General Road and Highway Discussion

[danbrotherston]

… their justification for widening it is to allow buses not to block traffic.

How much do you want to bet their design doesn’t even accomplish that?

Specifically, I imagine an intersection where a stopped bus occupies the right lane, while vehicles waiting to turn left occupy the left lane, resulting in no straight through traffic being able to proceed. Then the light turns red and everybody waits for another cycle.

If they really want to keep stopped buses out of the flow of traffic, they should put in bus bays and/or turn lanes as appropriate.

That being said, it’s OK if a certain amount of traffic has to wait for a bus once in a while. If they want to reduce delays to non-transit traffic, they should fix some of the signals on the LRT system where pedestrian and/or motor traffic is held even when there is no conflict with the LRT (King/Conestogo, King/Northfield, Erb/Caroline, King/Allen, King/Moore, King/Francis, Charles/Victoria, Charles/Benton, Duke/Frederick, Charles/Borden, Charles/Ottawa, Ottawa/Mill; wow, more than I realized when I started typing this). It’s just a pure deadweight loss, with no benefit to transit whatsoever.

Nah, don't worry, they do accomplish that, they absolutely have turn lanes lol. More lanes is always better or so the Regional engineering mantra goes.

That being said, I'll give them credit, bus bays are bad for transit riders because buses are often delayed getting into traffic, and our regional engineers don't seem keen on implementing those. But I can only imagine it's because of institutional inertia, not because of any thoughtful consideration of the situation...or at least, that's what I assume based on all their other decisions that seem rooted in inertia.

And yeah, the signal issues are big time problematic for everyone. I think this is why I say it's inertia, none of their decisions seem to be based in careful consideration, just blindly applying rules, and those rules are derived from car dependent policies.