Cycling in Waterloo Region

[welltoldtales]

What is the timeline for construction to start on the Downtown Grid? I know they said we would see construction start in the spring and maybe I am just excited because we have had above normal temperatures.

[tomh009]

And is the Delta St/Sydney St trail construction still planned for this year?

[KevinT]

If 738 people voted for him in the next election, and the rest stayed at home, would he be fighting those results too?

Brilliant, you should tweet that at him.

[danbrotherston]

Sorry, but I'm going to plug my petition again.

Benton and Frederick St. are really quite awful for cycling, my proposal for improving them can be found here: https://betterbenton.netlify.app/

Basically I suggest tighter turn radii, converting to two lanes to make room for a two-way cycle track. Improving connections to the ION station. All done as a retrofit to be affordable.

I have a Youtube video describing the idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rygMdouz...rotherston (gosh I wish we could embed like twitter).

If you think we can improve Benton and Frederick Sts. please sign the petition here: https://www.change.org/betterbenton

[KevinL]

Got it to work! I think the trick is removing arguments from the URL (the ? and everything after it).

[danbrotherston]

Got it to work! I think the trick is removing arguments from the URL (the ? and everything after it).

Thanks Kevin! That's really helpful.

Curious, did you just put the link plain without the query params? Or did you wrap it in a tag?

[KevinL]

I used the 'film strip' icon in the full editor, set the format to Youtube, and copied the link as I described the edit.

[Bob_McBob]

Region votes to make university-area bike lanes permanent

[danbrotherston]

Well that's great news, I didn't even see that on the agenda.

[plam]

Region votes to make university-area bike lanes permanent

Hurray! That fixation about cost though.

[ac3r]

To embed YouTube videos, you just need to use [.video=youtube]full url[./video] tags (with the period removed, of course).

[Acitta]

Region votes to make university-area bike lanes permanent

The King St. ones need to be made narrower, though, to keep delivery trucks from using them for parking and blocking them.

[danbrotherston]

Region votes to make university-area bike lanes permanent

The King St. ones need to be made narrower, though, to keep delivery trucks from using them for parking and blocking them.

The funny thing...and by funny I mean...in 20 years we will question what idiot did something this stupid...

Is that King St. is right now proposed to be 2 lanes from Charles St. in Kitchener up to Columbia St. in Waterloo...except for a 20 meter section around one of the most pedestrian dense intersections in the city, where it will become 5 lanes wide for something like 40 meters for no logical reason. When completely rebuilt, it will be plausible that traffic engineers were trying to kill pedestrians...

[ijmorlan]

Is that King St. is right now proposed to be 2 lanes from Charles St. in Kitchener up to Columbia St. in Waterloo...except for a 20 meter section around one of the most pedestrian dense intersections in the city, where it will become 5 lanes wide for something like 40 meters for no logical reason. When completely rebuilt, it will be plausible that traffic engineers were trying to kill pedestrians...

How different is it from any other intersection with turn lanes? I believe the lanes immediately south of University are northbound left, straight and right lanes; southbound there is a straight through lane plus a bus time point.

That being said, putting some more thought into the design to reduce pedestrian crossing distances would be a good idea. Of course part of my answer would be to separate right turn lanes from the rest of the motor traffic with islands (but still designed with small turning radius to severely discourage excessive speed). Another possibility would be pedestrian scrambles so that right turns can proceed freely during the motor vehicle green, eliminating the need for right turn lanes at all.

[danbrotherston]

Is that King St. is right now proposed to be 2 lanes from Charles St. in Kitchener up to Columbia St. in Waterloo...except for a 20 meter section around one of the most pedestrian dense intersections in the city, where it will become 5 lanes wide for something like 40 meters for no logical reason. When completely rebuilt, it will be plausible that traffic engineers were trying to kill pedestrians...

How different is it from any other intersection with turn lanes? I believe the lanes immediately south of University are northbound left, straight and right lanes; southbound there is a straight through lane plus a bus time point.

That being said, putting some more thought into the design to reduce pedestrian crossing distances would be a good idea. Of course part of my answer would be to separate right turn lanes from the rest of the motor traffic with islands (but still designed with small turning radius to severely discourage excessive speed). Another possibility would be pedestrian scrambles so that right turns can proceed freely during the motor vehicle green, eliminating the need for right turn lanes at all.

There is a left turn lane, but there are FOUR through lanes. These aren't turn lanes, they have matching receiving lanes on the other side. The road literally becomes a four lane plus turn lanes road for 40 meters for no reason. This is not a logical situation.

As a side note:

I think the pedestrian scramble is significantly weakend here (edit: here being Waterloo Region)...because our policies around ped signals are so fundamentally oppressive, most peds will just ignore the signal and cross on the don't-walk sign--and absolutely rightly so, our engineers gave up the right to ever claim pedestrians are in the wrong for ignoring their signals when they put a ped signal protecting a retaining wall--so it wouldn't really solve the problem. Also, fundamentally, when your signal phasing is 3-4 minutes, nobody is going to wait that long, and I will eat my hat if regional traffic signal engineers correctly prioritize ped crossing time in a ped scramble.