Raise the Hammer

Just a few quick observations:

- people speed no matter what in this city it seems. Locke often has speed-racers late at night, some who don't even stop for stop signs, and others who consider the stretch from Charleton to Main to be a speedway.

- what is more a problem about Main & King is not them being one-way, it's them being so wide. John and James are not six-lanes wide at any point when it was one- or two-way. At King's narrowest point (2 lanes, I believe) its really not that bad for speeders and seems friendly to pedestrians IMO. Having three lanes one way, three another is probably going to make things way way worse for downtown pedestrians. Main around McMaster is two way, and really wide, and pedestrians seem to go out of the way NOT to walk down main it seems - if Mac was not there, the sidewalks would be barren. The main point I have here is a two-way Main or King streets would still be a parkway running through the city core.

- we forget in this debate about the failures of streets that are two way.. and the successes of ones that are one-way. Downtown revitalization has no one solution.. street changes alone won't do anything and the lack of street changes alone won't necessarily damn the core to stagnation. The two-way Barton village sure looks great from a street design standpoint, but businesses there are anything but stable and the streets are anything but safe. The brief bit of King William that is cobblestone sure looks better than it did, but I'm not sure that make-over did anything but some cosmetic changes.

- IF main were to be converted to two way, lane reductions need to occur via a central barrier garden or space for outdoor vendors. Or, ideally, light rail (think Kensington Market's Spadina in Toronto). If not, and it remained one-way, several of those lanes need to go, the space reclaimed as garden/marketplace/etc. Four lanes is the most it should ever have, three ideally. We could use the spare space as the worlds longest sidewalk market/arts space, maybe?