Comment 97103

By Pxtl (registered) - website | Posted January 23, 2014 at 11:26:41

It's incredibly refreshing to hear Mayor Bratina actually proposing a two-way conversion instead of letting it die in council. A two-way conversion of Victoria/Wellington would be great for the neighorhood. Although I'm sure he didn't have bike-lanes in mind and just wanted a yellow line painted down the middle (both streets have a left-side parking lane so you wouldn't even need to do anything fancy to get the city's usual preferred TWINO solution).

During some heavy underground work a couple of years ago, both Wellington and Victoria were each reduced to 1 lane (at different times). Rush-hour traffic was slow, but not unacceptable. Two-cycle wait at Barton, that's it. And this is a restriction that was worse than Ryan's proposal since there was only one northbound lane on one street instead of one on each (and likewise for southbound). A road diet on Wellington and Victoria would probably go a long way in getting trucks off Cannon and Main (Wentworth and Sherman still might work for them, though).

I'm expecting the traffic people at City Hall to hate the idea though since they've got Ferguson as the fancy bike-route, and having one bike-friendly north/south street for the entire east side is plenty, thank you.

I'm still disappointed Bratina didn't mention the other obvious failure in connecting the north-end: 1-way Bay Street. I know they hate converting half a paired street but it's not really paired with Queen. In the South it fails as a pair since it's not really connected to Beckett, and in the North it fails as a pair because Queen mostly just connects Westbound traffic from Cannon to King - the "pair" of Queen North is Main Street. Bay is the only continuous road in the area - Caroline ends at the school, Hess is stuck the same way as Bay, Park and MacNab end at Jackson Square. 2-way conversion of Bay Street would probably the single biggest boost to way-finding downtown you could do with a single street.

The Clairmont is begging for a two-way bike lane. It's easily the single most absurdly over-built thing in the city.

Comment edited by Pxtl on 2014-01-23 11:41:33

Permalink | Context

Events Calendar

There are no upcoming events right now.
Why not post one?

Recent Articles

Article Archives

Blog Archives

Site Tools

Feeds