06-15-2020, 10:09 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-15-2020, 10:10 PM by danbrotherston.)
(06-15-2020, 09:38 PM)tomh009 Wrote:(06-15-2020, 08:34 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: They are also doing work there, but if they were unwilling to put a real island on a wide residential side street, how do you think they will deal with a narrow arterial road?
Is it actually narrow (for a two-lane road)? How wide are the lanes?
It's not narrow for a 2 lane road, but the lane widths are alread at the regional minimum of 3.35 for a non-curb lane.
Where as West, the lane widths were already around 4 meters as a result of the excess width for parking permitted on the road. And that's on a city street which has lower minimum lane widths.
There was already considerably more space on West than Victoria, and the boulevard on West is larger too. Yet they used none of that, rebuilt the curbs, minimized the island width to the smallest permitted island, kept 4 meter lanes.
I suspect the only thing that even makes it possible to build an island on Victoria is the bike lanes, the region counts they as part of the pavement width, which they insist on being at minimum 4 meters curb to curb so that snow plows don't need to slow down (yes, they can easily fit through a much narrower lane, but they may need to slow down and/or raise their blade, there are narrower curb to curb pavement widths in the region, see King at Allen). Of course using the bike lanes in this way makes them incredibly unsafe for cyclists, since drivers prefering not to slow down, will simply drive in the bike lane. I came within inches of being killed by a transport truck driver who chose to do this on Glasgow, the mirror went above my head. Of course, nobody at the region gives the slightest fuck about that, so long as no driver ever has to slow down, they're happy.