Comment 92383

By JustinJones (registered) - website | Posted September 20, 2013 at 15:04:15 in reply to Comment 92366

@engineer: I actually tend to disagree with you - traffic calming, complete streets and road diets ARE applicable and appropriate for ALL situations in an urban setting. Highways can be exempt from that, but there is no reason at all that every single street in an urban environment shouldn't be accessible to each and every person who wants or needs to access it.

As it is right now, our streets are inaccessible to people with disabilities, children, seniors, those who can't afford to drive, those who choose not to drive and a myriad of other people whose needs are not served by the roads - a public good that we all pay for through our property taxes.

And when it comes to the recommendations from experts, we've been hearing from literally dozens of them, from renowned architects like Ken Greenburg to activists like Gil Penalosa that our network of high-speed, one-way streets has got to change in order to make our city more liveable and desirable.

If you ask an engineer whose only concern is the rapid movement of traffic, then yes, they're going to say that a network of wide, fast moving streets ripping through the core of our city is a good thing, but when you ask people who are interested in providing mobility options, who know how to build a liveable city, and who know that roads must function to move PEOPLE, not cars, then you start to get much different answers.

We have some of the latter group here in the City of Hamilton at the staff level, the problem is that there are still those who are in the former camp that dig in their heels in the belief that allowing fast-moving traffic is going to somehow revitalize the downtown core. Until the downtown is a place that you go TO rather than somewhere you go THROUGH, people like Ryan can't stop questioning the logic that we're going to become more prosperous by following the same logic that hollowed out so many other North American cities in the past 3 decades.

Comment edited by JustinJones on 2013-09-20 15:06:20

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