Winter Walking and Cycling

[danbrotherston]

OK, not sure about the whole leaf collection thing. I thought I heard something about Ottawa extending the “luxury” Rockcliffe Park service (vacuumed from the road) to the whole city because it was the most economical approach but I could be mis-remembering.

As for the bike lane, you're probably right, Columbia could do with 3 lanes, but I doubt council is interested, they almost made the extension four lanes out to Erbsville. That being said, staff do correctly point out that someday....decades in the future, ION Phase 3 might take a lane away from University Ave...so of course, because of that remotely possible very long term future, we can't narrow the road today.

By the time we’re building Ion on University, we won’t need 4 lanes on either University or Columbia. Does the transportation department have an implicit requirement that traffic never bunch up? If the roads feel crowded and slow for only 1 hour a day then we’re probably overinvested in roads; and I think they hardly ever feel crowded and slow in this city. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love setting the cruise control and going down King from Waterloo to Kitchener, as I have occasionally been able to do late at night or Sunday morning, but I don’t have a problem with occasionally actually having to adapt my driving to other vehicles at ordinary times of day or even wait behind others to pass a traffic light at busy times; and even if I did have a problem with it that wouldn’t be a valid reason to spend millions of dollars on road widenings.

You're absolutely right. We waste money on roads. But I think the worst thing that the regional engineers have done is refuse to even plan for flat or decreasing VMT. The current traffic plan still accounts for significant VMT increase. It's like, you're planning for failure...it's a great way to fail.