Two urban planners favour electric streetcars proposed for Kitchener-Waterloo, but warn they won't end sprawl or boost the Kitchener core.
The upside of the $256-million transit scheme, unveiled Wednesday, is cleaner air and efficient, highrise housing likely to spring up along King Street, say Trudi Bunting and Pierre Filion of the University of Waterloo.
But the location of a transit station and convention centre at Victoria and King streets is problematic, they say.
Bunting figures the facility will be too far from the downtown's other end, the new farmers' market placed by politicians on the edge of the core at King and Cedar streets.
"The downtown should be more concentrated and compact, and this is stretching it, and that I see as a fundamental problem," said Bunting, professor of geography and urban planning at the University of Waterloo.
"It isn't going to help downtown Kitchener, and that's a concern."
Politicians have long had a bad habit of stretching the Kitchener core, Bunting suggested. She pointed to the failed plan of 25 years ago to place shopping malls at far ends of the core.
On the other hand, the rail link to university campuses could eventually boost the core by encouraging more university students to settle downtown. This would be a plus.
"It's not perfect. But it's a really good sign," she said of the Waterloo Region transit proposal, which is being pitched to the federal government for funding support.
Filion warns that the rail line will not dissuade families from buying detached homes in the suburbs. But it will encourage other people seeking apartments and condominiums to settle along new King Street highrises, he said.
Developers will be more inclined to erect highrises because they will see the rail line as more permanent than a bus lane. This encourages them to invest in construction, he said.
"Rail transit generally has much more impact on land uses than buses," said Filion, a professor of urban planning.
Filion and Bunting agree the region is wise to propose running its streetcars along King Street, a busy stretch between the cores.
The region should build a dedicated rail line to keep streetcars from traffic jams, said Bunting.
Meanwhile, Cambridge MP Janko Peric is pouring cold water on the rail transit proposal.
He says the project is "absolutely not" worth the big dollars that his federal Liberal government has been asked to contribute.
"There is no national impact," said Peric. "This is a really nice dream of one or two municipalities. There are so many municipalities in Ontario that have even probably better dreams. God bless them."
There are more important projects that a much larger population and larger part of the nation would benefit from, he said.
The region says its streetcar scheme, unveiled in a hurry this week, will die without a big federal funding commitment.
The plan calls for 10 kilometres of track, seven trains and seven stations linking Kitchener to the St. Jacobs market north of Waterloo, plus a Kitchener convention centre. Eventually the track will extend all the way into Cambridge.
Councillors are targeting a new, $2-billion federal fund for large-scale infrastructure projects that improve the economy or quality of life.
Peric figures his government would do better to look at projects like widening Highway 401 and improving border crossings, as a way to speed goods across the border.
Even a GO Transit rail link to Cambridge, for which the region is already seeking provincial government funding, would be a better way to spend federal funds, he said.
Other area MPs could not be reached for comment.