General Road and Highway Discussion

[danbrotherston]

I wonder if having 4 lanes now makes a future LRT on Victoria easier. Probably not. Anyway I do appreciate the segregated cycle lanes on both sides of Victoria that are in the designs.

That section of Victoria? No, I don't think so. It will never get an LRT so long as the other section is only 2 lanes wide. They won't even run an iXpress bus down the road.

My guess is that staff just don't even think about it. The concept of narrowing a road is alien to most regional engineers. I'm guessing that unless they are instructed by superiors to do this--to them--bizarre and unusual thing, they won't even consider it.

But that's just me desperately trying to fit Hanlon's razor into this....because the alternative....and I do consider this malice, is that regional staff haven't actually given up on widening Victoria St to 4 lanes the whole way. While they claim to believe that such a project will never actually be done, maybe they still secretly believe they'll one day be allowed to plow 3 more lanes through a whole bunch of living rooms.

That being said, in that case, they're still short sighted and...bluntly....stupid. This isn't going to be a project in the 10 year timeframe, maybe 25-30 years, and by then, the incremental cost of re-widening that section of Victoria, will be tiny compared with the cost of acquiring a few dozen homes and front yards and cutting of century old trees.

In either case, the result remains the same, waste of lives, waste of money.