Cycling in Waterloo Region

[danbrotherston]

I totally agree.  Of course you'll find that turn lanes increase safety, where as more through lanes increase throughput.

Guess which one of those things our engineers optimize for.

Except that more through lanes don’t increase throughput if they’re constantly getting jammed up by cars waiting to turn.

So to be perfectly honest I think it’s incompetence, at the basic level where they don’t bother looking at what actually happens on the street.

The order for increasing the capacity of a street should be like this:

1) single lane (laneway)
2) single lane but wide enough for opposing direction vehicles to squeeze past
3) 2 narrow lanes (residential street)
4) 2 normal lanes; turn lanes provisioned at busy intersections
5) 2 normal lanes; turn lanes provisioned at all intersections allowing turns
6) 4 lanes; turn lanes provisioned at all intersections allowing turns
7) 6 lanes; no turns allowed at all except where turn lanes are provisioned (not even to get into a driveway)
8) …

A lot of streets like Belmont where we on this board complain about the waste of resources to build and maintain a 4-lane street don’t really provide the 4-lane capacity. Although we’ve spent the money to lay down 4 lanes of asphalt, the lack of turn lanes means that sometimes there are 0 lanes of capacity at intersections — if people are waiting to turn both left and right, there goes your capacity. So we’ve paid for it, but we’re not getting it. Even people who think the car should be king shouldn’t be happy with that situation.

They won't increase throughput if they're constantly jammed up, but they won't ever be "constantly" jammed up, some straight cars will get through, which is why it increases the capacity of the intersection.

This is why our regional engineers saw fit to reconfigure Westmount/Glasgow intersection to four straight lanes no turn lanes from the previous configuration, even though that configuration was used before and was known to be unsafe, because it did in theory and practice carry more cars. Also prioritized over safety in this case is continuing unnecessary access (the intersection could have had turn restrictions) and keeping wealthy property owners happy (the property owners objected to widening the road to put in turn lanes).