Road design, safety and Vision Zero

[danbrotherston]

We are certainly making progress indeed. As much as I dunk on this region in regards to basically everything...I do see the changes happening every single day. They might happen slowly, may not all make sense or are outright bad, they might be pointless or insufficient but it's certainly progress nonetheless. If we want a nice region, it's up to us to create it. Nobody waved a magic wand and immediately turned Amsterdam, Barcelona, Chongqing, Osaka, Buenos Aires etc into the world class cities they are. It took centuries of time, millions of people, billions of dollars and the courage to actually seek and create the things they sought. It took a lot of failure to achieve the successes such cities now possess. Or even ours. 30 years ago, who would have thought that we'd have one of the worlds best physics schools or a company like Google being based here?

Great cities are built by those who are born in them or migrate to them, who stick it out through the challenges with the hope that their contributions will achieve something. These are the sort of people we name roads and schools after, who have buildings they designed being lived and worked in, who have built beautiful parks...any sort of real, tangible thing that people use and benefit from. In contrast, the entitled and selfish individuals who expect the world to bend to their personal desires - who will flip the table upside down and storm right out if they don't get what they want - have contributed exactly nothing. I mean look at cities in Indiana and Michigan to our south. We see a city like Detroit seeing a major, much deserved renaissance after decades of failure. It's the people who stuck around despite the extreme violence, awful infrastructure, economic despair and entire city blocks being abandoned who get the credit for the changes now happening. Not the privileged, white middle class that packed their bags and left somewhere more comfortable the first chance they got.

This is something that resonates with me.  Every generation of my family involves someone who moved to the area marrying someone who was already here and staying to raise the next generation.  Together, each generation has done its best (for better or for worse) to make the Region a better place without sweeping away everything that was here first.  To bring this point back, even tangentially, to road safety (or at least people moving from point A to point B), it was previous generations who created things that are still giving benefits today including (but not limited to):
- The Iron Horse Trail/Laurel Trail (circa 1997)
- Getting the Trans Canada Trail routed through the Region (circa 1992)
- The Grand Valley Trails system (circa 1973) (includes the Walter Bean Trail)

And on the topic of road safety specifically, there was Frank "The Bridgeport General" Groff (circa 1960s), the unofficial crossing guard in Bridgeport before and after Bridgeport was annexed by the City of Kitchener.

If a personal attack resonates with you, that's your business, but ac3r's comment is clearly directed at me, and explicitly calls me selfish and entitled, and accuses me of contributing nothing. Frankly, I'm done with this, I've blocked that individual, but they keep engaging with me here, and you folks keep quoting them, so I keep seeing it.