Once upon a time, drivers could use King Street to get directly between the downtown Kitchener and uptown Waterloo cores.
It was a different era. Stephen Harper was prime minister, the Toronto Blue Jays were contenders, and nobody had heard of fidget spinners.
Think we’re laying it on a little thick? Consider this: The Region of Waterloo estimates that its population rose by about 9,000 from 2015 to 2016.
Extrapolating those numbers, there are likely more than 15,000 people in the region who either moved here or were born after King closed between Victoria and Wellington streets.
The two-year closure came to an end Friday afternoon, when a nondescript black sedan became the first non-construction motor vehicle to use the reopened King Street. (For the record, it was headed toward downtown Kitchener.) Plenty more soon followed.
Anyone checking out the area for the first time in a while would have noticed some big changes.
The most obvious of those changes would be that the street is significantly lower than it was before.
King used to be level with the rail tracks, meaning drivers would regularly have to stop and wait for train traffic to clear before they could proceed.
Now a bridge has been built to hold up the tracks, with the road passing underneath.
“I think people will see it as a major improvement … for moving traffic in this part of the city,” Regional Chair Ken Seiling said in an interview.
Rail tracks still pass by at street level – but now they’re parallel to the road. Instead of carrying passenger and freight trains, they’re part of the Ion light rail network.
Other changes aren’t yet quite as visible to the naked eye. A retail plaza still sits along King at the end of Moore Avenue, although many of its storefronts now sit empty and the lower roadway means it can’t be accessed directly from street level.
In time, the plaza will be demolished. A new development featuring retail outlets, office space and three high-rise condo towers has been proposed for the site.
The closure had initially been scheduled for 18 months, which would have had it ending near the beginning of 2017.
Even that timetable was unusually long for a roadwork project. Regional officials credit that to the complexities of having to keep train traffic active for the duration of the construction.
Negotiations with rail companies and technical issues were the main reasons the closure was extended to 24 months, Seiling said.
With reporting by Stu Gooden
