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King Street (Streetcar Transit Priority)

max said:
What you propose requires a majority of the provincial legislature to be interested in solving the the issue with amending legislation.
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The fact that they need to put up signs telling people what each signal is for shows that the HTA is badly in need of amending. It's visual clutter and it's never safe to force drivers to read when they don't have to. There are better ways of doing this and our own legislation shouldn't be stopping us from implementing them.
 
Dr. Snoot said:
I honestly can’t believe this actually happened. Good on Chow and Council.

I think this will help. It’s one thing for people to drive through an intersection on a green traffic light. It’s another thing psychologically to do it when facing a big red light. I’d still support putting red light cameras at every intersection in Toronto.

What are these temporary platforms that are mentioned? I wonder why after years of pilot and then making it permanent we’re still talking about temporary measures.
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The temporary TTC platforms are because the City is planning a new watermain on King downtown in 2026 so all will be dug up (and they will THEN install new tracks and 'tidy things up". Yes, pity to wait to 2026 (though I suspect it will get postponed as having BOTH King & Queen blocked would be a REAL mess.)
 
MisterF said:
The fact that they need to put up signs telling people what each signal is for shows that the HTA is badly in need of amending. It's visual clutter and it's never safe to force drivers to read when they don't have to. There are better ways of doing this and our own legislation shouldn't be stopping us from implementing them.
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The HTA doesn't require all those signs or signals anymore. That's just the City of Toronto being paranoid. The 2016 amendment to the HTA officially adopted the bicycle-shaped lens to mean "bicycle signal", so since 2016 it is no longer necessary to ever use the "Bicycle Signal" sign. Municipalities can always choose to add the sign anyway in places where there's an unusually likelihood and consequence of someone looking at the wrong signal, but this is definitely not one of those cases.

It is also not necessary to have 4 mini-heads under the HTA, since they're all effectively the same signal phase. They only need 2 total. If they used the same lens on all of them (e.g. red/yellow/green circles) they could have one head aligned for transit and one aligned for bicycles, with the same sign on them. Or they could use two heads for transit and one bicycle signal head with bicycle-shaped lenses. The HTA definitely does not require them to have 4 heads and a bicycle signal sign.

Here's an example from Ottawa with only a single bike head even though the bike phase is observably different than the general vehicle phase. In this case the use of a "bicycle signal" sign is justifiable since the bike head is mounted high up as you'd expect a vehicle head to be, so there's a higher chance it could be mistaken for a general vehicle signal.
LBI-Ottawa2.png

Westbound on Laurier Ave at Elgin St, Ottawa.
 
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City of Toronto: "Let's put up red lights to stop drivers from going straight"
also City of Toronto: *puts four green lights immediately next to the red light*

And why is the bicycle signal not on with the right turn arrow? Bicycles are in the same lane as right turns, it is absurd to tell them to just stand there while the cars behind them face a green arrow.

Andy_in_Toronto said:
I don’t know if those guys have obtained a real drivers permit or have been riding a camel somewhere before.
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Ah yes, the notorious camel to BMW pipeline.
 
Only if we have stricter laws. They all should get their licenses revoked and forced to sell their vehicles for repeated offences. No penalty = keep doing it
 
Steve X said:
Only if we have stricter laws. They all should get their licenses revoked and forced to sell their vehicles for repeated offences. No penalty = keep doing it
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They should do the same with fare evaders. Anyone caught fare evading should get their presto card revoked and be forced to walk!
 
  • Haha
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Or wait until the fare inspectors have gone somewhere else, and board the next vehicle, and repeat the process.

Not only that, but since credit and debit cards, including Apple Pay and Google Pay, can be used as payment too... do you want to confiscate them? Do you want to confiscate people's phones?

Quick, no tolerance solutions to social problems always sound really good, until you stop to think about them for more than 1.5 seconds. It certainly doesn't pass any kind of practical or legal smell test.
 
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Steve X said:
Only if we have stricter laws. They all should get their licenses revoked and forced to sell their vehicles for repeated offences. No penalty = keep doing it
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I don't get how you can claim that the current laws - which allow red light cameras - are a failure, when we have yet to implement any red light cameras.
 
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Admiral Beez said:
Why doesn't the King St. corridor have bike lanes?
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Without moving the streetcar tracks north or south, you’d probably have to take out a whole lane to serve as a bidirectional bike path. Considering plans for extension of the Wellington bike path and the Adelaide + Richmond ones, I don’t think the city would bother throwing lanes in here too, maybe somewhere outside of the core.

King St is actually one of my go-to routes for biking at the moment (due to the mess on Adelaide and Richmond right now). I live on the east side near Jarvis and bike on King anywhere between Simcoe in the west and River in the east. Since there’s little through-access it’s usually pretty calm of traffic, though I would enjoy being less vigilant of parked cars.
 
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Admiral Beez said:
Why doesn't the King St. corridor have bike lanes?
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Because the current configuration is a temporary installation. The curb lane is just over 3 metres wide, so if you put in a 1.5m bike lane there's only 1.5 m left over for patios, loading zones or whatever else the city wanted to put in that space, and it's too narrow for any of those things.

When the street gets reconstructed, it would become possible to shift the curb line such that the sidewalk is consistently widened by 1.5m (which is actually useful) and some areas have a mountable curb such that trucks can load on the side of the road in a designated loading bay that acts as a sidewalk extension when not in use. That would leave space for a bike lane.

Example of a loading bay that acts as part of the sidewalk when not in use:
Capture.JPG


Currently the absence of a bike lane is terrible for streetcar operations because there's no way for a streetcar to overtake a bicycle. They just get stuck behind them, crawling along at 16 km/h or so. There are a ton of destinations on King Street, so there will always be people cycling on King, regardless of the bike lanes on Richmond and Adelaide. And as @reinventingthewheel mentioned, the absence of significant volumes of motor traffic on King makes it an inherently safer bike route than Richmond/Adelaide where a huge number of cars and trucks need to turn across the bike lane.
 
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Admiral Beez said:
Why doesn't the King St. corridor have bike lanes?
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Because it is not a wide streets, has street-patios, has transit (streetcar tracks and bikes do not go well together) and because not every street can accommodate separated tracks. Adelaide and Richmond are (finally) well set up for bikes and are VERY close. ) (BTW, I ride a bike and do not own a car.)
 
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