Raise the Hammer

Exactly. It's a complicated trade-off being made there. Obviously people living near Cannon and Main get a look at the downside up close and personal.

But it's a trade-off. I can see the city's case for Main and Cannon. King I won't discuss because LRT is going to change King's situation a fair bit - 1-way but very narrow.

The rest of the streets just seem to offer almost no gains, except maybe for a handful of exceptions like Wellington/Victoria connecting the Main/Cannon corridor to Burlington Street, or Queen South running down to Beckett (but if James and John work well 2-way and they go up to the Jolley Cut, Queen South could stand to be 2-way too). But either way, streets like that have some justification for being 1-way. Is it good enough? Well, that depends who you talk to, and depends on the street. Victoria and Wellington are solidly residential, for example. Queen North connecting the end of Cannon to King is part of the westbound corridor, but the buildings along Queen North are nicely set back away from the sidewalk and generally commercial, not the kind of crammed residential street-wall that makes me queasy to see stuck in 1-way like Wellington/Victoria.

It's a matter of costs and benefits, and where you draw the line. Spacemonkey obviously has a different line he draws from most of the posters on the site, but his point is valid too - the benefits for keeping these side-streets 1-way that aren't part of the major corridors (or urban highways if you like) seem ludicrously low, so even somebody who advocates for our urban highway system totally agree there's no reason to keep them one-way.

I mean, I'm a fence-sitter, but that might be caused by the fact that I don't live anywhere near Cannon.

But what possible reason could Charlton have for being 1-way? Duke St? Hughson?