Comment 99744

By kevlahan (registered) | Posted April 03, 2014 at 18:10:54

It might make sense to determine ahead of time which streets the citizen's panel should consider and which should be decided by the neighbourhood or ward with the support of the councillor and advice of city staff (traffic engineers).

A reasonable suggestion would be that only major-arterial streets would need input from outside the ward or neighbourhood. Minor arterials, collectors and local streets would not.

This makes sense as only the major arterial streets primarily serve people outside the ward and are intended to carry larger volumes of traffic.

For example, Cannon, King, Main, Hunter and Queen would be considered by the panel, but Bay, Herkimer, Charlton (minor arterials) and MacNab and Park (locals) would not.

As other commenters have pointed out, the concern from Mountain councillors is over big arterial streets that are heavily used by commuters from their wards. It really doesn't seem fair to have someone living 10km away decide that a local, collector or minor arterial street cannot be converted to two-way or re-made as a complete street even though the residents are demanding the change!

This agrees with City policy, which describes traffic calming as "where required" for local, collector and minor arterial but "not applicable for "major arterial". (Of course, I would argue that even major arterials need traffic calming, but this at least suggests there needs to be a more in-depth analysis of major arterials).

http://www.hamilton.ca/NR/rdonlyres/8B22...

The classification of all roads in Durand is given in Appendix E of the Durand Traffic Study Environmental Assessment:

http://www.hamilton.ca/Hamilton.Portal/I...

The committee or neighbourhood could also recommend down-classification of some roads. For example, does it really make sense to have Hunter designated as an arterial (like Main and Queen), or for Herkimer and Charlton to be designated as minor-arterial (instead of as collectors)? Does the traffic volume on these roads warrant it (a collector can have a volume up to 8000 per day, while a minor arterial can have a volume up to 20,000 according to the road classification above).

Shockingly, in the above report the "design standard" for minor arterial roads is 70km/h, while the design standard for major arterials is 70-100km/h. No wonder people exceed 50km/h on roads that are designed to be driven safely at up to double the legal limit! These design standards should be reduced to 60km/h at most (like collectors). Why would the design standard be for 1.4 to 2.0 times the legal speed limit!

Even worse, the "average running speed" is supposed to be faster than the legal speed limit: 50-60km/h on minor arterials and collectors and 60-80km/h on major arterials. How can the traffic engineers be designing roads with the assumption that motorists should break the law!

Comment edited by kevlahan on 2014-04-03 18:30:06

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