Comment 112262

By higgicd (registered) | Posted June 15, 2015 at 17:00:25 in reply to Comment 112257

As I have said a few times, I am not a proponent of this change. I fear it is distracting from a lot of great content in the full report. I will defend it as a thought exercise however, one I would be curious to hear everyone's responses.

Say you want to give Longwood a road diet through the MIP - from 4 bidirectional lanes to 2 with cycle lanes and a centre turning pocket, right up to Main. Now instead of 2 left-turn lanes you are down to 1. You also want to improve the relatively dire pedestrian environment at Longwood and Main and hopefully unlock some greater accessibility for the vacant parcel north of main and the old Acura dealership to the south.

Traffic counts from 2010, which is what we were given, indicate the road can generally support this, though peak-period traffic starts to look like it needs 2 lanes.

Longwood Traffic

So what do we do? Some auto trips will 'disappear', many will not. Do we want Longwood S to be a long line of cars turning left, idling their way up the street and emitting pollution next to higher rates of pedestrians and cyclists? Mark and I debated this several times - as an avid cyclist he argues that one nugget of an idea is to keep traffic moving via Longwood N so that all the alternative mode users won't die of lung cancer, and that the roundabout doesn't have to be the crazy highway we are all currently used to by designed according to all the other complete street measures.

Of course, we aren't traffic planners or engineers, just wanted to highlight some of the tradeoffs in complete streets implementations. That's really it, and I hope this doesn't detract from what I believe is a good review of the concept and the many research limitations that presently surround it.

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