Raise the Hammer

well I guess we now know who one of the people driving 80-90km/hr was.

Great response by Farr, although what a complete waste of his time.

And re: The Spec, what on earth was that today? You can't round up today's paper and use them at your local bonfire fast enough. What an awful bunch of 'reporting' and fact-checking. They had a piece about Locke St which starts with whining and complaining about restaurants and the city not providing parking by a guy who gets crushed in every election in Ward 1. The restaurants are all booming and bringing people/biz to the street. And the city installed a huge parking lot over a year ago which sits mostly empty all day long.

Then, further complaints in the article about rents rising. Heaven forbid ONE street in Hamilton not remain economically depressed and dirt cheap forever. If these business owners are so in love with cheap, why aren't they on Kenilworth Ave??

Just a tire fire of a newspaper today

Where is the city parking lot on locke st you mention?

I assume he's referring to the lot behind Starbucks.

Comment edited by DBC on 2016-09-10 09:19:44

yes, that is correct.

I drive a portion of Herkimer everyday during afternoon rush hour. The only time there has been any kind of backup on that road was when the Queen St access/Beckett drive was closed recently. Once the access re-opened, traffic on Herkimer was back to normal, with no backlogs.

The Bike Share data -- alone -- just seals the deal!

That said: I can certainly concede that the useful Herkimer/Charlton bike lanes could be improved (the way the configuration changes somewhat inconsistently, albiet understandably due to the legacy disjointedness of the street) -- but the changes are useful.

To make parking-protected bike lanes more balanced, let's paint them green. Including through intersections. The bike lanes look too much like parking lanes, maybe that's what people are complaining about. New York City already does this.

That's New York City's "better version" of the parking protected bike lane found on Herkimer and Charlton. Let's "finish" the job and paint the lanes green -- and also delineate parking spots better.

Road users thinking the lanes are crazy, need to realize it's often just a simple fix like the above, when they realize what New York City has done. Red Herring, My Ass! Excuse diversion, excuse diversion -- by the truckful.

Hamilton's street parking spots have been very poorly labelled, with no tickmarks (even Toronto has them), and creates confusion with poorly marked bike lanes. We need a new Road Paint Standard. Cement this better. Make this less confusing for ALL users (pedestrians, cars, bikes) -- just like New York City.

New York City has cars parked "in the middle of the road" too, in some parts --

And it's working there.

Perhaps, related to this, this needs to be a #YesWeCannon style movement, to fix the flaws in our local bike infrastructure -- complete the Hunter cycle track all the way to Stinson -- figure out the Cannon cycle track gap near Sherman Ave -- properly paint the bike lanes -- etc.

90% of the Herkimer-Charlton layout is fine. A major part of the last 10% will be more difficult/expensive (whether it be the cost of green paint or a bike-friendly bumpout), but we should at least expedite the green paint as being a Requirement for parking-protected bike lanes and through intersections.

Yes, it'll even make me happier as a car driver -- I will immediately notice the green paint through intersections and watch much more carefully for bikes when turning, for example. And I'll be less nervous driving not being confused between a bike lane and a parking lane, when the differences between the two are clear. But that's simple details that are easily fixable.

It just needs relatively minor refinements -- and these traffic excuses are diversion bullshit when the Herkimer-Charlton lanes are being falsely framed as being more disruptive to traffic than LRT. (huh? Even this pro-LRTer acknowledges LRT will be nominally disruptive to traffic...but _this_? Litterbox material.)

Comment edited by mdrejhon on 2016-09-09 15:13:32

Great comments! Those NYC lanes were one of our precedent examples we used in advocating for parking protected lanes on Herkimer and Charlton. We absolutely wanted the green paint too, but alas, city staff did not incorporate into the final design. As you said, hopefully we can continue to push for improvements to these lanes and others in the city!

our cycling office has come a LONG way, but they really need to get over their fear of green paint. I don't get it. It's universally used for adding a bold, visible touch to bike lanes. So cheap and simple.

I don't see a voting pane anymore. Why is this comment greyed out?

Let's look at the facts:

1. Whitehead has systematically criticized any efforts at street calming, two way conversion and bike lanes in the lower city.

2. He has repeatedly stated that he believes the primary purpose of these streets is to make it quick and easy for commuters to get to and from the Mountain ("essentially main thoroughfares for residents living on the mountain").

3. He insists on misrepresenting these particular streets as "main thoroughfares" (by which I assume he means arterials) when they are in fact local collectors. They used to be classified as "minor arterials" before 2011. His comments imply he would indeed like them to revert to their "minor arterial" classification (i.e. "wind these streets back").

4. There is concrete traffic measurement evidence for speeding, including extremely high speeds, at all times of the day on these streets before the bike lanes were introduced. This evidence comes from the speed trailer last year and the 2002 Durand Traffic Study. Whitehead does not appear concerned by this, and indeed would prefer higher speeds.

It is a fair summary of these positions to say that he wants "wind these streets back to a time when cut-through traffic tore through these urban neighbourhoods at dangerously high speeds at all hours of the day."

p.s. I live on Charlton between James and Queen!

Comment edited by kevlahan on 2016-09-09 15:45:44

I live at Herkimer/Bay St. The protected bike lanes have done a wonderful job at slowing down traffic. Walking along Herkimer between Queen and James can be terrifying during the week, with traffic blasting through at ridiculous speeds. Crossing the street was always dangerous. The new lanes have made a great difference to us.

edit: I would like to add that almost all parking spots along Herkimer, between Queen and James, are filled up instantly at 8am by hospital staff. All morning we see individuals in scrubs ditching their cars for the entire day along our street because they won't pay for parking at their place of employment. I would also move for metered parking along Herkimer and Charlton to curb this abuse of our neighborhood.

I will soon be moving into Mr. Whitehead's ward. I will vote against him at every opportunity.

Comment edited by eriks on 2016-09-09 15:38:13

When I lived at Charlton and John, I felt the same thing with regards to HHS staff who park on side streets to avoid paying for parking in any of the nearby lots. We used to have them come and park in our condo's visitor parking!

I have also moved from the base of the escarpment to Ward 8, and if you're moving into the Rolston neighbourhood, let me know - We can use as many engaged citizens as possible in our ward and neighbourhood!

I also live on Herkimer and agree with almost everything you have said.

One error.....the St. Joe's employees take all of the on street parking by 7 AM. All day every weekday.

I work at St. Joe's (don't drive to work except maybe a half dozen times per year), so I thought I could share a bit more information about hospital parking demand and its management.

At present there is a waiting list of something like (as I recall) 700 people for on-site hospital parking, and it takes something like 7 years to get past the waiting list. Many of the SJHH employees who park in Corktown and Durand do so because they can't get on-site parking, not because they refuse to pay for it.

Now, I would argue that the existence of a waiting list is indicative of below-market pricing, i.e. a subsidy for parking for those who have parking passes, but that's largely irrelevant to the issue of spillover parking: if the hospital raised its parking prices, then some people would give up their parking passes and others would pay more for them, but the total number of staff using hospital parking would be the same, and the demand for spillover parking would be the same.

There are also large numbers of patients (and families) and students who access the hospital who have no access to staff parking passes. They can pay for visitor parking which gets expensive very quickly.

The demand for spillover parking is determined by a number of factors: the availability of hospital parking, the cost and convenience of spillover parking, and the cost and convenience of alternatives to driving and parking. The supply of hospital parking is not realistically going to increase. St. Joe's has hardly any undeveloped land. Land in Corktown and Durand is very expensive and besides neither neighbourhood would stand for a new hospital parking lot being created by tearing down buildings.

The convenience of spillover parking is already being managed by the city with measures such as parking meters and 3 hour limits on many neighbouring streets. Other streets have all-day unlimited parking. The city's management of parking leaves much to be desired. Rather than an arbitrary geographic division between short-term metered parking, medium-term free parking, and long-term free parking, they should enable parking of any duration on any street with available parking and charge fees according to demand (likely this would mean higher fees closer to the hospital). People who use the hospital would likely consider it unfair if they had to pay parking charges according to the free market while local residents could buy cheap street parking permits, however. The solution to this problem would be a parking benefit district, which would return some portion of revenue to the local neighbourhoods to support local improvements.

Creating more convenient alternatives to driving and parking is the better way out here, which should not come as a surprise to most people on this forum.

So I'm not just railing against staff who park off site, there is an enormous lot at John/Charlton that could easily be built into a parkade, or the parking near Corktown park, or the lots just down John or James, but it's easier (and cheaper) to circle the blocks a few times to grab a free space on the street.

Out of curiosity, how much is a space per year for onsite parking at St. Joe's? How many spaces are there, and how many people work there (if you know)? I can't seem to find any numbers related to these topics, at least not easily.

The John/Charlton lot is private. Almost all of the people who park there are employees, mostly ones on the wait list. They pay more than those who have parking passes at the hospital. Yeah, that doesn't make sense.

The other lots you mention are private as well. They haven't been turned into parkades probably because it wasn't a good business venture for the landowners when land was cheap, and now that land is getting more expensive they might be looking at more lucrative land uses in the long term. That's speculation on my part, but I doubt any new parking garages would go up without public money, and I'm not sure where the public money would come from. Parking garages are crazy expensive to build.

Parking is now about $100 per month for those who can get it. I think about 2000 people work at the Charlton site.

Comment edited by John Neary on 2016-09-13 19:11:03

you'd think eventually mixed use buildings would get built around here and excess underground parking can be included like you see at many buildings in Toronto. I routinely park in condo or office buildings in Toronto when I drive there.

I hope that will happen too, but that is not going to suck up all of the demand for hospital parking. As long as parking is cheap in Corktown and Durand, people accessing the hospital are going to want to use it. The only way to really prevent parking spillover is to make on-street parking very expensive. There are obviously a lot of tradeoffs in doing so.

Comments like these from TW keep annoying me, but what annoys me more is the fact there is no penalty for a cllr that repeatedly spews false and misleading information. There is no standard on what is minimally acceptable data collection for decision making. No rules for what be said about "concerned citizens/businesses" from other wards that don't wish to be identified... Best I can come up with is from the code of conduct:

Members of Council shall be committed to performing their functions with integrity and to avoiding the improper use of the influence of their office, and conflicts of interest, both apparent and real;

Comment edited by GrapeApe on 2016-09-09 19:58:15

Councillor Whitehead just said to Bill Kelly that a car door was smashed off as a result of this project.

Umm, I'm no genius, but I"m going to guess a car door would be smashed off by someone flinging their door open without looking to see if cars were coming first. This is the fault of the door operator, not the bike lane. I actually hope this happened. Would show the clear reason why we need the buffer between parked cars and bike lanes.

How a city councillor could even dream of going on radio and trying to place blame anywhere other than the person getting out of their car not doing so in a safe manner like we were all taught when we got our license shows the complete lack of common sense and understanding he has on basic issues.

Yeah. "A car door was smashed off - don't you know that's where the cyclist was supposed to be?"

There is a very good chance Whitehead just made this up because he thinks it could happen, just like he has made up or deliberately got wrong many other 'facts' (e.g. number of cyclists, classification of the streets).

Three points.

1. If this the weren't a parking protected lane the driver would have opened the door into the path of cyclists, with a very good chance of killing or maiming the cyclist especially if a car was travelling by at the same time. If this really happened it is an early demonstration of how these lanes have increased safety and protected cyclists from inattentive motorists.

2. A motorist is responsible for checking and visually ensuring the path is clear and safe before opening the door. The fact motorists often forget to do this is one of the main motivations behind the parking protected design.

3. The parking spots are wide enough that if the driver parked close to the inside line there should be plenty of space to open the door without coming into conflict with moving vehicles.

Comment edited by kevlahan on 2016-09-10 11:41:12

Maybe in a roundabout fashion Terry is actually asking for Queen St. to be fully converted to 2-way traffic all the way to Main or King... or York if one dares to think that far. Surely that would shave off the equivalency [sic] of at least five days of the additional ten per year in a car being caused by these bike lanes. Surely?

Comment edited by ScreamingViking on 2016-09-11 00:16:51

Yeah maybe he has some mental block that makes him incapable of speaking out in favour of a progressive idea, and behind every lie and hateful commented towards citizens is a tear of sadness that he'll never get to experience the joy of riding a bike in Hamilton.

Comment edited by AnjoMan on 2016-09-12 10:12:17

you're a better person than I.

I would be more inclined to think this is a roundabout way of him suggesting all the homes on Herkimer and Charlton be demolished so we can build a 10 lane expressway, along with a double deck freeway over the Queen Street Hill.

That's plausible too.

When will someone recognize that real people actually live on the Queen St hill, and it is a nightmare of congestion during the rush hours and speed during the rest of the time. Our safety is at risk every time we walk down our own street. Please, please, please add a buffer between the sidewalk and the street, add back street parking, and make it two lanes again. We live here.

There is no nightmare of congestion according to https://raisethehammer.org/article/3074/...

During rush hours, it is a steady line of cars in the left turn lane from the end of Beckett to the bottom of Queen (at Aberdeen) weekdays from 7:15 to 9:00 am, and 4pm to 6 pm. I cannot turn into my own driveway if I get home between 4 and 6 pm for fear of being hit by the vehicles coming down the right lane. The rest of the day and night it is just a steady stream of loud, fast-moving traffic up and down the hill. There is no buffer between the sidewalk and the street to protect pedestrians, and cars often hit the curb. When it rains, the cars in the right lane are going so fast the spray of water completely covers the sidewalk (and the person walking on that sidewalk). I suppose "congestion" was the wrong choice of words. It's not congestion, it's just a major highway running through an old neighborhood, with too many cars often going too fast, and it is a daily nightmare for all of us who live on Queen and Aberdeen.

yea I've often looked at the grand old homes there and thought "no chance I would live here with this awful highway running by". You regularly see cars on the sidewalk taking turns too fast. Heck, the city even installed knockdown sticks near the bend. The lanes are wide....I wish they would put bike lanes on the QSH from Fennell to Glenfern. It could be done asap simply by narrowing the car lanes and removing the centre painted off section.

Don't begin the left turn lane NB until the straight section of Queen, N of Glenfern.

Better yet, make it 1 lane each way right up to Stuart St and remove the left turn lane (or make it a short, typical left turn lane).

You could try linking the Queen Street Hill section with the plan to calm Aberdeen which is being led by Councillor Aidan Johnson: they have similar issues of high speed traffic and no buffers. Unfortunately, Councillor Whitehead strongly opposed any suggestion of traffic calming on Aberdeen and that has slowed the whole process down.

It is too bad that no efforts to calm traffic and provide a buffer for pedestrians were included when the Queen Street Hill road was rebuilt recently for $6 million! They could have included an up-bound cycle lane, or extended the sidewalks, for example.

Incidentally, before the bike lane on Charlton drivers would be annoyed (sometime honking) and not slow down when I tried to turn into my driveway on Charlton. The mentality was clearly that they don't expect anyone to actually live on these streets.

Speed is a real issue: so much so that the City has added "SLOW" signs and pavement markings.

There is obviously some heavy traffic during the relatively short rush hours, but Councillor Whitehead was claiming the streets were backed up all the way onto the mountain because of the bike lanes, and that they had caused grid lock. Having Queen Street two-way would likely ease some of the traffic issues, rather than having all northbound traffic funnelled onto Herkimer. The Google traffic view does not show "red" all the way down the Queen Street Hill, or on Herkimer.

Some sort of buffer between the sidewalks and the road would be helpful.

Comment edited by kevlahan on 2016-09-15 16:00:18

Agreed. Speed and volume are the real issues, and a 30kph speed limit, two lanes rather than three, and a buffer between the sidewalk and the street would go a long way to calming the street.

I don't know where Mr. Whitehead lives, but I'm pretty sure he would not enjoy a "highway" in his front yard with cars hopping the curb of his sidewalk on a daily basis.

What is shocking to me is that the traffic planners actually came up with the idea to ruin an old neighborhood just so more cars could move faster through it. Very disheartening to know that speed is more important than safety and liveability.