08-10-2016, 12:45 PM
(08-10-2016, 11:23 AM)Markster Wrote: I personally would be against blocking through traffic through the park. It's just too useful a connection.
That said, I'd be entirely in favour of adding pedestrian-priority crossings of the road. One or two standard "Level 1" pedestrian crossings would be perfect. The addition of sidewalks should also help make it seem less like a "parkway".
Honestly, I think Pokemon GO has been one of the greatest things for traffic control in the park. There are countless people crossing Jubilee at the Boathouse now, and the cars seem to be going slower for it.
Define "too useful". I don't think it sees *that* much traffic. The detour to go up Joseph is about 500 meters farther, or approximately 45 seconds at 50 km/h, even including turns, lights and stops, it's probably only a minute or so. This amount of savings is worth having the highway through our park?
And again, you find it useful because it exists, but if it didn't exist, we wouldn't be arguing to build it because it would be *useful*. For example, it would be extremely useful to many people (many profs live in uptown) to have a road from uptown all the way directly to the university, pretty much the exact route the LRT is taking. It would cut a fair bit of time off the current alternative routes. It meets the same criteria of "useful", but I don't think anyone's arguing for it.
There are probably 4 locations or more that there should be crossings, but anyways, see below.
Quote:tomh009
While the road may or may not be necessary, it surely is not absurd. It provides the connectivity from Park to Courtland, which would otherwise need to detour through Victoria/Joseph/Queen or Victoria/West/Highland/Queen.
If the speeds are a problem (not my experience, but I'll admit that's only anecdotal) then putting a few speed humps on the through-the-park section would address that without having to dead-end or eliminate the road.
I don't necessarily think speed is the biggest problem, I mean, driver's basically ignore entirely the 30 km/h limit, but generally stay under 50. Maybe that's still too fast, but I think the real problem is that it is a park.
How much does this detract from our park, parents can't let their children play, lest they wander into the road, you can't go running for an errant frisbee or soccer ball without looking for traffic.
From a philosophical point of view, I don't think there should be traffic in a park. We have very few traffic free area's in this country, the fact that our crown jewel of a park isn't one of them, I mean, if we should start anywhere, it should be there, IMO.