Grand River Transit

[danbrotherston]

Pickup and drop off of what?  It's entirely reasonable for ring road to be closed to everything but buses, service vehicles and delivery vehicles.

We've said this for years, but UW Admin has only ever moved the other direction (limiting buses, and creating more pedestrian crossings of Ring Rd., and limiting pedestrian access along Ring Rd.).  My opinion of UW Admin is well known here, this is a major reason why.

Packages, family members, bringing things into the office, …

Especially off hours. There is simply no justification for not allowing a family member to drop me off conveniently close to a building.

I personally could walk from University Ave., but there are lots of people with less mobility for whom that is not a reasonable requirement. And I don’t mean disabled people, just people who don’t want to have to walk the equivalent of several blocks. Anybody who thinks it’s reasonable to close Ring Road must (if they are consistent) also believe it reasonable to close the area bounded by approximately Bridgeport, Caroline, Union, and Moore, or a similar-size area around Uptown, to motor vehicles.

And while in the past the traffic policies on Ring Road were not very pedestrian-friendly, with crosswalks being eliminated and pedestrians generally having to yield to vehicles at all but a very limited number of locations, right now there are many crosswalks where motor vehicles are to yield to pedestrians. In fact if anything now the issue is buses being excessively held up by an unrelenting stream of people walking. Generally speaking, I have no problem with Ring Road not being a fast road, but at a certain point all the traffic (vehicle and pedestrian) needs to get a chance to move. I wonder if it’s time to consider traffic lights at some locations.

I’m not sure what the right answer is. Off of Ring Road, I think we pretty much have it right: there are lots of service roads that go in to various buildings, but they are all dead ends so they are low traffic. Ring Road however sometimes feels busier than I would like. In the past I have mused about making it more of a zig-zag route, with shortcuts for buses only. The idea would be to slow down most motor vehicles but allow buses to move through more quickly.

I hope that regardless of what one thinks about traffic on Ring Road, however, it should be clear to everybody that cutting down on buses is not the way to address traffic levels. This reminds me of when the iXpress came in and the neighbourhood lobbied to keep them off of Central/Albert/Seagram if I remember correctly. Completely absurd to complain about a bus every few minutes on those streets, given the traffic level of general motor vehicles.

This is absolutely not true, if traffic on Ring Rd. is a safety issue, then there's absolutely a reason to remove that danger. You may disagree with that reason, or think it's not sufficient, I disagree, but absolutely there is reason.

There are plenty of places where you cannot drive to get dropped off including most of campus. Just because you can do so today, and we call it a "road" doesn't mean that it cannot change.  And no, I would not have a problem making the uptown or downtown core pedestrianized, many cities do in fact have areas that large closed to general vehicle traffic and only open to transit/deliveries/service.

(Only on the east side does this apply, the west side is still a disaster).  In fact, the crosswalks are the problem, before the crosswalks pedestrians crossed from one sidewalk to the other whenever there was space, now they are all funnelled into a few crosswalks, which creates more conflict.  That being said, I have never once seen a serious traffic jam outside of special event days when UW Police direct traffic anyway.  If there is a traffic problem, I think it is vehicle traffic which is the problem on our pedestrian campus.