Walking in Waterloo Region

[danbrotherston]

https://www.waterloochronicle.ca/news-st...-official/

Has the region's director of transportation ever actually walked anywhere? Because it sure doesn't sound like it. As someone who primarily drives, ground loop triggers are in no way as annoying and inconvenient as pedestrian beg buttons, nor do I have to touch a high traffic surface during a global pandemic just to legally proceed through many intersections. The icing on the cake is van De Keere claiming the mayor of Guelph literally received a million emails in opposition to the change, when it was just a sarcastic comment on Twitter.

The article didn’t sound as bad as I was expecting.

In particular, I think it’s hard to make a case for running regular cycles at an intersection where a very low-traffic road meets a high traffic road.

In other locations, the pedestrian buttons are clearly inappropriate. An obvious example is King St. at Willis Way., where the pedestrian signal should always activate.

In still other locations, the lights should just sit on walking person in all directions until a motor vehicle comes and triggers a green. Detectors could even be placed well in advance of the intersection so that in the absence of other traffic, a vehicle travelling at the intended speed would reach the light just after it turns green and wouldn’t have to stop at all.

I mean, it's poor reporting (the headline, and the weak questions) and full of missinformation at best from Mr. van de Keere (the region DOES NOT treat intersections differently based on context, it's widely repeated that their engineers refuse to consider context in implementation, and fight council when told too).

But no, it's pretty clear van De Keere never walks anywhere (he might GO for a walk in his neighbourhood, but not TO anywhere).  I've not made a secret of it, top level regional staff are one of the biggest obstacles to improving our transportation system in the region.  I have absolutely no clue why they are so obstinant, it's not even like it's a local thing, we have reasonably progressive cities, with very good staffs.

This is my biggest fear with any sort of amalgamation, the region staff would likely take over transportation, and we'd lose any hope of even localized improvements.