Comment 77842

By timd (anonymous) | Posted June 01, 2012 at 20:14:31

One of the finer aspects of Vancouver traffic engineering is the fact that there are no highways in the city--all the major throughways are two-way streets, and in the downtown, a lot of them have two-way segregated bike lanes as in the illustration above. The reason traffic moves just fine is because of the abundance of feasible routes, since one street is as good as another. Relying on one or two main roads to move the bulk of traffic is crazy. Cut down the lanes on Main and King and traffic will naturally disperse.

That said, the reason there are no highways downtown Vancouver isn't due to any decision making at city hall, but because neighbourhoods got together and rejected the proposed development (and saved a substantial chunk of Chinatown in the process*). How long will it take before Hamiltonians realize that city hall is not and has never been invested in their lives, their families or their neighbourhoods? Probably not until every last inch of spare land has been blacktopped, striped, and assigned a parking space number.

*It must be noted that Hogan's Alley, a predominantly black neighbourhood (and home to Jimi Hendrix's grandma!), was destroyed before development on a thoroughfare into downtown was halted.

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