Cogswell Interchange

[OliverD]

Originally Posted by Keith P.

A family putting their children in the middle of city traffic raises its own questions rather than being a rationale for more unnecessary infrastructure spending.

Putting their children in a car also puts them in the middle of city traffic which is not without risk. Simply crossing the street also puts them in the middle of city traffic.

If city traffic poses such a grave risk to people using protected cycling infrastructure the solution should be to make that situation safer for all involved rather than to remove the users of that infrastructure from the equation.

[Drybrain]

Originally Posted by Keith P.

I thought the Commons pool was closed for repairs?

Depending on the ages of the children, I'm not sure of the wisdom of placing them in the midst of traffic.

Repairs are done (the floating floor panels are fixed).

And is it more dangerous for me to bike with my kids on quiet streets and protected bike lanes, or to move to some rural or exurban area where we have to drive at highway speed every day to do anything, and my kids will get their own licenses at 16 and start bombing around at 100 km/hr as teens? Honestly not sure. Both have risks. I know few people blink at the latter.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by Antigonish

It's a bit of both, tbh. Things like transit, traffic management, utilities, etc., really needs to be quantified before pursuing should/shouldn't. However, things like libraries, recreational facilities, landscaping, and so on are important but are more qualitative for bean counters.

This is true but in the current culture even the more numbers-friendly areas like transit are often over-quantified.

Everyone seems to love and prefer streetcars, trains, and ferries, but operationally buses are cheaper and easier so they tend to win out. In a downtown area it is much nicer to have a train come every 5 minutes than have a main street constantly clogged with buses, with many having loud diesel engines, running on a huge variety of routes that are hard to figure out.

Truck traffic and noise in downtown is another one that is hard to quantify. On paper there is no clear immediate financial payoff from solving that issue and the solution costs millions.