Quote:
Originally Posted by Kitchissippi
I was just out there yesterday riding my bike to remind myself why I moved from Orleans and closer to the core. That has got to be the ugliest "main street" in the city, and to make it worse, traffic is fast. With the 174 parallel to this road, they really should limit the through traffic down to 2 lanes, make it cyclist friendly, have super wide sidewalks and encourage building closer to the street. Cumberland Village a few kilometres east should serve as an example.
Instead of the roundabout, they should start with the few blocks around the church as it is the best architectural centrepiece of the street, maybe create a plaza and a counterpoint across the street to define a focal point and build from that.
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We seem to both share having moved from the east end to places closer to the core. I choose the east side of the core whereas you seem to have picked the west....
The roundabout is a really stupid idea. I agree. The last thing we need is to make high speed traffic stop less.
The problem with St Joe is that it is one of only 3 east-west roads that exit Orleans. Thus it will always have that function and require the lanes to handle it. The other problem is that out of Orleans 100k+ population very few people actually live within a nice walk of that street. A good part of one side of it is a the cliff and the other side just does not have that much in the way of housing. This makes it extremely difficult to create a street around pedestrians. Bike lanes might help a tad, but out there they will probably mostly attract bike-obsessed/Lance Armstrong wannabee commuters trying to get to the parkway, rather than people traveling to business along the street. The risk with bike lanes is they would make the street even wider and leave us with another Innes road.
Encouraging building closer to the street is definitely a good start, although I don't know how much new building there will be in the near future. Most of the ugly strip malls and such things have a fair bit of life left in the buildings.
So we are left with street scaping....joy. Happy trenching power lines.
I think the real challenge is the suburbs what works from a business standpoint is the car....so the trick is how to design something interesting that is car friendly. Not a usual design problem now is it?