Winter Walking and Cycling

[the_councillor]

- Firstly, if you could link me to that Regional survey I'd appreciate it.  I frankly have a hard time believing it, or it certainly isn't statistically significant (as the surveys I'm referring to are.)

- Which roads have we widened?  I can't speak for every ward, but in mine, over the last ~10 years, I can't recall the city widening a single one.  In fact, we cut Lorraine Ave. from 4 lanes to 2 to install cycling lanes.

- Further, whenever we redo a road, the majority of the reason (and more importantly in this context, the vast majority of the cost) is to replace the water/sewer infrastructure underneath.  Belmont Ave. is an ironic street to point out seeing as we just approved $350K during budget to reduce the lanes and install segregated cycling lanes instead.  Not sure you're helping your case here.

Yes, I came and spoke in support of that. Of course, if council had realized the road was overbuilt 3 years ago when the road was rebuilt, it wouldn't have cost us $350K.  And yes, the purpose was to reconstruct the sewers, but the result is that the entire road was rebuilt, it was an opportunity to save a great deal of money AND create a safer better street in our city.

The fact we are now spending money retrofitting those fixes in I don't think negates that--I think it exemplifies it.

But regardless...this is off track...

On topic, every sidewalk in the DTK clearing zone that I walked on today was entirely clear of ice and perfectly safe to walk on.   Every sidewalk outside of that was a sheet of ice, and very dangerous.

Those sidewalks should be cleared very well.  They're maintained to the highest Priority 1 standard, like main roads.  But if we're talking city-wide sidewalk-clearing there would be a huge difference between priorities 1, 2 & 3.  For example, there were people literally skating on some Priority 3 roads yesterday.