03-10-2016, 12:23 PM
The exercise started as a reaction to a City of Waterloo planning document that casually labelled some of the streets as "minor collectors". due to their relative straightness and directness through the neighbourhood.
That sparked a strong reaction, as there was a fear that this would lead to upgrading of the streets to directly serve through traffic. (i.e. widening, eliminating stop signs, etc)
And so through their Councillor Melissa Durrell, they had this classification reversed, and, as a active preventative measure, the Uptown West Traffic Study was initiated for the purpose of preemptively stopping a hypothetical dramatic increase of traffic due to the new condo construction on King St.
Personally, I think it's absurd.
The neighbourhood is fine as-is. I've done the "cut through the local streets" thing in there, and the existing network of stop signs already does a fine job of discouraging it. It's rarely faster. Yes, these are "local" streets, but they are still public streets, and provide useful disaster-relief for the road network. Look at the chaos that happened around the Columbia closure at the railway tracks. When there is literally no redundancy, one closure has huge effects.
That sparked a strong reaction, as there was a fear that this would lead to upgrading of the streets to directly serve through traffic. (i.e. widening, eliminating stop signs, etc)
And so through their Councillor Melissa Durrell, they had this classification reversed, and, as a active preventative measure, the Uptown West Traffic Study was initiated for the purpose of preemptively stopping a hypothetical dramatic increase of traffic due to the new condo construction on King St.
Personally, I think it's absurd.
The neighbourhood is fine as-is. I've done the "cut through the local streets" thing in there, and the existing network of stop signs already does a fine job of discouraging it. It's rarely faster. Yes, these are "local" streets, but they are still public streets, and provide useful disaster-relief for the road network. Look at the chaos that happened around the Columbia closure at the railway tracks. When there is literally no redundancy, one closure has huge effects.