ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[danbrotherston]

Leaving that aside, what they really should have done is closed the intersections to cars.

If there is actually a real silver bullet that the Dutch use to make their roads better, it's that they're willing to close intersections. Yeah, you have to drive a little farther (which makes walking and biking more attractive) but since the road grid is less complicated there's less infrastructure, fewer intersections, and safer roads as a result.

The only allowed left turn movement there is from Agnes to King. Realistically this movement can be moved to Wellington.

If emergency vehicles still need access they can add flex bollards.

There's no reason there should be any traffic signal there, there should be no intersection at all, not even right-in-right-out. Nor should there have been at Moore. And don't even get me started on the section past GRH, at least 3 should have never been built.

Leaving aside that would have saved 5 million dollars at least in construction costs (a fully signalised intersection will easily run 1 million, I say remove 5), it would also have saved a dozen or more collisions already (admittedly some might just have collided at different intersections), and would have made safer, faster roads for everyone in the region.

This restriction would have been a huge net positive, at the cost of a relatively minor inconvenience for a few.

But unfortunately our traffic engineers and politicians are both spineless and cannot say no, so instead of following the actual standards that traffic engineers have (because even the pathetically bad traffic engineering standards that North American engineers follow explicitly prohibit all 5 of the intersections I call out), they cave to the slightest driver pressure, in a way they never cave to any other transportation constituency.