General Road and Highway Discussion

[danbrotherston]

Strasburg Rd connecting to ... Southmoor Dr and Stirling Ave S? With bike lanes on the bridge, I should hope!

Bicycles and pedestrians only, to my knowledge.

Which actually doesn’t mean that separate bicycle lanes wouldn’t be welcome, but you don’t need to worry about motor vehicle traffic.

Yes, to clarify it will be a bicycle and pedestrian bridge, no cars.

I'm not saying I oppose such a bridge but there is a big reason why I wouldn't support it and why I would prefer an alternative, and a simple reason why it is the preferred option. (Keep in mind, there is middle ground between supporting and opposing).

The estimated cost for this bridge is 17 million dollars. Now leaving aside the ridiculously over inflated construction costs we pay, and the fact that MTO is requiring the region to build a bridge that can span 8 lanes because they plan on failing to address climate change.

Quite simply, 17 million dollars buys a HELL of a lot of cycling infra. In fact, 17 million dollars is over a third of the entire 10 year capital budget in the proposed cycling plan (which could easily get cut down for being too expensive).

Now, the highway is a major barrier to cycling in the city and I fully support building frequent safe crossings of the highway, it is important. However, the bridge over Homer-Watson is merely 500 meters away, or about 2 minutes cycling, which could connect the cycle lanes and such which could connect to all the same places on the other side through Meinzinger Park.  And there is plenty of extra space under this bridge to put in cycle lanes, hell it's FOUR LANES. Yeah, it should have been connected when it was reconstructed, but a retrofit would be cheap and easy.  And yes, the Ottawa and Homer-Watson roundabout is a garbage nightmare for anyone not in a car, but that should be fixed anyway--it doesn't go away with a bridge at strasburg...and a trail could easily bypass the roundabout on the north west side anyway.

So why is the region intent on doing this vastly more expensive option to acheive basically the same connectivity. Basically it allows them to say the folks on southmore and avalon pl can access the bus stops on Chandler Dr, meaning GRT can now claim those houses have good access to transit (within 500m or whatever their usual metrics are. Now I'm not going to say this isn't a good thing, it's great, but lets not pretend it's a cycling project...it's a transit project, but it's going to get labeled a cycling project and people are going to be upset about the price and complain about cyclists....and it is still a lot of money for a small number of connections (like around 100,000k per dwelling).