Baseline Rd. Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) Project | Proposed

[Richard Eade]

Yeah, I can understand that the City would never consider putting bikes and buses in the same lane. It would be too unsafe in its mind.

The City has ‘Sharrows’ that tell cyclists and car drivers that they need to share a lane, but when there are professional drivers in buses involved, sharing a lane with bikes simply won’t work. It is better to leave a dedicated bus-lane empty between the every 15-minute or half-hour buses – because there is no way that a bus could ever merge left to go around one of the few cyclists who use Baseline each day.

I wonder if the City realizes that buses will be traveling in the outside lanes, between Greenbank and Centrepointe? And that any cyclists using Baseline in that stretch will also be using the outside lanes? Oh, Good Lord!!!! This is unsafe for people on bikes and will impede transit. And this condition will persist until that huge sack of money drops from the sky to build a ‘Complete Street’ west of Constellation.

I realize that Phase 1 of the Baseline BRT is being done at the lowest possible cost. To do that, there are no physical roadway modifications planned for east of the Greenbank/Baseline intersection. The new bus lanes are going to be paint only; and only where the roadway is already three lanes wide.

However, there is a minimum of about 27.5 metres between the sidewalks on that stretch of Baseline. The distance from McWatters to where the existing three lanes begin is about 800 metres. Given that the current estimated cost to add side bus lanes to about 3 kilometres of Heron Road (between Bank and Conroy) is $122M, I expect that about $45M would add enough width between the existing sidewalks (i.e., no property acquisition needed) from Greenbank to Constellation for the following configuration:

Sidewalk – 1.8m (existing)
Bike and transit lane – 4.5m
General traffic – 3.25m
General traffic – 3.25m
Median and left-turn lane – 5m
General traffic – 3.25m
General traffic – 3.25m
Bike & Transit – 4.5m
Sidewalk – 1.8m (existing)

Total – 30.6m which will easily fit into the, roughly, 31 metres from outside to outside of the existing sidewalks. Since a standard bus is about 2.6 metres wide, a 4.5-metre-wide lane gives lots of room for both buses and bikes.