11-24-2018, 10:38 PM
(This post was last modified: 11-24-2018, 10:39 PM by danbrotherston.)
(11-24-2018, 09:55 PM)tomh009 Wrote:(11-24-2018, 03:45 PM)Pheidippides Wrote: Under that rationale we shouldn't build extra road lanes until they are needed either.
In general, I don't think we do: witness the 401 as a prime example. If you build a road, I expect that you would build it for something like a 20-year traffic forecast. Counterexamples surely exist, but I don't think extra lanes are generally being built unless they are expected to be needed, as the cost is quite substantial.
In this case, this is really a mid-distance connecting trail that is likely to see few pedestrians commuting, and also relatively few using it for exercise. So I would say that it should be planned for that same 20-year traffic volume, but for bicycles, not cars. And it's quite possible that 3m is a sufficient width for that, if pedestrians are rare.
I'm not sure about MTO, they're probably limited by the extreme cost of their projects, but at a Regional and City Level, we vastly overbuild our roads, both, in the past, for things like Frederick and Belmont where plans changed, but roads continue to be reconstructed in their vastly oversized state, and on roads like Bearinger, Davenport, Westheights Dr., and others where road diets were easy to justify by traffic numbers even decades later and yet are almost impossible to implement due to the misguided perception of something being "taken away".
And don't think this has ended. At a Regional level an explicitly stated goal of the last two transportation master plans has been to not overbuild roads, and yet we see roads like Westmount which are vastly over built, and Highland which is planned to be widened on the assumption that traffic volumes will justify it in 10-20 years.
Yeah, we over build roads like its going out of style.