General Road and Highway Discussion

[ijmorlan]

The easier possibility is for the E->S ramps by dropping King St to a single lane that continues onto the highway and 2-laning the offramp.  During the morning rush, traffic can be at a standstill through Homer Watson, and worse if there's congestion downstream.

King St. is only two lanes anyway, starting less than 500m north of the intersection with Dixon/Montgomery immediately north of the interchange, and continuing all the way up past Uptown. So reducing that remaining half kilometre to two lanes would be a very sensible thing to do.

In general I’m opposed to freeway widening unless it’s on a full cost-recovery basis, but to deal with bottlenecks it sometimes makes sense. In this case, I imagine 2 lanes from the flyover, 1 from King, and 2 from the west coming together to form 5 (rather than the existing 4) lanes, which could then continue to where the 5th lane is currently introduced ahead of the Fairway exit. At that exit the 5 lanes could split into 4 lanes continuing and 2 exiting onto Fairway as they do now. This would involve approximately 1.2km of a single additional lane but should help significantly to equalize use of the roadway.