Comment 54144

By Robert D (anonymous) | Posted December 31, 2010 at 11:39:12

Sorry, I want to have a go at this part again:

"The Federal Highway Administration’s Pedestrian Safety Report on “One-Way/Two-Way Street Conversions,” concludes that compelling reasons exist for both types of streets from a pedestrian safety perspective.

Reasons for converting to 2-way streets:
...
* Possibly: safer for pedestrians.

Reasons for maintaining 1-way streets:
...
* Possibly: safer for pedestrians."

Just focussing on that one point, both are "possibly: safer for pedestrians". I'm a little confused as how this could be. And safer compared to what? If it's to the other alternative, they seem to be saying alot of nothing.

"Well, 2-way streets are possibly safer than 1-way streets, but 1-way streets are possibly safer than 2-way streets." It's equivalent to saying this: "One of them is probably safer than the other, but we don't really know which, maybe we should just have omitted this point altogether?"

My thoughts is that the analysis in the study itself probably explains why they said what they did, perhaps there are certain configurations and situations where one-way streets are safer, but we'll never know if any of them are relevant to Hamilton without looking at the complete report.

But I have a better idea, something that perhaps SpaceMonkey will agree to:
How about we collect some statistics for where pedestrian/motor vehicle incidents have occured within the city of Hamilton, the number of fatalities, incidents where there was an external factor involved (like alcohol or weather) and then compute some statistics of or own?

Who knows, perhaps the evidnece will demonstrate two way streets are more dangerous, and we could convert Upper James, Golf Links Road, and Centennial parkway into one way streets to cut down on traffic fatalities? People would just go around and use a "twinned" street to come back the other way. Upper James could twin with West 5th, Centennial could twin with Lake Ave., and Golf Links Road...well I guess they'd have to twin with Garner. That's fine though, we'll build more roads through the residential neighbourhoods so people can cut across to Garner.

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