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General Road and Highway Discussion
It already has the Walter Bean trail along it - directly adjacent for about 2km, then parallel through Rare until the George connection.
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(02-26-2018, 01:15 PM)ijmorlan Wrote:
(02-26-2018, 10:55 AM)boatracer Wrote: "Extremely surprised to see they plan to expand Blair Road between Fountain and George. That section of road has never struck me as being bad for traffic or needing to be widened."

Yeah unless there is an accident it is never slow through there.  Wondering if they are looking at providing bike lanes.  In the spring-fall there are a lot of cyclists and most sections aren't very wide with a lot of curves.

Whereas a significant expansion of the public transit budget would be a big discussion.

Re: bike lanes, I believe this road is rural in character? If so, a fully separated path would be better, although the path itself should probably have separate pedestrian and bicycle lanes.

(02-26-2018, 01:20 PM)KevinL Wrote: It already has the Walter Bean trail along it - directly adjacent for about 2km, then parallel through Rare until the George connection.

The section with the trail adjacent is "separated", in that it has a half meter with a rumble strip and some (often destroyed by cars) plastic bollards, and for a short time, a curb. It really isn't terrible, if they'd fix the pavement and remove the broken glass and car parts.

The rest of it has a trail through the natural area which isn't suitable for road cyclists, where there is a need for a real parallel trail.

Whereas, you're absolutely right, it's time we made a big expansion to the road budget a big point of discussion. That's my intent.
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I don’t know what Rare or George are, but if we’re talking about Blair Road, almost all of the bollards are completely gone. They were all there in the fall, and now there are like 4.

It wasn’t obvious to me if they were removed intentionally for the winter, or if they just all got busted off by snowploughs.

I rode this section a couple of times a week when I was commuting to work last year. I hated that road section so much, but endured it because the other parts are absolutely gorgeous (albeit some bits were at the limit of what the bike I was riding would endure Wink )
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Rare is the nature reserve through the river floodplain.

George is the road Blair becomes when it enters Galt proper.
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Thanks Kevin. I’ve lived here for 17 years but had never heard of either of those things.
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(02-26-2018, 05:02 PM)Canard Wrote: Thanks Kevin. I’ve lived here for 17 years but had never heard of either of those things.

Which is why many choose to bicycle, and is a stated goal of most active transportation plans.
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You lost me!
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I mean to say, learning new things about your surroundings, and improving the buy-in of residents and feelings of community engagement. This is, to me at least, why active transportation matters.
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I ride my road bike through the Walter bean trail quite often. Blair road is nice riding too with the curves and rolling terrain which appeal more to Roadies. The tour the grand usually routes down it.

That section does have a speed limit of 80 which is kinda surprising given the blind corners and hills, which is why I don't usually ride it.
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Is it just me or are the traffic calming features on Glasgow not really slowing down most cars that much? It's easy to avoid the islands by veering into the bike lanes, even with the little posts they put up to prevent it. The lone speed bump does get people to slow down a bit, but of course they installed it through the bike lane. I suppose all the traffic calming is probably slowing down the really insane speeders, but nobody is coming remotely close to the artificially low 40km/h limit on that stretch.
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Traffic calming on Glasgow Street is a joke, the speed limit shouldn't be 40km/h between Westmount and Fischer-Hallman, a lot of the front yards on that street are big enough to build another house on and still have a reasonable setback from the road. The bike lanes are extremely frustrating in design, and people use the raised sections to put their garbage out. It's just ridiculous that a main thoroughfare gets this treatment. I was at a council meeting years ago and the residents of that street had sent a delegation with a slick powerpoint that someone with a lot of marketing experience had made and the presenter spoke eloquently and at length about how unsafe it was for the kids to play and yaddy-yaddy... I guess it worked and they got the first traffic calming stuff but it was different than the present configuration.

Personally I wouldn't mind if they brought back photo-radar. It's easy enough to avoid speeding if one cares to. (and I don't mean 10 over)
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(02-27-2018, 09:46 AM)clasher Wrote: Traffic calming on Glasgow Street is a joke, the speed limit shouldn't be 40km/h between Westmount and Fischer-Hallman, a lot of the front yards on that street are big enough to build another house on and still have a reasonable setback from the road. The bike lanes are extremely frustrating in design, and people use the raised sections to put their garbage out. It's just ridiculous that a main thoroughfare gets this treatment. I was at a council meeting years ago and the residents of that street had sent a delegation with a slick powerpoint that someone with a lot of marketing experience had made and the presenter spoke eloquently and at length about how unsafe it was for the kids to play and yaddy-yaddy... I guess it worked and they got the first traffic calming stuff but it was different than the present configuration.

Personally I wouldn't mind if they brought back photo-radar. It's easy enough to avoid speeding if one cares to. (and I don't mean 10 over)

The limit should be 60km/h there anyway (at least west of Westmount), owing to its place in the road network. Kids playing out front of those houses? Not likely! And not because it is a major transportation corridor.

And remember, I’m Mr. Why Do We Spend So Much on Cars Anyway?
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They're living on a road that should act as an arterial, but have strong-armed the city into treating like a side street. Nobody should be surprised they are having traffic issues.
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It certainly “should” be an arterial looking at the map, but it is in fact entirely residential, and those houses have been there for fifty or sixty years.

I think the issue isn’t that these residents with million dollar houses strong-armed the city into giving them special traffic-calming measures, so much as it is that the city doesn’t provide any traffic-calming measures for residents elsewhere. I don’t begrudge these people those things- I want them on my own street.

Reasonably, 60km/h would probably never be on the table for Glasgow. Weber Street in Kitchener is 50, for instance. So how much of a difference would 10km/h make? And difference to what? There’s not exactly gridlock; does traffic on Glasgow ever get backed up, even by KW standards?
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The funny part about speeds is... it doesn’t matter. 40 or 60 km/h, on a cross-town trip the difference in trip time will be like 12 minutes or 11.5 minutes. It’s traffic lights and so on that make the time increase.

So, in a perfect world, speed limits would be something reasonable across the board - like how in Bermuda the entire island has a 35 km/h limit everywhere, without exception (except lower in some places). The island is about the size of Waterloo Region. It takes 40 minutes to go from one end to the other, just like it takes about 40 minutes here, with much higher limits and bigger roads.

It’s all psychological however, people hate to move slowly if they think they can move faster. It doesn’t matter what mode of transport it is. It’s just that in a car, it’s easier to push the pedal down further with no personal penalty.
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