, but none who would be adversely affected, except by traffic increases, which could be alleviated with LRT. In contrast, the redevelopment of Merivale without LRT would spell disaster for Baseline-Clyde-Merivale traffic congestion.

Funny how the City pushes for intensification in all the wrong places while ignoring the obvious.