Cycling in Waterloo Region

[danbrotherston]

Is that King St. is right now proposed to be 2 lanes from Charles St. in Kitchener up to Columbia St. in Waterloo...except for a 20 meter section around one of the most pedestrian dense intersections in the city, where it will become 5 lanes wide for something like 40 meters for no logical reason. When completely rebuilt, it will be plausible that traffic engineers were trying to kill pedestrians...

How different is it from any other intersection with turn lanes? I believe the lanes immediately south of University are northbound left, straight and right lanes; southbound there is a straight through lane plus a bus time point.

That being said, putting some more thought into the design to reduce pedestrian crossing distances would be a good idea. Of course part of my answer would be to separate right turn lanes from the rest of the motor traffic with islands (but still designed with small turning radius to severely discourage excessive speed). Another possibility would be pedestrian scrambles so that right turns can proceed freely during the motor vehicle green, eliminating the need for right turn lanes at all.

There is a left turn lane, but there are FOUR through lanes. These aren't turn lanes, they have matching receiving lanes on the other side. The road literally becomes a four lane plus turn lanes road for 40 meters for no reason. This is not a logical situation.

As a side note:

I think the pedestrian scramble is significantly weakend here (edit: here being Waterloo Region)...because our policies around ped signals are so fundamentally oppressive, most peds will just ignore the signal and cross on the don't-walk sign--and absolutely rightly so, our engineers gave up the right to ever claim pedestrians are in the wrong for ignoring their signals when they put a ped signal protecting a retaining wall--so it wouldn't really solve the problem. Also, fundamentally, when your signal phasing is 3-4 minutes, nobody is going to wait that long, and I will eat my hat if regional traffic signal engineers correctly prioritize ped crossing time in a ped scramble.