General Road and Highway Discussion

[danbrotherston]

So I did finally get a reply from staff about my comments on the Victoria St. segment:


I mean, I guess that's the answer: staff are still pretending that they will be widening Victoria St. west of West Ave...ironic given that they have basically offered to narrow Victoria St. east of King... (something that was on hold since the new highway to Guelph was on hold).

It's ironic that despite having a TMP they still have barely co-ordinated any plans...although I think possibly the start of the project for Victoria St. in the area (6 years ago) *might* predate the latest TMP or at least coincided with it.

But the fact that this project was "decided" 6 years ago, is another issue altogether.

The way I interpret it, the Region eventually hopes to have 2 lanes of car traffic and 2 transit lanes (LRT, BRT) along much of the length of Victoria. In this case, Victoria would see a "road diet" while also adding the transit lanes. In the mean time, they don't want to reduce lanes west of Laurence just to dig them up again in the medium term for transit lanes. It seems to be a bit of a patchwork solution, and is dependent on the construction of a mythical highway, but I can understand their rationale.

It does make me wonder how many properties between Laurence and West will need to be expropriated to make this happen, though.

All of the houses on one side of the road....roughly 60 houses.

This basically guarantees that this will never happen, and staff even acknowledged this in the previous TMP.

But even if by some miracle they were able to make this happen in 20-30s for a rapid transit line, it still wouldn't matter...they could just widen the corridor they are building now, that would literally be the easy part, and it would need to be reconstructed in order to support the BRT/LRT infra anyway.

The real reason here is that regional staff do not believe in 2 lane roads...even if they managed to make this a four lane road they wouldn't actually convert it to a BRT/LRT corridor, because they don't have another 4 lane corridor across the city--this is a source of major frustration among planners.

But in 20 years, all those planners will be retired and maybe better people will be running the show...but again, there's no reason to waste millions of dollars, and literally dozens of lives in all that time for no gain, just because in 30 years there might be an LRT there.