General Road and Highway Discussion

[ijmorlan]

… their justification for widening it is to allow buses not to block traffic.

How much do you want to bet their design doesn’t even accomplish that?

Specifically, I imagine an intersection where a stopped bus occupies the right lane, while vehicles waiting to turn left occupy the left lane, resulting in no straight through traffic being able to proceed. Then the light turns red and everybody waits for another cycle.

If they really want to keep stopped buses out of the flow of traffic, they should put in bus bays and/or turn lanes as appropriate.

That being said, it’s OK if a certain amount of traffic has to wait for a bus once in a while. If they want to reduce delays to non-transit traffic, they should fix some of the signals on the LRT system where pedestrian and/or motor traffic is held even when there is no conflict with the LRT (King/Conestogo, King/Northfield, Erb/Caroline, King/Allen, King/Moore, King/Francis, Charles/Victoria, Charles/Benton, Duke/Frederick, Charles/Borden, Charles/Ottawa, Ottawa/Mill; wow, more than I realized when I started typing this). It’s just a pure deadweight loss, with no benefit to transit whatsoever.