Comment 120728

By Tecumseh (registered) | Posted February 08, 2017 at 19:17:05 in reply to Comment 120727

Would I take a proper Dutch CROW design over the one I proposed? You bet! I agree with you 100% on the safety of our streets, as compared to our workplaces for instance, as you point out. (Some days I ask myself how we ever decided cars were a good idea on our city streets in the first place, which for the majority of human history were true public spaces.)

So in my feedback to LRT staff my first preference was to NOT add traffic lanes back, and to consider 2-way conversion of Main St instead. We should not be moving backwards in that respect.

But as much as I agree with you Kevin, there are probably on the order of hundreds of thousands of people in the city who disagree with us on the importance of safely accommodating all modes of transportation on all streets. So maybe I'm pessimistically hedging my bets in presenting a starting point for discussion that assumes traffic engineers will get their way on accommodating additional car traffic. But if applying best practices at every instance was realistic (politically, economically, physically, etc.), there would be far less need for engineers. I'd suggest engineers are precisely most necessary when competing constraints are present, and a solution that is not pre-made needs to be, well, engineered. Without knowing the full scope of constraints at play here, and hearing from all stakeholders, it's not really possible to know what can work for the community, and what can fly politically (let alone get an engineering design that navigates all of that too). Anyway, I hope once the LRT staff come back to the community for input your voice is there too Kevin, because maybe we should be aiming higher than the idea I've presented here for consideration.

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