Whoaccio, this idea that "the traffic must go somewhere" neglects to recognize that part of the reason there's so much traffic on King is that transit along King is slow and unreliable so many with the option prefer to drive.
Well, that's part of the reason I am advocating improving rapid transit downtown. So traffic can "go somewhere" that doesn't involve more roads. The point was that if we just keep reducing road capacity, and don't provide any corresponding increase in alternatives, we will either have to put road traffic elsewhere downtown or have the traffic just go to the suburbs, both of which are undesirable and in the long run more damaging than just putting in rapid transit.
Norhtern Light said:
There is a problem with this: The underlying assumption is that roads move people. In fact, roads move cars. And moving people and goods is the goal.
Well I clearly missed the cars that are being driven by crocodiles. This idiom is incredibly misleading as it makes false distinctions between various means of getting around based on purely normative reasoning. Roads obviously allow increased mobility for a population, just as subway tunnels offer increased mobility for people (not subway trains), airports improve mobility for people (not airplanes) and ports make the shipment of goods (not container ships) easier.
Norhtern Light said:
And moving people and goods is the goal. The object is how to move the most people and goods. And Transit is much preferable option for the former (along with sidewalks/bike lanes for the 'last mile') ; then freight rail and short-haul truck for the latter. This produces maximum efficiency.That's the goal; and more lanes of traffic is not the solution.
Once again, this is flawed thinking. More road capacity is self evidently an improvement in transport capability. So is more rapid transit, more (and better) buses, more LRT, more freightrail, more airtravel, more shipping and so forth. Making normative judgments that one is better or more appropriate than another doesn't help anything.
Second_in_pie said:
Well I see several options. The first is to ban cars on the entire King route, while extending Front St and allowing the rest of the traffic to use Richmond and Adelaide. Of course, this is going to get some criticism because a) "It's all about the war on cars" and b) "Front, Richmond and Adelaide wont be enough" To that, I say that the route makes the most sense as a totally car-free zone, and that I would rather have one foot forward and meet a strong wind rather than stay back doing nothing.
Just saying "war on cars" doesn't immunize potentially dumb ideas from being dumb. Even if we take for granted this proposal was possible, it isn't, I see no reason why ROWifying King and/or Queen like that is the best solution. Richmond and Adelaide become pseudo residential after Spadina, so they would have to be expanded between Spadina and Roncesvalles, which would piss off everyone, and as it is the neo-luddite crowd is out to make them bidirectional and remove lanes so I can't imagine why they would all of sudden cheer its' expansion. The Front Street Extension, which was deemed valuable in the 80s, has been killed again by the neo-luddites on totally spurious grounds, so I don't get how that would get done. Queen's Quay is being shrunk, which will force traffic northward, and the Gardiner's future is always precarious, which would force even more cars onto streets like King. It would be next to impossible to create any kind of new road parralel to either King or Queen.
And what would we get in return? An improvement on the status quo no doubt, and some serious public realm improvements could be had, but ultimately why not just do what everyone else does when they run of space on the surface? Dig! Given that is easier to run electric trains through a tunnel than cars, a metro system of some sort would be easier than creating new road capacity in the corridor.
