Road Diet

I got a note in my mailbox last week about an open house on Tuesday for the proposed Bearinger Road road diet.

Bearinger Road runs between the Lakeshore Village neighbourhood and UW’s north campus. It was originally meant as a major east-west route connecting Fischer-Hallman to Weber Street. Somewhere along the line, a subdivision got in the way, and now it ends at Albert. We’re left with a big, four-lane road with (east of Westmount, anyway) very little traffic.

I live in Lakeshore, so I use Bearinger a lot. I cross it walking to work every day. I drive on it nearly every day. I’ll be biking along it once the mud goes away. The city got some infratructure money last year and repaved it. Great, except that now instead of barreling down the empty road at 80, drivers are happy to hit 90 or 100 kph regularly. That makes it tough to cross a wide, four-lane road with enough hills and corners that you often can’t see what cars are coming until you’re in the middle of the road.

When they got the infrastructure money, planners didn’t have enough time to do a full study and figure out what the road should be in the long term. So they left their options open. Even though they painted four lanes, they also had a plan to repaint it as two lanes. That’s what the “road diet” proposal is all about.

The road diet is one of a bunch of techniques to change our streets to be more useful for a wide range of uses. Drivers will drive slower on a two-lane road with narrower lanes. Pedestrian islands make it less terrifying to cross these streets. Bike lanes and a multi-use trail serve cyclists of different levels.

The city has money left over from the original work, so they’re planning on implementing the road diet strategy, as well as adding a roundabout at Hagey Boulevard.

Check out the city’s site for a FAQ and diagrams of the proposed plans. The proposal goes to council on March 29th.