General Road and Highway Discussion

[danbrotherston]

So I've been thinking on stroads for the last little while here and I am thinking that service streets can provide a solution to them.

I am trying this idea out with a case study on Fairway Rd. (one of our stroadiest stroads). Here I've added service streets along the road to service all the retail businesses along Fairway Rd. between Wilson and Manitou. It eliminates dozens of driveways and two fully signalized intersections. It would clearly be a far far safer road, and would have bike infra for very cheap.

The cost is of course to access (as it always is) drivers in the other direction would have to go ~1 minute out of their way to make a U-turn. I feel like this is an easy price to pay, but given our traffic engineers love affair with stroads, I figure it'd be a hard sell.

You guys have any other thoughts on this.

I think that would make a Fairway into a true road. Could something not quite as goo be accomplished by requiring all developers to at least connect their parking lots to one another and removing some access driveways. The Starbucks to MEC plaza is connected, unfortunetely the car dealership breaks up the frontage to the Toys R US plaza. On the other side if the shoppers plaza could connect to the Former Williams parking lot, you are then linked all the way to the Former RBC site. 
This did make me think, our worst Stroads did develop in the 50-70s. Roads from the 80s onward are mostly roads with a few nodes of Stroadiness here and there.

Yeah, I mean, modern roads do restrict intersections some what...just look at Ira Needles.

But it's still frustrating how willing regional engineers are to put unnecessary and risk inducing intersections on their roads. Just look at Ira Needles between University and Thorndale. Despite having roundabouts with direct access into the plaza only 600 meters apart, the engineers still felt the need to have two right-in-right-out and one full movement (extremely large) intersection in that distance. Like...why?! It's because safety is so far down the list of priorities that making drivers go an extra 600 meters is an unacceptable cost to pay to save lives?! Insanity.

And then our traffic movement figures get hurt...

So yeah, new roads are a little better, they tend not to have dozens of smaller businesses like Fairway Rd. does.

To be honest, I don't even know if it's the engineers that have achieved this, or if it's the concentration of development into a few larger scale developments rather than dozens of smaller business owned properties.

As for if developers could be forced to achieve this by connecting their parking lots? Maybe? I doubt it. For one, unless you actually close the driveways you won't achieve any safety or throughput improvements because people will always turn into their convenient location. For another, parking lots aren't always lined up, so it may involve a lot of jogs. Possibly it could be useful for bike infra...but...honestly I think a planned corridor is better. But there's nothing to stop the city eminent domaining a chunk from all the parking lots to fit in the service street. I'm pretty sure my design does encroach on most of the properties.