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Red-light city

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Much easier on one-ways. This can be seen on many one-way streets; Erb/Bridgeport in Waterloo; Johnson Street in Kingston. Richmond/Adelaide in Toronto.

It's impossible to always work on a 2-way street ... that's why traffic engineers love one-way streets.
 
I think the main problem with the red lights is that the city has not updated the traffic counts on major roads in years if not a decade!

Traffic has increased and major streets need more green time, and some streets need more left turn time, etc..

The main thing I find bothersome in Toronto is that small streets in Toronto get way too much green time and I have often seen streets get a green with NO one there while traffic on the main road sits there for 20-30 secs waiting for green.

Small streets need at most 5-10 secs of green, maybe more if there is a pedestrian (activate that by a pedestrian signal push), but otherwise the green should be short and sweet.

I've been to California and they have great signals where if you're on a small street off peak (night time), as you pull up the light on the main road turns red, as you enter the intersection to go through or turn, the light turns yellow right away and then red to quickly return the green back to the main road.

This is what we need in Toronto. Also, getting rid of that bloody 2sec all red delay. That is 4 secs wasted PER cycle. What a terrible waste!
 
A number of streets are clearly deliberately desynchronized. If you drive up Blue Jays Way at 8:50AM, for example, you'll get a string of green lights. At 9:10, you'll get a red light at every intersection.

It's pretty stupid for the Sun to make it into a cyclists vs. cars thing. Most cyclists I know are way more pissed about it than car drivers. After all, it's a lot more work to stop and start.
 
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It was just the other day that I wondered when the city would get a reasonable system of traffic lights (while sitting at a totally empty intersection for 3 minutes while newspapers blew by.)

Even more aggravating is that the city doesn't allow transit vehicles to get any sort of priority, faster red or anything at all, even on select routes or at select intersections. I've been told that Viva has "mild signal priority." I have yet to see this priority in action, but I'm taking my word that it's there. At least Highway 7 has well timed greens, especially compared to Toronto's hideously unsynchronized and sometimes seemingly deliberately annoying red lights.
 
The intersection at Victoria/Dundas is the most annoying one I have come across in the city as a pedestrian. Most people cross in an east-west direction, as does most vehicle traffic, yet the north-south phase of lights seems to drag on longer than the east-west phase. Its so bad that the amount of close calls between pedestrians and cars is so high with everyone jaywalking.

As for synchronizing lights, Jarvis isn't that bad. If I catch a green, I usually catch all greens.
 
Tuscani01 said:
The intersection at Victoria/Dundas is the most annoying one I have come across in the city as a pedestrian. Most people cross in an east-west direction, as does most vehicle traffic, yet the north-south phase of lights seems to drag on longer than the east-west phase. Its so bad that the amount of close calls between pedestrians and cars is so high with everyone jaywalking.
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This used to have a really short north-south phase. But when they added the scramble at Yonge/Dundas they changed the phases to presumably ensure that the back up of traffic at Yonge doesn't stretch right through the Victoria St. intersection.

I agree, it's very frustrating.

There are some traffic signals in the city where a "minor" street intersects a "major" one, where phases have been timed to give a painfully long wait to those on the minor street.

For example in my new neighbourhood at Queen and Jones, I haven't timed it yet but I would estimate that Jones Ave traffic has to wait about 4 minutes for a green light. I've seen people get sick of waiting and just run the red when the way is clear.
 
GraphicMatt said:
It's the too-short pedestrian phases across University that really bother me. You shouldn't need to break into a quick run to make it across in one phase.
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Agreed, that's why roads just shouldn't be that wide. You see the same on Lakeshore at Leslie.

This is what perplexes me about the proposal to replace the Gardiner expressway with a 10-12 lane surface road; I'd think that would be more difficult to cross than the existing elevated expressway!
 
Not that I want to jump on a Sun bandwagon, but they *kinda* have a point with synchronized signals. Generally, they're awful in this city, and as was said, if you're lucky, sometimes Jarvis has synchronized greens that allow you to go from Queen to Isabella in about three to five minutes assuming traffic is cooperative.

The all time record though has to go to First Avenue in New York. New Years' Eve, shenanigans at a bar on 4th street, the two of us get in a cab and we get to her place at 72nd and 1st in, I kid you not, about twenty minutes at around 2:00am, average speed and traffic volume (for New York). All greens up to about the high 50s. *That's* synchronization.

And things only got better and stranger from there, but I digress...
 
Hamilton has a beautiful system of synchronized greens. Accordingly it has
  • utterly ruinous streetscapes of closed storefronts
  • among the worst rates of car-dependency out of all CMAs
  • repeatedly seen its pedestrians get literally split in half by vehicles speeding way over the limit to "catch up to the wave"

Be careful what you wish for.
 
nfitz said:
Agreed, that's why roads just shouldn't be that wide. You see the same on Lakeshore at Leslie.

This is what perplexes me about the proposal to replace the Gardiner expressway with a 10-12 lane surface road; I'd think that would be more difficult to cross than the existing elevated expressway!
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Yeah replacing the Gardiner with a huge road at-grade is dumb. Keep it elevated until they can afford to bury it.
 
Coruscanti Cognoscente said:
Yeah replacing the Gardiner with a huge road at-grade is dumb. Keep it elevated until they can afford to bury it.
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I agree. One just needs to visit Chicago to see how it would turn out. Lakeshore Dr. is a 10 lane road, packed with cars during rush hour. Not a fun street to cross. At some points its impossible to cross because of concrete barriers. It feels like you are crossing a highway. Either bury the Gardiner, or leave it as is.
 
Platform 27 said:
Hamilton has a beautiful system of synchronized greens. Accordingly it has
  • utterly ruinous streetscapes of closed storefronts
  • among the worst rates of car-dependency out of all CMAs
  • repeatedly seen its pedestrians get literally split in half by vehicles speeding way over the limit to "catch up to the wave"

Be careful what you wish for.
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Yet Montreal and New York don't have these problems.

The problem with downtown Hamilton is that the cars aren't going to or from downtown at all, they're just cutting through it as a fast way to get to the 403.
 
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