{"id":25476,"date":"2021-04-10T07:56:25","date_gmt":"2021-04-10T11:56:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/?p=25476"},"modified":"2021-04-10T07:56:25","modified_gmt":"2021-04-10T11:56:25","slug":"fixing-collingwoods-streets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/fixing-collingwoods-streets\/","title":{"rendered":"Fixing Collingwood’s Streets"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"DoorWhile our council has been obsessed with the Saunderson Vindictive Judicial Inquiry (aka the SVJI<\/a>) and lavishing all our tax dollars and their time promoting its often redundant or irrelevant recommendations, most of our residents have been focused on things that actually matter. Such as the sad condition of our decaying streets and crumbling sidewalks. This is, of course, being made worse daily by the increase in traffic from visitors and the growing number of people moving here from the GTA. And there are more delivery trucks and vans on the road because more people are ordering goods online. But nothing is being done about it by our council. Nothing is even planned.<\/p>\n

Nor has anything been done to make our streets safer and quieter. Well-known and well-used methods of traffic safety and traffic calming used across North America are simply ignored. Most residents can point to a local intersection where stop signs are needed, especially at intersections used by school children daily, but our council appears ignorant of them.*<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Same with the long-overdue traffic light at Third and High Streets. Council heard about it then waffled. Rudderless and unfocused, council drifted away from the problem, too focused on the SVJI to even contemplate anything else..<\/p>\n

What about red-light cameras? Stand near any traffic light on First Street and you will count numerous cars that run red and yellow lights every day. Dozens of them, every day. You’ll also see a lot of vehicles travelling well above the posted speed limits. This is a community safety hazard. But it’s being ignored. Same with the cars that block the sidewalk at Starbucks trying to get into line. It’s a safety issue for pedestrians that is simply ignored by a council unable to get its head out of the box of SVJI pettiness.<\/p>\n

Where are the bicycle lanes? Not simply lines painted in streets, but protected, reserved spaces for cyclists? We know white lines alone are pointless because the town painted them on Ontario Street but ignores the cars parking over them every day. Cycling has also increased here, too,  and it’s become increasingly dangerous because of the higher volume of vehicles, especially trucks and buses. But what has our council done to make it safer? Right; nothing. <\/p>\n

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What about the long-discussed plans to make St. Marie and Pine Streets one-way? Or to make the downtown core into a pedestrian mall, at least in the summer? Why not try these at least as an experiment to see if they work for the better? Where is the courage to be innovative and think outside the ordinary? Right: not with this council.<\/p>\n

What about extending or installing sidewalks in areas where there is a mix of pedestrian and vehicular traffic but no safe place to walk? What about putting signalized pedestrian crosswalks on Hurontario, Hume, and Sixth Streets \u2014 our busiest roads? Sidewalks in some parts of town often just end abruptly with no continuance, forcing pedestrians to walk beside the traffic. (For example, Fifth Street. It’s a popular, often busy alternative route to Sixth Street, and its traffic includes town busses and many trucks. The sidewalk is only on the south side, however, and it ends at Walnut, although the street itself continues to High.)<\/p>\n

It took a lot of local noise and complaints from residents around Sunset Point Park to get the town to finally install temporary speed bumps along the street bordering the waterfront. They are also needed in many more places in town to slow local traffic, especially near schools. And what has our council done about them? Or anything<\/em> about traffic calming in busy areas? Right: nothing.<\/p>\n

And it’s not just doing it for today: where is the strategic plan for our transportation future, as well look to more growth, more traffic, more on-road vehicles, and an increasing number of electric vehicles (Where are the charging stations in Collingwood? Right: there aren’t any!) and eventually self-driving (autonomous) vehicles? Where are the requests by council for options and ideas? Where is the forward thinking, the looking ahead, the innovation? Right: not at this council.**<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Our council remains mired in its nugatory obsession with decade-old events and processes, lavishly throwing our tax dollars at it even now. Meanwhile, our town changes and grows and suffers the problems that increased traffic brings. And with that comes increased threats to pedestrian and cyclist safety. Residents see these issues every day, but our council seems blind to them.<\/p>\n

Even keeping the streets minimally maintained seems beyond our council’s capabilities. Now and then a desultory works crew might arrive to throw a shovelful of cold-patch into one of the many reoccurring potholes and (when they even think of it), tamp it down, but residents know that “fix” will soon be strewn across the asphalt with every passing car and the hole will re-emerge as big or even bigger than before.<\/p>\n

I walk streets daily where three to four decades of cold-patch-fixes are visible, none of which have ever solved the problem that caused them, and the potholes return annually. There are numerous streets where decades-old subsidence creates large pools of water on streets after every rain or snowmelt. The latter is particularly bad on streets with no sidewalks; pedestrians have a difficult time walking on them. There are clogged storm drains that contribute to localized street and sidewalk flooding, too. Why aren’t the streets ever actually repaired? Or the drains cleared?<\/p>\n

There are sidewalks in my end of town that flood to ankle depth with every rain and snowmelt, forcing pedestrians to walk around these ponds, often into the street with the traffic. That’s a safety hazard, especially for the children and parents walking to and from the nearby school every weekday. But nothing is ever done about them.<\/p>\n

Why doesn’t our council do something \u2014 anything<\/em> \u2014 to improve our streets and sidewalks? To improve safety and walkability?<\/p>\n

Collingwood deserves better.<\/p>\n

~~~~~<\/strong><\/p>\n

*<\/strong><\/span> Last term, our oh-so-wise council voted to end its individual subscriptions to Municipal World<\/a>, a magazine with articles, opinion pieces, and columns about issues like this and everything else that touched on municipal governance.  Cover to cover, it was full of ideas and solutions, full of articles by peers and experts, about issues, events, processes, and planning. But our council didn’t want any<\/em> of that. They already knew all they ever wanted to know, so they stopped getting their magazines to avoid being given anything even remotely intelligent. Besides, it required reading and they were always very reading-averse. And most of these know-it-alls got re-elected.<\/p>\n

**<\/strong><\/span> I recently finished reading Edward Humes’ book, Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation<\/a><\/em> (Harper Collins, 2016) and am almost finished Tom Vanderbilt’s earlier Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do<\/a><\/em> (Vintage Canada, 2009). Both look at driving, traffic, urban issues, and the challenges that confound planning and works departments, as well as engineers. Although they focus mainly on American issues (where the infrastructure is in even worse shape) I highly recommend them. I realize our reading-averse councillors will avoid anything with so many pages or such big words, but my readers might find them enlightening and thought-provoking. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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While our council has been obsessed with the Saunderson Vindictive Judicial Inquiry (aka the SVJI) and lavishing all our tax dollars and their time promoting its often redundant or irrelevant recommendations, most of our residents have been focused on things that actually matter. Such as the sad condition of our decaying streets and crumbling sidewalks. This is, of course, being made worse daily by the increase in traffic from visitors and the growing number of people moving here from the GTA. And there are more delivery trucks and vans on the road because more people are ordering goods online. But \u2026…… click below for more \u2193<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,537,425],"tags":[429,1453,1452,945],"class_list":["post-25476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-collingwood","category-council","category-planning","tag-planning-2","tag-safety","tag-streets","tag-traffic"],"a3_pvc":{"activated":true,"total_views":355,"today_views":1},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25476"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25485,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25476\/revisions\/25485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}