Spoken as if it was from someone who doesn’t realize that cities are creatures of the Province. Sheesh! It sounds as if she believes that Provinces shouldn’t have control over what municipalities do to the local roads? Dudas doesn’t seem to realize that all highways fall under Provincial regulation. That is why the Highway Traffic Act is a Provincial thing.
Then there are statements like this that just reinforces my belief that she needs to actually think about what the legislation actually says:
Quote:
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"[Ottawa city] staff advised me that, you know, not only this project, but projects across the city — anything that includes any piece of cycling infrastructure that would reduce the lane size, that would impact vehicular traffic — could either be on hold or killed outright," Dudas said.
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Emphasis added by me.
Seriously? Where in the legislation does it forbid decreasing “lane size”? It doesn’t. If you can add a 1.5m bike-lane by reducing two 4m traffic lanes to 3.25m each, then that is allowed – because there are still two vehicle lanes at the end.
That said, I think that Orleans Boulevard would be a great place to ADD Cycle Tracks. Not removing general traffic lanes, but ADDING peripheral Cycle Tracks. The RoW is wide enough for the addition without needing any extra property, so (as Kitchissippi points out) they could be added relatively inexpensively.
What the legislation is trying to ‘fix’ is municipalities choking off easy movement. The ease with which movement happens determines the economic health. Like it or not, traffic movement generates business.
But it is not always bad to replace a vehicle lane with something else – like a bike-lane or wider sidewalk. The key is that the lost capacity needs to be replaced with something better. If, for example, a subway was run under Bank Street, then there should be no issue with reducing the traffic lanes from two per direction to one, and installing bike-lanes and wider sidewalks. That is, of course, assuming that the subway connects useful places, thus drawing many riders from their vehicles. A successful subway would drastically reduce the traffic along Bank Street, and thus, a single lane would be sufficient for the remaining volume.
Alas, in Ottawa, converting a vehicle lane from a busy road into a bike-lane is not the same thing. It does not provide an improvement in the ease of movement. Although some will point out that ‘theoretically’ a bike-lane can carry more people per hour than a car lane, that is not the reality during a Wednesday morning in January. Ergo, for much of the year, traffic is throttled due to the lane loss.
Personally, I think that Bill 60 is necessary because some municipalities have a very piecemeal way of planning and constructing transportation infrastructure. Those municipalities are not taking a holistic view to improve ALL movements within the city. The Province now needs to step in and regulate what happens for the good of the economy.
That said, I would say that there should be a clause in Bill 60 that allows an over-ride of the very restrictive wording. Something like: “Unless permitted by the Minister”. There should be a process through which a municipality can apply to remove a vehicle lane with sufficient cause and compensation for the economy.
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