Highway 7 - Kitchener to Guelph

[danbrotherston]

We could build decent road capacity by widening the existing township highway to four lanes, and making a smooth connection from it to the end of Shirley (and on through Bingeman Centre) to the parkway. But the province has decreed we get an expressway instead, so that's what we plan around.

The thing about Shirley Ave/Bingeman Centre, it needs some work to be brought up to standards for speeds and driveway accesses. The currently posted speed limit is 50 past Riverbend Dr, which is kind of absurd, given that it's a 4-lane road with median that's likely safe to be driving 70km/h. The things that are stopping this are the shoulder bike lane which should be removed and put above the curb and the large number driveways on the South side.



Given the number of driveway accesses, there really ought to be a separate access road south of Bingemans Centre Drive just to serve the industrial driveways on a separate street than the main East-West connector road so the speed limit can be raised.



The section of Shirley Dr East of Bingemans to Victoria has too many driveway accesses and bends to be brought up to higher speed or capacity road, you may need to route a new Highway 7 closer to the rail corridor, or compromise and keep it on Bingemans Centre Dr to Lackner.



Ideally though, I'd like to see the whole thing scrapped except for the Bruce St. connector. Remove some directional ramps to increase weaving distance and improve safety on the Conestoga Parkway. Add the directional ramps Eastward back in, and call it done.





Compared with what the province is proposing, that's 3 fewer rail tunnels, 3 fewer overpasses, and the Edna ramps are maintained. It wouldn't preclude building an overpass in the future, but with the presence of alternate routes across the Grand River and into Guelph, I don't see who this really helps except for making countryside land around Breslau more developable. The 401 still becomes a bottleneck past Highway 6.

The design of the reconstructed portion is the fault of the province. The engineers there don't have the slightest idea how to design a street....so they designed what they know...a divided freeway and then signed it at 50 km/h. Honestly the engineers involved shouldn't be allowed to design roads...they're dangerously incompetent.

OTOH, the road is already designed to be a 70km/h highway. And as for the driveways and bike lanes, as our regional engineers like to say "that meets all modern engineering standards"...by which they mean, death and injury is a design feature.

So it could easily be the new highway, no extra work needed to meet provincial standards. But if you really want to make our roads safe (which we all do, even those of us who want there to be fewer cars) a service road would be pretty easy to build here and is the easy solution to stroads: https://thecutstack.substack.com/p/stroads-but-good-ff9