This is once again (just…

This is once again (just like Bill-212) more government overreach from the Province dictating cities to design streets and roads based on upside-down priorities.

A responsible approach to prioritizing the various design facets of a street or a road should be done as follows when it comes to prioritizing engineering values:

1. Safety: Is the design of the street or road safe for ALL users? This includes pedestrians, cyclists, transit users, and private vehicle drivers. The safely of ANY group of these road users should NEVER be compromised in favor of a lower-priority engineering value.

2. Cost: Can we afford to build this street or road - both in terms of initial construction cost as well as the long-term maintenance costs? Remember that sidewalks and bicycle lanes need less frequent resurfacing as these types of road users weight significantly less and thus provide orders-of-magnitude less wear on the asphalt.

3. Volume: Can this street or road move the required number of people per unit time? Remember that transit can move many more people per unit area than private motor vehicles can but a lack of transit lanes will disincentivize people from using transit and resort to using less space-efficient means of transportation, namely private motor vehicles - see the Downs-Thomson Paradox. Similarly, a lack of safe bicycle lanes will cause people to feel unsafe while cycling with heavy vehicular traffic and will thus likely result to car driving thus resulting in more traffic congestion - thus working against what this bill claims to attempt to solve.

4. Speed: This is the lowest priority engineering value that should be considered when designing a street or road and generally runs contrary to the three aforementioned values. Higher speed traffic is inherently more dangerous (greater vehicle momentum, decreased reaction time, longer braking distances), more expensive as it requires wider lanes and gentler curves, and decreases the throughput volume of a street or road as the vehicle following distance must be increased.

Unfortunately, Bill-60 flips these priorities upside-down and instead prioritizes:

1. Speed: "The proposed changes are intended to keep people and goods moving by creating more capacity on roads for vehicles and drivers." - this is clear whom this bill prioritizes - fast moving vehicles.

2. Volume: The bill claims to create more capacity on roads (though evidence doesn't support this) but there is no discussion about safety or cost (long-term or short-term)

3. Cost: There's no consideration of how municipalities will be able to pay for this. Town/City councils are better suited to deciding how property taxes paid by their residents can best be used to design streets that are financially viable for the municipality. Provincial overreach risks creating a poorly designed local street that will not be able to generate enough property tax revenue to sustain itself thus leading the city/town towards financial insolvency.

4. Safety: Bill-60 claims to "enhance community safety" but there is no evidence to support this. Higher speed traffic is more dangerous for everyone, but especially the most vulnerable road users such as young children and the elderly. Encouraging more "human-scale" modes for transportation, I would argue, creates safer communities. Personally, I can speak of two incidents where I can assert the validity of that statement. In the first incident, I saw a young child fall off her bicycle while riding with her mother on one of the Don Valley trails. I was carrying band-aids with me so I stopped and asked if they needed any - they were both very grateful! In the second incident, I was walking for a grocery trip when an elderly lady further down the sidewalk from me tripped and fell. I stopped, asked if she needed help, and help lift her up - she thanked me and said she probably wouldn't have been able to stand back up on her own. The thing is, in both of those cases, had I been traveling by car, I likely wouldn't have even noticed these incidents or would have been able to safely stop. So if Bill-60 is sincere in wanting to "enhance community safety", walking and cycling should be encouraged instead of being discouraged by heavily restricting the construction of bicycle lanes and increasing motor vehicle traffic.

I'd like to thank whomever is reading this comment and sincerely hope that provincial parliament will reconsider Bill-60 in light of reviewing these engineering values.