Comment 105934

By jason (registered) | Posted November 04, 2014 at 15:17:06 in reply to Comment 105928

The Hamilton trolls never let you win no matter how much data or info you share. I've said for years I'd be happy as heck with one-way streets like they have in Vancouver, Portland, Montreal etc.... But the reply is always some nonsense about why our city can't handle anything less than disgusting Main or King st freeways. heck, Portland has more one-ways than us by a country-mile.

Most look like this downtown: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9eppEJtsnd8/UP...

And like this in old urban hoods like Hamilton's lower city/central/east hoods:
http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5523/10698...

What we've just done to Cannon EAST of Victoria is the first safe, complete, one-way street on a main road in Hamilton.

Like Vancouver, Portland intentionally made the decisions to build their city with transport OPTIONS instead of becoming like LA. Now even LA doesn't want to be like LA anymore and is building LRT, subways, bike lanes and road diets across the entire metro area. Hamilton could have learned before it was too late, but instead we continue to spend tons of money on new roadways like West 5th, Barton, King, Kenilworth with no changes to their mode share. All cars, all the time, and way more capacity than we need. Which will cost us way more to upkeep than we can afford.

I've mentioned this before too, but some more recent examples to show how when a city population is used to proper one-way streets, they are discussed as rational, legit options for traffic calming and revitalization:

http://www.oregonlive.com/beaverton/inde...

Folks in the Portland metro area don't have the bad associations with one-ways that we all have. Because 95% of theirs are human scaled, complete streets full of thriving business. Here, a suburban downtown is considering getting rid of it's 5 lane street (2 lanes each way, centre turn lane) and replacing it with a 2-lane one way street to accommodate wider sidewalks, bike lanes and parking on both sides.

A couple of years ago in Montreal, a cycle track was installed on a major two way street downtown. The biggest complaint from the cycling community was that the cycle track was too narrow and inferior to the others ones in the city that are almost exclusively on one-way streets because the number of lanes required for the two-way street ate into cycling space. They recommended converting it to a one-way street in order to lose 1 or 2 lanes of car traffic.

Comment edited by jason on 2014-11-04 15:23:47

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