General Road and Highway Discussion

[Pheidippides]

Of course, it would be far more meaningful if Queen is also improved, and would have been even more so if Highland had been improved as well, but that ship has sailed.

Sorry for the delayed response; still catching up and processing a lot of posts after being away.

I have never understood why Queen (the Blvd part from Westheights to Highland) is not targeted more as a cycling route or at least preferred to Highland (a lost cause at this point for cycling) which does have cycling lanes for a part (that go from nowhere (Fischer-Hallman) to nowhere (Westmount)).

Queen has way more capacity than it will ever need. It could easily be reduced to 1 EB, 1WB, and a centre turning lane, and still have room for physically separated bike lanes both EB and WB. The fact that on-street parking is even allowed on large stretches of it is obscene and proves that it is overbuilt and not fulfilling its designed purpose (as an city arterial road in the Kitchener road classification system its primary purpose is to, "provide mobility for people and goods through and within the City" - so by clogging an artery with parking it is unable to do its job). In fact, the recommendation is that on-street parking is "Generally None" and cycling facilities "Separated Preferred". Map of street classifications.

I am beginning to think that one way to convince more people outside of the typical bike lanes advocates about the value of cycling lanes is through their pocket-books. Make it a political issue that we can chip away the infrastructure deficit simply by building smarter (e.g. narrow roads with segregated bike lanes, 3 lane roads (1+1+turning) instead of 4 (2+2), etc.). Use that recent City of Ottawa study to illustrate that over-building a road simply to paint a line for cyclists is a waste of capital when bike lanes don't need to be built to sustain so much force (they should still be built to last though!).