Raise the Hammer

I often wonder if the Mayor lives in the same Hamilton as the rest of us.

There is no reasonable way to suggest that there is not an excess of traffic movement capability. Not when the city routinely reduces the number of travel lanes for arbitrarily long periods of time without any reasonable cause. There's something very wrong when all we hear about is how constricted things are and yet no one seems to experience it - like on Main and King where lanes have been "disappeared" to private construction -- and there's no backup. Like when they were repaving King with traffic down to two lanes and traffic was backed up from Sherman to almost Garfield!

I think it's high time that we implemented more one way streets to improve traffic flow on similarly congested streets - like Mohawk and Fennel or Upper James and Upper Wellington.

Oh, right... they don't need it, just like lower city streets don't need it.

Does the Mayor really believe that if you take the streets and put them back to two way that we somehow magically lose traffic handling? THE SAME AMOUNT OF PAVEMENT = THE SAME AMOUNT OF PAVEMENT.

Oh, and I agree with the comments about the fetishistic desire for on-street parking. I think that if it's so important to have on-street parking, it can be paid for by the people who want it so badly. The most recent numbers I can remember seeing peg the cost of paved city street at something like $20k/km. That's a ton of investment (in terms of public dollars) for the exclusive and private use of individuals. Since there seems to be a common desire to yammer about the subsidy for transit, can we talk about the subsidy for parking? You want the spot on the street by your house, you pay. Toronto charges on a sliding scale from $13.70 (if you have no property parking) to $47.98 if you just want the convenience (those are monthly costs). If you're like most of my neighbours in the lower city, you've got parking for at least one vehicle on your own property and you are using the street because your driveway has a second (or third) car / your parking is off of the laneway and you like just pulling up out front.


Why can't we just have a simple rule:

"All streets must permit two way traffic unless a street is narrower than the suggested[1] 8.5m minimum roadway width then a single direction of traffic is permissible."


There. Wasn't that easy?


[1] MTO Geometric Design Standards - this seems to be a common reference, but the book is $169 and I'm not buying it.