Cycling in Waterloo Region

[SF22]

I am not sure what criteria they use to decide when a public consultation is needed.

In the East Ave. case there is already some right of way and buffer space that can add protection without moving any painted lines (that was an...intense...public consultation where those lanes were discussed). I suspect that a public consultation would still be required any time lanes are reconfigured.

Actually I just took a review of the EngageKitchener site, it is...interesting. I didn't realise it's a full reconstruction. I suspect they're using "virtual consultation" here, I'm sure the homeowners got flyers about it, and that is meeting their requirements (real PICs are expensive...lots of staff overtime).

The scope of work is pretty extensive....much more than I thought, a complete rebuild with protected bike lanes is pretty good, and they're....not terrible. 1.3 meters is too narrow, but I'll forgive it for protected lanes, because honestly that's worth way way more. They do a great job of transitioning the bike infra at Chapel. The turn radii and lanes are still too big but at least they narrow the road at the intersection. The engineers still have no idea what to do about curbs. But the biggest issue I have with it is that it doesn't go far enough. It doesn't integrate well with Krug, which has bike lanes to go under the highway (Krug is already rebuilt so that ship has sailed probably). And they aren't making any changes from Krug to the Aud, and the bike lanes disappear for no good reason there.

I'm guessing there were cost limitations preventing that, and they wanted to make connections from Chapel to Krug and Frederick, which is fair.

Still, it's rather interesting that there was no publicity about this.

...

Edit: I think a lot of this is driven by the complete streets guide. These kind of documents are incredibly important. It's also funny to hear "the roadway width will be reduced from 9 meters to 7 in line with complete streets guidelines" that's great, but it should be even narrower. In the Netherlands, collectors are often only 5-5.5 meters wide. But even in Canada, the TAC standards they're basing this on permit a 6.3 meters wide road to carry two traffic lanes, and the region will use 3 meter lanes when they want to cram more in (see Westmount Rd.). Still, it's a big step forward.

So I live very close to the East Ave segment getting redone (not on East itself, but just one street over), and we didn't get a flyer about it. So if they did any consultation, it was definitely just for the homes that are going to be directed affected. They're also prepping it for a connection to Chapel on the north side, which (I don't think) is not a neighbourhood bikeway yet, but is earmarked to be one, and will eventually meet up with a proposed MUT on Edna/Dumfries. I am REALLY glad that they are separating the lanes out properly, because people are constantly drifting their cars well into the bike lane on East Ave. A lot of people seem to think it's an extra-wide vehicle lane, the way they treat it.

I believe they aren't extending the work past Krug because the utilities underneath aren't in such rough shape (only the watermain needs replacing, according to an email I received from the city rep), so they must have chosen to delay any reworking of the existing painted lanes from Krug to Eugene George Way to keep costs down.

But yeah, I totally agree that the guidelines that have been put into place are doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. Presumably the argument is that they did the majority of their public inquiries on the general master plans, and now only need a small amount of feedback on each individual project moving forward.