[URBAN NOTE] "LRT will completely transform Mississauga"

[rfmcdonald]

San Grewal's Toronto Star article predicts good things for Mississauga, as mass transit leads to densification and unification.

Big skies, wide lanes, lowrise sprawl — that’s the post-’60s identity of Mississauga, burned into the GTA psyche.

But this month marked a historic step in the rapid evolution of this giant, sprawling suburb. A multibillion-dollar LRT transformation is about to begin, promising to do for Mississauga what the subway did for Toronto.

“This is truly transformational.” Adjectives are speeding out of Ed Sajecki’s mouth. The man in charge of planning and building Mississauga can’t contain his excitement, a day after council agreed on a “memorandum of understanding” with the province to build an almost 20-kilometre light rail corridor right up Hurontario St., the centre of what will soon be the country’s fifth-largest city.

“I mean, imagine what this could mean,” Sajecki says over the phone, the words flooding out of him in a stream of consciousness. “Imagine what Toronto was like without the Yonge subway and then the Bloor subway.”

For a builder like Sajecki, being handed the opportunity to transform Mississauga from that detached post-’60s identity into an interconnected city is akin to Michelangelo, commissioned to turn the Sistine Chapel’s blue ceiling into a magnificent series of frescoes.

Sajecki describes how, as a child, he began taking the subway to High Park, on his way to the lakeshore to fish and enjoy the city’s waterfront. “You didn’t need a car, you could leave it at home; the whole city became your neighbourhood.”