Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
But has the city earmarked the hundreds of million or billions of dollars it will cost to retrofit existing roads to reduce the design speeds?
This reminds me of the move to reduce the blood alcohol limit for impaired driving without ramping up check stops. It's a superficial gesture that will inconvenience the law-abiding and do little to curb dangerous driving.
|
So I'll give you an example based on my neighbourhood. 8th Avenue runs at the south side of the neighbourhood and is a pretty wide road. It also has a lengthy playground zone that runs right in the middle of it. The street is very wide and includes bike sharrows that drivers often ignore. I've had one friend hit by a car on his bike on 8th.
What would make sense is to add a protected bike lane along there. It's heavily used by cyclists and has a lot of children around. Someone tried to install a traffic calming roundabout at 8th Ave and Remington Road, but you have a collector and a residential road intersection and roundabouts don't work with incompatible road types like that, at least not for traffic calming.
But you can't put a bike lane there because due to the 50km/h speed limit, it's too narrow to accommodate a bike lane. If you lowered the speed limit to even 40km/h then it changes the street requirements and you can make a safer road for cars, bikes and pedestrians.