The Road Diet

Roads

I’m all for diets. Some work, some don’t.

I was at a seminar a few years ago about changing our cities to be healthier (e.g reducing obesity), less polluting and more people friendly. We were shown pictures of places around the world that are much more pedestrian friendly and I also visited some of these areas when in Portland (And also a six lane road that was not!) People in Portland and Vancouver are statistically healthier than people in Waterloo Region (Oh, we come out badly in those surveys) because of efforts made in their cities.

The City of Waterloo is going to actually narrow a road and may narrow another. It seems to go against the common sense of our car crazed society. Bearinger, which is near where I live, needs some further thought as the road was just repaved as a four lane this past fall. My neighbour, Louise McLaren, wrote a great letter to the Record in support of this “diet”,

http://news.therecord.com/Opinions/LettertotheEditor/article/667089

Davenport is another story. It is a short street between a subdivision and the Conestoga Mall with an industrial park at one end and a dead end to a nursing home at the other. It has traffic to the mall and local homes but I have never found it super busy.

It is, however, with the four lanes, difficult for pedestrians to cross. And we need to make our cities more pedestrian friendly. The new change will have two lanes, cycling lanes, a median and a pedestrian island. The traffic will slow (the wider the road, the more cars speed — watch how that works when you are driving down Northfield then into the new Westmount extension) , and alternate nonpolluting forms of transportation will grow.