Highway 7 - Kitchener to Guelph

[ijmorlan]

Highway 7 is a stroad IN Kitchener but the suggestion given by KevinL to connect it to Shirley would eliminate that. Outside the city it has few destinations and is a proper highway. Improving the highway with a parallel cycling path, and a divider in the middle to prevent head on collisions would fix the safety issues. You'd now have a proper highway connecting the cities, with limited access (only a few businesses). Yeah, Shirley is also kind of a stroad, but it's not as bad as Victoria. But what are you going to do when the state of the art in road construction in your province is absolute garbage.

Victoria/Shirley would make a great highway. I would hope that new driveways would not be allowed as a matter of course and that existing ones would be removed as redevelopment takes place; instead, access to the highway should be managed and planned, not simply allowed to evolve unsupervised.

The re-routing would then make it easy to re-think Victoria in the city as a proper street.

The other big thing freeway enthusiasts are completely ignoring is the enormous cost of a freeway. Sure, if a freeway cost the same as widening an existing road and making some minor adjustments to traffic flow, they would have a point (although there would still be other issues to consider), but that’s not the case. Optimizing the existing road would probably save enough money to build a transit line between the cities (well, OK, not if we can’t get out of the absurd cost situation we seem to be in right now, but I’m assuming we can get back to building train systems for a reasonable price).

If we built transit instead, we'd induce that demand in transit ridership instead.

Exactly. People act as if people have made a blood oath to continue travelling the same way they already travel, and that’s not true at all: people will travel using whatever is available, and if the only good option is using a car, that’s what they’ll do. Since we assume people will drive, we build roads, and as a result, driving a car is really the only good option in many places.