[Elmira Guy]

Sorry

Originally Posted by vid

Please don't quote an entire post full of photos without removing the photos. Especially when they're larger than 800x600.

Thunder Bay is similar to Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge-Guelph. Two (or three) downtowns all lined up, two separate cities, and people from one city rarely go to the other, but unlike KW, we have a place between the two cities where everyone meets. It's basically two separate cities with one overlapping big box area. (We have less big box stores per capita than other cities this size, since they're all optimally located in the middle of the city.) In that aspect it is better because we have less urban sprawl dedicated to shopping areas, and have got sort of a downtown out of it as well. The downside is our residential areas aren't very dense. Like KW, an LRT line (or at least BRT) would be somewhat feasible here. (Especially since we already have a rail corridor linking both downtowns, Intercity including our largest mall, and the airport.) Our university and college don't line up though. Each of our downtown areas has its own thing going, so there is more variety in downtowns, unlike Toronto which really only has one actual downtown.

There are benefits and negatives to this urban model. It's pretty common in Europe, the metro area of Frankfurt is really hundreds are cities, Frankfurt proper probably isn't much bigger than KW itself but the region has millions of people.