CBBarnett
Senior Member
Like many similar situations, it's kind of hard to imagine how this development would do any of the things that the neighbours are concerned about. Here's the layout, with the development not triggering any new accesses to Bonaventure Drive - I find it difficult to imagine how a few more apartments will meaningfully change the lived experience here, apart from having a refresh of the stores and shops in the old retail plaza.
Yellow is the new tower, green is the seniors apartments:
I wish we could flip the script here - concerns about traffic and safety for senior pedestrians are not development concerns in this case, they are existing concerns that have persisted for so long that everyone is numb to them, so people start to think the status quo is acceptable and any change is risky.
Frankly, the status quo of the public realm is abysmal - perhaps with the smallest asterisk to caveat that statement is that I can think of countless locations that are even worse. Bonaventure Drive sidewalks and the whole MacLeod Trail / Heritage Drive/ Heritage Station public realm setup is remarkably anti-pedestrian, despite significant development in the past. This is true with or without this new tower. The development can't and won't change the number of wide/sweeping truck aprons in the area, it won't widen the sidewalks on Bonaventure (because it's not on Bonaventure), it can't solve the MacLeod /Heritage 4 minute signal time for pedestrians or every road in walking distance's high-speed right turn lanes.
But with seemingly no mechanisms or ability to meaningful change the current public realm at the scale required - opposing development becomes the only lever that anyone can imagine to protect them from harm. Unless systemic reform occurs to actually address the real problem (terrible, anti-pedestrian public realm today, not as a product of new development) I doubt adding 1 (or 10) towers will make it any worse.
