General Road and Highway Discussion

[ijmorlan]

I think the one movement that's likely to encounter issues is drivers trying to get from King St westbound, over to Charles St (perhaps to turn left onto Victoria St S southbound). Water St has a left turn restriction, Ontario St is one way, Victoria St has a turn restriction, and Gaukel St is now closed. With Francis St closed too you'd have to left turn at Frederick or Queen, which is quite a bit before Victoria St and likely to cause some confusion. Not insurmountable, but I think it's where traffic impacts are likely to come from.

This one is time based, although it covers basically the entire day. But I was never really on board with time based left turn restrictions. The sign details are too small and contain too much information that you can't parse it fast enough by the time it becomes readable, so people often ignore them. If the point is to prevent blocking traffic, why not have a "don't block traffic" sign, where you can take all the time you want to turn as long as no one is waiting behind you?

Our drivers are not mature enough to handle that. I agree it makes sense conceptually, but the same people who can’t process that if they’re in the left turn lane they need to turn left even if they’ve realized they want to go straight are the same people who wouldn’t be able to resist waiting to turn left and blocking traffic behind them. Also the same people who park themselves in the middle of the exit from a parking lot waiting to turn left, leaving no space for people turning right to move past them to their right.

Back to the original question, I can think of a couple of possibilities: install a left turn lane from King westbound (northbound) on to Water, or promote right on Water, left on Duke, left on Victoria; I think you would want to provide signalized support for the left turn onto Duke. Installing the left turn on King would I think require removing parking from one side of the street, maybe 6 spots.