Planners, engineers take a look at going Dutch on native roads

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Painted bike lanes, raised sidewalks by intersections and flex posts popping up in the course of streets are simply among the concepts which can be new to Windsor and are being thought of to make native streets safer and extra comfy for cyclists and pedestrians.

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A digital workshop Tuesday on how the Netherlands started sharing highway area with non-motorized visitors, and the teachings discovered, has given native planners, engineers and different municipal directors inspiration to check out new concepts.

“It was good to listen to contemporary views on issues we are able to do in Windsor,” stated Jeff Hagan, the town’s transportation planning senior engineer. “It gave us meals for thought on new approaches we are able to take.”

Town is about to embark on its first pilot challenge with bodily separated bike lanes, alongside a stretch of College Avenue connecting the downtown with the College of Windsor’s essential campus. Individually, neighborhood consultations are underway on tips on how to handle visitors patterns on Wyandotte Road by east Windsor; and council has given the go-ahead for energetic transportation infrastructure and visitors calming measures alongside Kildare Street between Ottawa Road and Tecumseh Street West.

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“I believe there’s actually an urge for food for extra selection in transportation,” stated Hagan, one in every of about 30 individuals on the workshop led by 4 consultants from three nations related to the Dutch Biking Embassy. Hosted by the Windsor Legislation Centre for Cities and the Windsor Essex County Setting Committee, the four-hour session was closed to most people to assist facilitate open dialogue.

With dashing and aggressive driving by residential neighbourhoods an enormous supply of citizen complaints, metropolis council lately amended Windsor’s visitors calming coverage, and every ward can now make investments as much as $10,000 yearly in momentary visitors calming measures.

Among the steered visitors calming instruments mentioned at this week’s workshop will likely be carried out domestically, in keeping with Hagan, together with a proposed decrease posted pace restrict of 30 km/h alongside residential stretches of Kildare Street, separated bike lanes, and easy measures like painted pavement markings and centreline flex posts geared toward additional calming visitors.

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Decrease motor-vehicle speeds and bodily visitors calming measures are important in terms of sharing roads with different customers like cyclists, workshop individuals heard. Hagan stated one thing executed in another way within the Netherlands, the place massive numbers of commutes and brief journeys are taken by bicycle, is designing and constructing sidewalks at grade, with automobiles having to climb that stage at intersections, which has a traffic-calming impact.

Sumaiya Habiba, Essex County’s environmental co-ordinator, stated what she discovered most attention-grabbing and shocking was how profitable different cities have been in garnering public help for this “multi-modal strategy” to getting round, with cyclists, pedestrians and motorists sharing the highway. Designing “colored paths” — inexperienced paint or crimson asphalt — for cyclists, for instance, gives motorists with a “very clear visible” that different forms of customers are on the highway, she stated.

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Essex County’s rising County Large Lively Transportation System, encouraging individuals to make use of alternate options to motor automobiles to get round, has been an enormous success, stated Habiba. Ten years after its initiation, CWATS is at the moment being reviewed, with a purpose of additional extending the community’s attain to attach extra communities.

Dave McLaughlin, a transportation planner with international planning and engineering consulting agency WSP Canada Inc., helps with the replace of CWATS, an Essex County plan he describes as “transformative — a really massive success story,” and a mannequin which different municipalities are in search of to emulate.

The pandemic, the local weather disaster, and now record-high gas prices, have opened the way in which for cities to strive new issues, stated McLaughlin, like “highway diets” (decreased lanes) to supply area for such alternate options as bike lanes and road boulevards for adjoining companies.

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“Cities tried these as momentary measures, as pilot tasks … and the doomsday predictions of some didn’t come to be,” stated McLaughlin. The truth is, he added, they proved so fashionable that cities from Toronto and Montreal to London and Kingston are turning what had been envisioned as short-term pilots into everlasting modifications.

Some enterprise organizations, together with neighbourhood BIAs, are amongst these pushing for extra “vacation spot streets,” he stated, with wider sidewalks, boulevards and bike lanes to spice up visitors to business areas.

McLaughlin helped develop Windsor’s 2001 Bike Use Grasp Plan, which envisioned a citywide biking community, one which was by no means totally carried out. He stated he sees the identical curiosity and pleasure at the moment as existed initially with BUMP 20 years in the past.

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“How we transfer goes to alter,” he stated.

Tuesday’s workshop, which adopted an preliminary public seminar with authors and mobility specialists Melissa and Chris Bruntlett, helps “contribute to a cultural shift and buy-in,” stated Anneke Smit, director of the College of Windsor regulation faculty’s Centre for Cities. The digital session, which included representatives from Windsor Police Service and Transit Windsor, in addition to metropolis operations and engineering, planning, parks and environmental departments, was a gathering of the forms of experience wanted to assist make that occur, she stated.

Hagan stated one thing he’d prefer to see within the preliminary part of the College Avenue West revamp is organising various kinds of momentary or “pop-up” bike lane and different designs after which gathering suggestions on what works finest earlier than last implementation.

dschmidt@postmedia.com

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