General Road and Highway Discussion

[zanate]

The part that's missing here is that, having grown up in Forest Heights myself, never ever ever ever have I seen that street with solid parking on both sides. Hard to imagine having parking on only one side even coming close to inconveniencing someone in a measurable way. It's a nonsense complaint.

A much more balanced story in Kitchener Post:
http://www.kitchenerpost.ca/news/neighbo...c-calming/

Nonsense complaint or not, a lot happens when you fill a council chamber. I was there, and I pointed out the fundamental flaw in arguing to keep unused parking at the expense of other uses. But it hardly matters when that gets drowned out by other speakers. Numbers matter, and there was a real decorum problem among the people attending as well-- something that, sadly, one of the councillors was happy to play to.

In this case, policy and balancing public vs. private use of the roadway space withers in the face of a vocal opposition. The direction has been set: is there room for two lanes of parking, and bike lanes? Well there is, but it's going to squeeze everything. Instead of having buffered bike lanes that would have been comfortable and safe for people on bikes of all ages, we'll have dooring lanes. And I'm sure someone will argue that the dooring risk isn't really there because you can go for long stretches without finding any parked cars. Someone actually did argue that we don't need to worry about bike lanes next to parked cars because there are so few parked cars, as an argument for keeping parking!

So if you don't like this state of affairs, and if you want to call it a nonsense complaint, I'd suggest that you start telling Kitchener councillors your opinion because whether it's nonsense or not, it's going to carry the day.

And it's going to have an effect on other streets in Kitchener, too. Union Ave residents are watching and taking notes. These folks are quite happy to portray this as a waste of money (despite the very low cost of a paint solution-- East Ave was done to this template for $20K) and are attacking bike infrastructure so that we aren't talking about what this really is: maintaining private use of public space at the expense of public need.