Walking in Waterloo Region

[danbrotherston]

My number one wish list for KW is raised pedestrian crossing. There’s one in Wilfrid Laurier University but sadly not a lot more.

There are a couple in town, their implementations are generally poor.

For example there is a new one on Patricia:

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.4417928,...384!8i8192

That was constructed in the last 2 years.

There are also older ones like this one on Laurentian (significantly better than the one on Patricia, but still with significant issues):

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.4166509,...384!8i8192

These are for midblock trail crossings, I cannot think of an intersection raised crossing, beyond extremely poorly designed T intersection + driveways that exist in a few places.

The biggest problem with these, is that while the raised crossing does slow traffic on Patricia, the choice to still drop the curb, then raise the crossing means that trail users experience a bump an order of magnitude more severe than drivers. While this alone poses danger as it can cause trail users to fall, the bigger problem is it focuses the attention of trail users away from the road, you must focus on just staying up when bouncing up and down the big bump.

I had a discussion with the Kitchener engineers on this one, the reason they do this is drainage. I took some time, evaluated the crossing, then gave that my opinion is that whatever the extra cost to fix the drainage so that the crossing can be done right is worth it, because the current design is incredibly problematic.

The second biggest problem is the fact that there is a raised crossing on Patricia which sees almost no traffic, but there is NOT one on West which sees significant and much faster traffic. The reason being, West has too much traffic to put a raised crossing. But that is the OPPOSITE justification, West has a lot of traffic so it NEEDS a raised crossing, but Patricia has little so it is probably fine without. This kind of backwards logic has to be dealt with. Worse, West has TWO major trail crossings BOTH of which have had their designs corrupted by the demands of vehicles...it is really infuriating every time I think about it.