10-07-2019, 04:26 PM
(10-07-2019, 02:45 PM)ijmorlan Wrote:(10-07-2019, 11:26 AM)danbrotherston Wrote: Regional staff have claimed the official status, I have no personally pulled the land deeds lol, but I generally trust them.
And yes, the city also put up the sign. Frankly, it seems like one of these "stop asking questions lest we be forced to do something about it" situations.
That being said, I think it would be not too hard to fix, it would only take about 15 parking spaces in the parkade and some small renovations to redirect the path out through the parkade and avoid the entire alley...it should be trivial to work across the road from that point--its safer and less congested there anyway.
There is already a path connecting Regina to King next to the parkade. I guess taking some extra space to widen would be helpful. But why would anybody use that when the direct route is available? The only real problem is the flangeways; the fact that the space is shared with trains simply isn’t a problem, safety or otherwise (well, except administratively!).
More fundamentally, we have a regulatory framework which isn’t capable of officially taking into account local conditions and making appropriate accommodations, or at least not without excessive expense. It shouldn’t take more than a few hours’ total time by various people to request, investigate, and approve a request to consider that area to be shared right-of-way between trains and multi-use trail, subject to a low maximum speed for the trains and reconsideration in the event train traffic increases significantly.
It’s a good thing trains already exist. If they were invented now I doubt level crossings would even be allowed, anywhere, and trains would end up being infeasible to install almost everywhere.
The pathway exists, but is not wide enough for biking and walking. I'm thinking of routing into and through the parking garage, wide comforable (and covered) path.
Certainly I don't think sharing with the train is a safety issue, that being said, I'm not sure I'd totally trust the flangeway, it might work 99% of the time, and 1% of the time fail, so if you're always riding along the tracks, eventually someone will take a fall. As for changing human nature, yes, that is hard, but I expect exposed railway ties would convince the vast majority of cyclists to take the new easiest path which would be the trail. I bet you'd still have peds using the alley, but this is probably fine.