Comment 106054

By jason (registered) | Posted November 07, 2014 at 23:47:13 in reply to Comment 106052

What needs to be discussed is what happens to the traffic from Burlington, Waterdown, Dundas and Ancaster if we cut off one if not two of those major corridors into and out of the City by building an LRT.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with the current LRT plans, or perhaps have been given some 'altered' info from somewhere, but there are no routes being cut off from drivers with the LRT plan. In fact, the consultant report suggested turning Main into a two-way street to make life easier for drivers, but of course city hall axed that recommendation because they love having 5 lanes largely empty 20 hours a day, and completely useless when there are slowdowns on King.

Everyone needs to remember that east of Bay St, Main St carries around 2.5 lanes worth of traffic. East of Wellington it drops to 2 lanes worth, and never rises beyond that. We could take 2 lanes off Main for LRT and virtually not impact vehicle traffic at all, other than to make it harder for people to do 100km/hr, which 99% of the population would agree is completely dangerous and shouldn't be possible through our densest neighbourhoods.

Hamilton is in a unique situation of having lots of excess lanes that through the city that are simply not needed, as we've just seen with Cannon and York. I live near York and honestly hoped that the new bike lanes would slow things down a little, but it's still 60-80km all day long. But the buffer between sidewalk and live traffic is now much nicer and feels safer.

If folks refuse to get rid of the one-way pairs of King and Main, I say we put LRT on King as planned. This leaves it as 1 westbound lane with curb parking on the north lane, and 2 westbound lanes during rush hour. Main can go down to 3-lanes with street parking and a two-way cycle track on the north lane. Wilson can become two-way all the way to Sherman as an alternative to King, and if we make Bay St two-way, folks can avoid Main/King altogether and still get in and out of downtown and further west along Cannon or King from Bay.

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