Vaughan's continued growth in a car-dependent sprawl format is unlikely to change with this addition of yet another experiment in bringing costly urban transit to the suburbs. Lets just be real here. If anything, some of council's actions suggest that they aren't actually all that serious about changing the status quo in a meaningful way.
I guess this where I fundamentally disagree. I believe that with the right policies and the right investments we can retrofit suburbs and we can do better. If you want to be more cynical and say places like Vaughan can never meaningfully change, you're obviously entitled to that opinion.
Some municipalities have been better than others in responding to the shift of the past decade and change; I think Markham is obviously more amenable to a real shift than Vaughan is, for example. (And of course, they can't have the subway to serve their extremely ambitious plans because there's no capacity. But that's a whole other issue.)
And I am well aware of Vaughan's flaws and under no illusions the city has overnight given up on auto-centric development. But I also believe that the city and the landowners are sincerely invested in trying to make VMC work. They typically wait years to do things like a library in a new subdivision but they're already moving forward with that and a YMCA in VMC, trying to make it a real destination. The alternative, which is the terrible forms of development Vaughan built almost exclusively for 30 years, is no alternative at all.
If you're uninspired, that's your right too. I see Smart Centres passing over Walmart for KPMG as a fundamental change. The company that is perhaps more responsible for shitty big box retail than anyone else in Canada deciding to go all-in on transit-oriented mixed-use development strike me as "inspriational," even if they are still building crap elsewhere at the same time.
You think the first office tower there is "massively undersized" and I don't know by what standard you measure that but I know that, even in this condo boom, there are very few places people are willing to try 50-storey condo towers in the GTA, and this is one of them. On lands that would otherwise be a Walmart parking lot. (And given that fact, a compact 6-storey lot adjacent to a bus terminal is an improvement all on its own.) I know that the existing employment uses in that area are old school, low-rise industrial parks and aesthetically and economically, that KPMG tower is clearly superior.
It ain't perfect and neither of us will know for years whether this experiment worked but this is very embodiment of the Growth Plan - to build suburban nodes around rapid transit after decades of sprawl - and I believe in that vision, so I'm hoping they can pull it off rather than taking shots at it while it's still in the crib. I guess those are my thoughts
