04-12-2020, 10:35 PM
(This post was last modified: 04-12-2020, 10:36 PM by danbrotherston.)
(04-12-2020, 02:38 PM)tomh009 Wrote:(04-12-2020, 12:54 PM)jamincan Wrote: Genuinely, how important is Stirling actually? My impression is that it's a massively over-sized local road. It's a bit of a pipe-dream, but what if they instead had Stirling north of Courtland stay north of Schneider Creek and be discontinuous with Stirling south of Courtland? This would than allow the IHT to cross at an intersection and only have one road crossing there. The downside, of course, would be that Stirling becomes discontinuous and there would likely be two lit intersections in close proximity.
For sure it's not busy, but disconnecting Stirling would leave Madison as the only way to cross Schneider Creek between Ottawa and Queen. That's removing/relocating downtown access for a lot of people living in the Mill St area.
Downsizing would be much easier, but it doesn't solve this particular problem.
Could we chop off part of the Stirling Green island and move the whole intersection a bit further (Kitchener) W, toward Madison, and make it a single set of lights in each direction? Also dead-end the right-turn shortcut on the side of the island. It would require buying a bit of the plaza parking lot, and it would result in a fairly large (in terms of area) intersection but it would be quite functional, I think.
So, I'm quite certain the road has little enough traffic to support reduction to 2-3 lanes, which absolutely does improve the crossing. I'm less sure if the traffic volumes would support your designs.
That being said, I'm very certain the city would not be in favour of it. They are just getting a taste for repurposing extra and unnecessary space for other purposes, and are just dipping the toes into the waters of closing roads entirely (Delta St.) I don't believe there would be any apetite for inconveniencing drivers to that degree for quite a while yet.
While I am in favour of limiting the convenience of driving, even I think that would be needlessly antagonistic to drivers, given that there are reasonable alternative that could/should be implemented. Nice in theory but I'm not going to be arguing for it.