R+T is very suburban?

[ijmorlan]

I'm not suggesting that everything is exactly the same with Ring Rd. closed to private vehicles, but there are already many buildings on campus which have no direct access by private vehicles today, this just makes more buildings in that particular circumstance. There are already systems in place to address those buildings, it can address the rest.

Further, there are private-car free places all over the world that manage to function just fine, many places with much stronger accessibility laws than here, I'm talking, virtually every city centre in every Dutch town and city. Bigger places like Mackinac and Govenors Islands, even the Toronto Harbor Island.

I think it's a little insulting to call me "unserious". In return, I could argue that your position is unambitious and fearful.

If you want to have a serious discussion on it, you could and did correctly point out, that there are a number of shorter measures that could be taken that would be easier to implement and meet with less (but certainly not no) resistance. And you could do that without calling my position "unserious".

I’m not sure which buildings you are thinking of. The only ones I can find are LIB, AL, and GH, and even those are pretty close to the TC dropoff zone.

The islands you mention are all tourist/recreation/park areas; nobody has to go there, and especially nobody has to go there for short visits or errands. Additionally, they tend to have various local options such as horse carriages on Mackinac Island.

The “unserious” is not meant to be an insult. I just think it’s unserious to propose closing Ring Road to traffic, for the reasons I’ve given, and makes you look like a zealot (which you are not; just passionate about the issue and willing to propose significant changes from the status quo).

South Campus is already effectively a car free zone, with the exception of some excessive speed, mostly on Ring Road, from some drivers. Ring Road is a 2-lane road with no turn lanes; yet how often do you see a traffic jam? Even at a busy class change I can’t recall seeing anything that qualifies. Other than Ring Road, there are only dead-end driveways which I don’t much think about but actually reach almost everywhere without bringing traffic with them. I think the fact they are dead-end is crucial; nobody uses them to get anywhere except the buildings they are built to reach.

We don’t need more bureaucracy where to do a simple errand I have to pre-register and get a permit just to enter campus. We just need to use known techniques to slow down the small amount of remaining traffic (which will also cause the remaining cut through traffic to disappear to Phillip St. and Westmount Rd.).