Comment 2297

By jason (registered) | Posted November 23, 2006 at 18:25:18

you raise a great point Ben. People wonder "where will the cars go?"
Here's my take - folks who live in Central Hamilton/East Hamilton where you used to live would take the logical route along Burlington Street and over the Skyway to get to Burlington-Toronto corridor. We keep getting references to Toronto traffic - despite the massive size difference in these cities and TO being the headquarters for corporate Canada, it's still worth thinking about. After all, folks who live in central Toronto - north of Bloor or along College/Yonge area don't simply have a highway to jump on when they want to go somewhere...they go to the nearest highway - 427,401 or DVP/Gardiner.
The next segment of downtown traffic to be diverted should be the trucks. Imagine being in the Byward Market in Ottawa and having a steel-laden transport go screaming by?? Again, trucks use our downtown as a shortcut because of the huge streets and timed lights. I have a friend who's a trucker - he told me they don't cut through downtown Toronto, London or any other city. Only here. Why? Because we make it easy for them. I live near York Blvd and regularly have trucks from Stelco/Dofasco etc....come by our place. The next segment is folks who will leave the car at home (as I've begun to do the past year and a half) to discover the wonderful world of walking/cycling and transit. Once those 3 options are viable, safe and convenient, we'll see more people take that route. Now think of this - if we can see a 15% increase in pedestrians/cyclists/transit-users, a 20% shift of central/east city dwellers using Burlington St/QEW to head to the GTA and limit all downtown trucks to only 'local delivery' in the core imagine how much less traffic there will be. And i'm being cautious. I think we could see transit/cycling increase by 20 or 30% given our built environment and close proximity of transit routes. Over time I think we'd see more than 20% of people living in Ben's old area using Burlington St/Red Hill/QEW instead of cutting through downtown. Maybe even 50% or more once Red Hill opens.

Getting some hard numbers would be good, but as you can see, my ideas here would eliminate tens of thousands of car trips in our downtown.

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