04-20-2021, 05:39 PM
(04-20-2021, 03:48 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: There is a left turn lane, but there are FOUR through lanes. These aren't turn lanes, they have matching receiving lanes on the other side. The road literally becomes a four lane plus turn lanes road for 40 meters for no reason. This is not a logical situation.
As a side note:
I think the pedestrian scramble is significantly weakend here (edit: here being Waterloo Region)...because our policies around ped signals are so fundamentally oppressive, most peds will just ignore the signal and cross on the don't-walk sign--and absolutely rightly so, our engineers gave up the right to ever claim pedestrians are in the wrong for ignoring their signals when they put a ped signal protecting a retaining wall--so it wouldn't really solve the problem. Also, fundamentally, when your signal phasing is 3-4 minutes, nobody is going to wait that long, and I will eat my hat if regional traffic signal engineers correctly prioritize ped crossing time in a ped scramble.
I just took a closer look at the plan and indeed I see that what I thought was a northbound right turn lane is marked as straight through / right turn. This makes no sense given that on the other side there are posts marking off the bike lane so there is only one lane on the north side of the intersection.
Coming southbound, the rightmost lane should be a right-turn-only lane (but is it actually marked as such? I’m not sure), which implies that on the south side of the intersection there should be no vehicles coming into the second lane except for buses headed for the bus stop. But it doesn’t look like the designers understood that when making that plan.
I’m just amazed that we’re at a point where most of King St. can be redesigned as a 2 lane road. I just wish we would extend that: the part from Columbia to Weber definitely does not need 4 lanes (when Weber was closed, that part of the road was sometimes restricted to 2 lanes and jammed up a little, but with traffic able to use Weber instead I can’t see that being an issue). At most the area between Weber and Conestoga Mall (around the expressway) might need the 4 lanes but even that I’m finding myself doubting.