Bumpy road to a greener urban core
Some unavoidable traffic truths:
One. You can't provide enough traffic lanes because traffic expands to fill the capacity. Remove lanes of roadway and traffic disappears. Remove traffic capacity and voices of protest escalate. The concept is counterintuitive. How can you take down the Gardiner and expect traffic to improve through the downtown corridor? Never mind the experiences of other cities around the world.
Two. Pedestrians and cars coexist in urban regions, but neither, often competing, is well served. The politician is constantly mediating the demands of each, often satisfying neither.On St. Clair Ave., the city tried to accommodate business, cars, pedestrians (they sacrificed cyclists) in what looks nothing like the promised grand boulevard. (Of course, the corridor may improve when it is all completed, but the signs there are worrying.)
Three. In Toronto, the political pendulum is tilted away from the automobile. If cyclists and pedestrians can't make significant gains this year and next, with the greenest city council on record, progress will be slow and painful.
Current issues underscore the struggle. Councillor Adam Vaughan wants to turn sections of one-way streets Richmond and Adelaide into two-way thoroughfares. City staff want to experiment with a ban on right turns on red lights at high-volume, accident-prone intersections downtown. And plans exist to eliminate the flexible centre lane on Jarvis St. in favour of bike lanes and more walker-friendly enhancements.Ending the one-way streets as far as practically possible should be a priority. Among the worst major streets downtown are Richmond and Adelaide. One-way streets doomed Hamilton. Richmond and Adelaide prove that when streets are turned over entirely to automobiles, life is sucked out of the streetscape.
The best streets – for business, pleasure and everyday living – are ones that mesh traffic by foot, bicycle and auto, the ones that achieve balance so that each corner is a destination, not a drive-through.The right-turns-on-red debate can be settled through observable behaviour. Are pedestrians being hit at certain intersections more frequently than at others? Why? Is the right-turn prohibition the best way to address this? Then do it immediately.
Jarvis St. is an interesting dilemma. A major arterial road, it ferries 28,000 cars daily to and from Rosedale, north Toronto and points beyond. The corridor is nondescript – a useful road in a city where highways into the core are anathema.Just what the city wants here is not entirely clear. Condos have brought a 30 per cent jump in the street population. The street isn't congested, but taking out a lane will increase travel times by two minutes. This doesn't seem like much until one realizes we spent more than $100 million on St. Clair with the promise of a one-minute gain in commuting time.
The staff report didn't recommend bike lanes as a priority. There is no vision for a truly grand street. Parking lanes may be taken out, something that should hurt a necessary retail strip.In total, the vision for Jarvis isn't sophisticated enough.
3 comments:
Cyclists, and those who use transit are also taxpayers; by your logic we should have as many cycle routes and transit routes as there are car-priority roads.
Or are motorists more equal than other humans in our democracy?
Drivers pay property taxes. Cyclists pay property taxes.
Drivers pay licence fees annually. Cyclists don't.
Drivers pay taxes when they buy fuel, Cyclists don't because of course with the exception of free air they don't visit service stations.
These fuel and licencing fees are supposed to pay for the infra-structure but a large portion goes into general revenue and a portion goes to provide bike lanes.
Drivers are penalized if they don't obey the highway traffic act. Cyclist don't.
There are laws re: consuming alcohol and using cell phones while driing. Cyclists don't.
I will give you that drivers add to pollution, etc. but they contribute to public transit, bike lanes, etc. And let's not forget their contribution to commerce which puts food on your table, fuel to heat your homes,etc.
I think you'll find that the costs that motorists pay do not go far in paying for the roadways they use. Parking in downtown areas is subsidized and undercharged, suburban city planning increases the distances our hydro, water, gas, and sewage infrastructures have to run to houses spread out with two and three car garages, this added capital and maintenance cost to municipal infrastructure is not payed for by your automotive taxes, and, as you mentioned before, drivers do not pay a carbon offset tax for their fossil fuel emissions.
We have to look at roadways as multi-modal and public spaces, the more people you can get out of cars, the better your drive will be, no?
I don't believe cars will vanish overnight, on the contrary, they are an important mode of transportation, fast and flexible if inefficient, and will remain an important mode of transit for the next century. However, we have to facilitate other means of moving people, for automotive transportation has a negative feedback factor, the more cars you put on the road, the longer the waits, the more congestion, the bigger the cost to the economy — Public transportation, on the other hand, is a positive feedback system, wherein service improves and the system makes more money as more people use it. We need to find alternatives to keep the automobile a tenable means of transportation.
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