Raise the Hammer

I want an active healthy neighborhood. I just want lots of 400 series highways as well.

All good. I agree and share a desire for smooth flowing highways. The characteristics of the former will help the latter. Converting some trips to non-car will keep some cars off the highway. If we keep building to discourage activity, put everything far apart big box Roman villa style, and make it stressful to go outside, so you only leave the house on business as quickly as possible without loitering, then no matter how many 400 highways there are, they'll be congested and life will suck. Linc and Red Hill are already congested as some complain, and they're new highways. When the mid-pen gets built, it will be hailed as a sweet relief when it first opens. The sprawl that will inevitably congest it, is already expanding forever outwards. I will bet untold square kilometers of new subdivisions and big box crap is already awaiting development. It isn't working. So in addition to having enough highways to meet our needs, we have to change something else too, what we are doing is terminally congesting our highways. It is as effective as a heroin addict chasing the next fix. We will always need another highway, another lane. I mean my god, the 400 north of the 401 has gotta be 12 lanes wide by now, in total, and it is still not enough.

I just watched a Mythbusters where they simulated congestion. 22 cars was too much for their test track, it jammed up. They removed just two cars, and 20 cars got up to speed and stayed steady. Getting just a few people onto a GO train is decent pressure off 400 highways. Rezoning to make it easier to house more people close to the GO station is a great idea, and would be consistent with the spirit of what the report is suggesting.

That's all this report is saying - look at how you build, and what it's doing, and that we can do better. Among many things, some design changes take pressure off the whole system. 400 highways included. Unfortunately much real estate is already fixed and its repartitioning causes much dissension. So some things are mutually exclusive inside the city, unfortunately. That's where some smart planning helps.

To conclude ... so you build so you never want to go anywhere, end up ordering pizza and playing xbox instead of skateboarding across the street, the only vacancy you found was too far from the GO station so you sit on the 400 highway getting dosed with stress and inactivity and morning talk radio ... holy smokes is that ever unhealthy. Of course it's not a direct cause of diabetes, but our style of development increases the instances of it, by making it that much harder to stay healthy. I know this first hand. So much of what I've said is from experience as well. That was as well as I could explain it ... hope that was of some use applying their report to "everyday life". It's not totalitarian or eugenic to take their advice, it's smart stewardship of a community.

Comment edited by mikeonthemountain on 2014-05-21 21:14:00