09-18-2017, 03:19 PM
(09-18-2017, 03:01 PM)ijmorlan Wrote:(09-18-2017, 02:23 PM)tomh009 Wrote: Why would a 3m-wide trail increase animosity over the current 2.6m-wide trail?
I think he means as traffic increases, and compared to a wider trail. Presumably 3.0m will be better than 2.6m, but not by much and the difference is likely to be swallowed by increasing traffic.
Re: the “uniform width” thing, yeah, do these planners actually read what they write? That’s just absurd. Even road projects sometimes give up on widening in certain segments for a substantial period of time — e.g. Weber St. just north of Victoria St. for many years until the recent widening, and Highway 6 through Morriston. An MUT can definitely go wide opportunistically and narrow where needed. This is exactly the kind of utter nonsense that destroys my faith in their professionalism. At this point I barely default to granting planners, as a class, any expert knowledge at all. By contrast, you won’t see me second-guessing an electrician’s choice of wire gauge.
Yes, sorry for not clarifying, I meant the increasing trail volumes will lead to that animosity, the 40 cm increase will do little to mitigate it. Biggest problem being that widening the trail to 3 meters now is an investment in a 3 meter trail for the next 20 years.
Lol, don't let electricians off the hook too easily either. They're also just applying a standard, which may or may not be right. There was a pretty strong argument that I read (that I unfortunately cannot find again) that the OCS for our LRT was very overbuilt, which is both expensive, and unsightly.
But I am sympathetic to the premise. Simply cutting and pasting standards doesn't seem worth of the title engineer. But to be fair few of us here are actually project engineers.