General Road and Highway Discussion

[ijmorlan]

I[/url] didn't read the entire thing but looks the city wants to add a MUT to Hickory and possibly connect it to Phillip street. Not sure how they would route it through all the buildings, but that connectivity would be great for students going to UW/ION that now would take traffic away from Uni and Columbia.

Yes, unfortunately the time to plan for an MUT extension of Hickory to push through to Phillip was before the west side of Lester was redeveloped. There is a gap between the two buildings approximately at Hickory, but there are power transformers in the way of a direct path and overall it’s not designed to be a pedestrian/bicycle traffic route. Meanwhile on the Phillip St. side of the block there is new construction which as far as I can tell doesn’t leave space for a direct connection at all.

A major planning screw-up, especially given that Hickory St. is almost exactly straight in line with the new bus terminal access road and the existing William Tutte Way. So with proper planning we would have had a continuous and almost perfectly straight pedestrian route from Regina St. to the Student Life Centre, passing right by the north end of the LRT platform. Instead of making sure this kind of thing happens, our planners are wasting their time outlawing music lessons in townhouses and specifically mentioning “picture framing” in the zoning code, as distinct from other retail establishments.