ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[danbrotherston]

"Planning exercise"....

You mean land use planning? The thing is, that's not how it's planned. At least at a regional level--I don't think the cities do any better. The region's transportation plan was developed in isolation. They took what they believed would be the development pattern, and used that as gospel. Engineers were very explicit, the scope of work did not include asking about the land use plan. Which is insane, because now we are developing a regional plan that...god willing...will not align with the transportation plan that they are implementing.

The Ira Needles incident was...unfortunate. I think an overreaction, or rather, reaction to complaints. They widened a road without widening the intersections. This does not increase the road capacity, all it does is permit impatient drivers to recklessly filter around slower drivers. The road was built as four lanes, but was only paved 2 wide to save money. That's why widening it was so easy. They claim development happened faster than expected but realistically I think the novelty of the roundabouts, the unusual traffic patterns they general (slow down at every intersection) was foreign to people, they perceived it as "excessive congestion" and complained to council, who then demanded that staff "fix" the non-problem, which they did by spending money widening pavements for no value, and then were angry and bitter about it after that.

I have no doubt that this kind of thing is what leads them to have a "preference" for four lanes, because unlike building unsafe, deadly infrastructure which kills people, the environment, and our city, this kind of apparent "blunder" is the thing that makes heads roll in the city.

You're not wrong. I do believe though that this is another one of the cases where having separate tiers of government causes more miscommunication where the planning doesn't match the transportation etc. Normally I would say the region does a slightly better job building more realistic roads and widening when the 'demand' comes. A road that come to mind include Fisher Hallman between Ottawa and Bleams, it opened in 2000 as a two lane road and was only widened in 2016. On the other hand the city rebuilt Huron Road with four lanes during the same era and it still never seems busy.

I mean, roads like Highland Rd., Ottawa St. are the counter examples so maybe things have changed.

On the other hand, there's also Weber, Westmount, Erb, and others which are older, but also were built originally to be 4 lanes entirely unnecessarily.

More, roads like F-H, University (West of Erb), were built only 2 lanes, but clearly with an intention to be four lanes later.

I don't know, the cities have a bad track record as well--I can think of a dozen if you want, but has a much better track record with road diets. Seems like the cities have acknowledged that four lane roads are not necessary, or worth while, or even a net positive everywhere.

The region is not at that place yet.