Comment 121596

By kevlahan (registered) | Posted June 07, 2017 at 08:57:50

Adrian makes an important point: it is not just those residents who "chose" to live on an arterial street who are harmed by a poorly designed artery that is dangerous for cyclists and pedestrians, it is everyone in the neighbourhood who must cross or walk along these streets to go about their daily business.

Unless you force everyone to drive everywhere (which is directly counter to the City's own policy), even people who do "choose" to live on side streets are affected by the poor designs of minor and major arteries.

Again, the point is not (as Councillor Ferguson seems to believe) to turn arteries into side streets, but to ensure that arteries are safer and more convenient for pedestrians and cyclists (and safer for motorists) while still carrying larger volumes of traffic.

And we know what to do: wider sidewalks, safe pedestrian crosswalks at most intersections and slower traffic (at the very least traffic should not be travelling faster than the legal speed limit).

Shockingly, streets like Queen are actually designed for highway speeds of 70-100 km/h and for illegal average running speeds of 60-80km/h!

https://www.raisethehammer.org/article/2...

This is clearly unacceptable, especially in a densely populated area like Durand/Kirkendall.

Two way conversions are a good compromise for achieving safer traffic speeds: the total number of lanes is not reduced, it makes it easier for motorists to reach destinations (and reduces traffic by eliminating the need for doubling back). But it does lower speeds and increase driver attention because of the effect of oncoming traffic.

Two way could actually be beneficial during LRT construction and afterwards by providing motorists more flexibility in reaching destinations.

Queen North of Herkimer is particularly bad in that it is largely empty outside of an hour or so in the afternoon rush hour (as shown in the photo), has multiple blocks with no safe crossing points (e.g. none between Charlton and Aberdeen), no buffer on the sidewalks and very narrow sidewalks at some locations (e.g. between Charlton and Herkimer on the West side the sidewalk is a about 1.5m wide and cars often bump up onto the sidewalk due to the bend in the road just before Herkimer!).

Note the schoolchildren waiting to cross at Charlton and the narrow sidewalks very close to the cars on the left side:

https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.2517654,-79.8817944,3a,75y,75.56t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1soYn-cWepxUdGwOa76iwx9Q!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1

Comment edited by kevlahan on 2017-06-07 09:08:37

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