Cycling in Waterloo Region

[dscurtis]

I'm surprised they used grass that narrow on Highland. I know the region generally refuses to any grass verge less than 1 meter wide at a minimum because they feel it simply doesn't grow. Of course this is the city so they're usually saner, and this is also housing fronted, so they don't do maintenance anyway.

The undulations are unfortunate, it could just be a different contractor doing a shittier job. I know that with some of the speed humps they were done so poorly that only the markings on the ground indicate where they are, there's very nearly zero vertical displacement to the actual road surface, certainly nothing anyone would notice driving over it.

I suspect some contractors are just very uncomfortable with/incompetent with building non-car infra.

FWIW, the driveways and road surface on East are still very wide. I mean, it's generally a huge improvement (and no doubt something DoFo will review :eyeroll but I wonder if the road is actually meeting the new complete streets standards. I hope it isn't, because compared with the cars, it is still so freaking wide. This encourages speeding and dangerous behaviour. For reference, the main road through the village where we are (mind you, not the main car road, just the main street) that carries a fair number of cars, tons of bikes, and even frequent large trucks and buses, is only 5.5m wide, so 2.75m per lane (although there are no lane markings). Quiet residential side streets (that are still two way) will be ~4m wide. I think this makes a huge difference to how roads feel, and especially how the traffic flows (to say nothing of the cost).

Yes, my experience with the Region has been min. 1.0m boulevard for grass, if less they prefer coloured concrete.

Reading through the City's Complete Streets document, East Ave is classified as a Major Community Collector Street (page 39). The typical cross sections on pages 27-28 show 3.3m+3.3m road lanes and a 2.4m parking lane = 9.0m total road width. MTE's drawings show East Ave as 8.1m EP to EP, so a bit narrower than the recommendation. Agreed that narrower would be nicer.