Grand River Transit

[danbrotherston]

This is absolutely not true, if traffic on Ring Rd. is a safety issue, then there's absolutely a reason to remove that danger.  You may disagree with that reason, or think it's not sufficient, I disagree, but absolutely there is reason.

Remove the danger, yes. Entirely remove vehicles, no. Unless you are proposing a saturation-level coverage of public transit on campus running 24/7. Also you didn’t say anything about on- vs. off-peak. Even those no-car downtowns I understand are often open to vehicles overnight.

There are plenty of places where you cannot drive to get dropped off including most of campus. Just because you can do so today, and we call it a "road" doesn't mean that it cannot change.  And no, I would not have a problem making the uptown or downtown core pedestrianized, many cities do in fact have areas that large closed to general vehicle traffic and only open to transit/deliveries/service.

Again, with saturation-level public transit, maybe. There is a Canada Post outlet in Shoppers’ Drug Mart at Waterloo Town Square. How are people to pick up and drop off large parcels other than parking their car close to the building? And of course there are places where you cannot drive to get dropped off, for example inside every building. But you can get dropped off near every point on campus. The same is true in Uptown. It’s much easier to close some streets (already done; except on campus they weren’t built in the first place) than all streets.

(Only on the east side does this apply, the west side is still a disaster).  In fact, the crosswalks are the problem, before the crosswalks pedestrians crossed from one sidewalk to the other whenever there was space, now they are all funnelled into a few crosswalks, which creates more conflict.  That being said, I have never once seen a serious traffic jam outside of special event days when UW Police direct traffic anyway.  If there is a traffic problem, I think it is vehicle traffic which is the problem on our pedestrian campus.

Good point about the crosswalks. Agreed on the last sentence, just don’t agree that eliminating it entirely is a reasonable solution. We already don’t have many traffic routes on campus and we certainly don’t encourage through traffic.

The funny thing about this is that I’m the guy who would make King and Regina each one lane one direction, cutting traffic lanes between those two streets in Uptown in half, would make freeways entirely user-paid (and congestion-charged on top of that), would implement SFPark for all parking, would disconnect Caroline St. from the south side of the intersection with Erb, and would narrow almost every 4-lane road in the city to 2 lanes. But even I recognize that the problem with cars isn’t the concept itself, which is universally, even in places like Europe, recognized as useful, but with excessive numbers of them and with inappropriate design of conflict points with non-motor traffic.

I'm sure we can agree to disagree on this point.  But I will point out to you, that plenty of people survive without a car.  We pickup packages, we get around campus, we do groceries.

Our main point of disagreement is perhaps that aside from construction/paratransit requirements, I don't think cars are a required feature of an urban environment.  Adding them has very real costs for everyone else, for the benefit of what you yourself describe as convenience.