Cycling in Waterloo Region

[ijmorlan]

Turn lanes definitely should not be removed. It might be OK to remove regular lanes (personally, I would reduce almost all 4-lane roads in the city to 2-lane), but not turn lanes. In fact, in many places the problem is that we have more regular lanes than we need and not enough turn lanes (I’m looking at you, Belmont! And you, Westmount! Don’t make me come over there, Union!).

I totally agree.  Of course you'll find that turn lanes increase safety, where as more through lanes increase throughput.

Guess which one of those things our engineers optimize for.

Except that more through lanes don’t increase throughput if they’re constantly getting jammed up by cars waiting to turn.

So to be perfectly honest I think it’s incompetence, at the basic level where they don’t bother looking at what actually happens on the street.

The order for increasing the capacity of a street should be like this:

1) single lane (laneway)
2) single lane but wide enough for opposing direction vehicles to squeeze past
3) 2 narrow lanes (residential street)
4) 2 normal lanes; turn lanes provisioned at busy intersections
5) 2 normal lanes; turn lanes provisioned at all intersections allowing turns
6) 4 lanes; turn lanes provisioned at all intersections allowing turns
7) 6 lanes; no turns allowed at all except where turn lanes are provisioned (not even to get into a driveway)
8) …

A lot of streets like Belmont where we on this board complain about the waste of resources to build and maintain a 4-lane street don’t really provide the 4-lane capacity. Although we’ve spent the money to lay down 4 lanes of asphalt, the lack of turn lanes means that sometimes there are 0 lanes of capacity at intersections — if people are waiting to turn both left and right, there goes your capacity. So we’ve paid for it, but we’re not getting it. Even people who think the car should be king shouldn’t be happy with that situation.