Raise the Hammer

The city has made it repeatedly clear that they have no interest in making Cannon and Main 2-way... what I can't help but notice is that they also seem to have no interest in making those streets safe.

Look, there are many fast streets. I'd argue that the usual comments about streets on the mountain is kind of a red herring, because outside of rush-hour the traffic on Rymal or Garth is every bit as fast and scary as the traffic on Main and Cannon.

But you know what is different? What's next to the roads. Name me one high-speed street on the mountain that has the sidewalk directly adjacent to a live traffic lane, without even a grassy boulevard giving parents a moment to rescue their kid darting into the street. Where the ramps of the driveways occur in the same space parents are pushing strollers? There are parts of Cannon where it seems like businesses have their entire frontage sidewalk sloping into the road.

Urban highways happen just fine without one-way streets, it's just most of them aren't as obvious as our Main and Cannon with their one-way signs. But you know what doesn't happen in most urban highways? Pedestrians standing not three feet from traffic going at 50 kph. That, to me, is the big difference. Sidewalks next to a highway.

Many of Ontario's actual regional highways do have sidewalks... with a ditch separating them from traffic.

I mean, look at the 403 Bridge to Westdale - when it was built, it had a live traffic lane next to pedestrians. When the city put in bike lanes, they first tried little meaningless plastic bollards. Since then, the city has upgraded it to proper Jersey barriers. Now? That walking path is comparatively safe.

Of couse, we can't line all of Cannon with concrete barriers. It would make street-side parking impossible, for example, and coverage wouldn't be perfect anyways because of the aforementioned driveways. Also it would be prohibitively expensive.

So what can we do? We can slow traffic down, obviously. We could at least put some space between the live traffic and the pedestrians with more parking lanes and bike lanes. We could take out a lane of traffic and add some grassed boulevards like occurs on every high-speed street in the suburbs. We could do something instead of just having a sidewalk next to a highway.