General Road and Highway Discussion

[PhilippAchtel]

Related to the discussion of the restriction on driving down the residential detour in Conestogo, King St. in St. Jacobs is completely closed in two places and the official detour involves driving through a residential area via Printery to Water to Albert and then Northside to Sawmill. Perhaps because these roads are serviced by GRT buses, there's been no pass system suggested to my knowledge, nor are out-of-town cars being told to detour to Arthur St. to bypass the town.

That said, St. Jacobs has a much stronger tourism industry than Conestogo, along with the presence of the Home Hardware HQ, so turning away passers-through is probably not an option. And there are signs requesting that large trucks detour to 85.

Edit:

My reaction to hearing about this street closure to non-residents was...why can't we do this in more places? This quiet street in the township has for reasons of the construction been introduced to the dangers of rat running, has understandably been upset by it, and found a solution.

With electronically-controlled bollards, the cost of enforcing street restrictions is a lot less than paying construction workers to do it. We could make sure the streets that have been designed to serve as arterials do so, and not our residential streets.

Welcome to the Netherlands .    Bollards aren't even needed, it's easy enough to cut or make inconvenient enough those through routes by other means without actually blocking cycling or walking (which presumably you'd still want to allow/encourage).  Right now, we create easy cut-through routes then freak out when people use them and install traffic bumps, and then whine about those bumps.  Generally, we just need to be smarter about design.

Here's an article and video describing retrofitting a neighbourhood in Utrecht to do exactly this.

https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2013/...t-century/

Thanks for the link. As a Waterloo Region resident, it's always a bit bittersweet to read about locales that actually pay more than lip service to cycling and transit.

This will be done by removing the centre line and by implementing cycle lanes. Since the ring is not for through traffic and the speed limit is 50km/h, separated cycle tracks are not necessary. But the ring is also a bus route, so there are a number of bus stops. For safety reasons separated cycle tracks will be built around all bus stops in the ring.

They mention it so matter of factly. Like, of course, you'd have separated lanes for bus stops on side streets. Sometimes I wonder if the serious cyclists preference for mixing bicycle and automobile traffic actually creates an impediment for separated bike lanes as opposed to the lanes we have now by promoting the idea that it's natural for bikes to mix in and out of vehicle traffic. Like would you get sideways glances in the Netherlands if you showed them the lanes we have on busy streets such as University and Erb?