Glebe Bus Lanes: City Planning In Action: GRAY
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The city tampers with the Glebe at its peril for what it touches quite often goes to dirt.
We could cite no end of disasters and mini-disasters but for the sake of brevity we’ll just say light rail. This should be enough of a dumpster fire to send shivers down the spines of careful Glebinistas.
Neighbourhoods are complicated little places, best left to the devices of the inhabitants rather than the far-removed ivory-tower-dwellers and well-pensioned city tall-foreheads who know better.
The idea of asking the Glebsters about how their neighbourhood should be run … in this case bus lanes on Bank Street … is that of the late diplomat and politician Stephen Lewis, one of the great minds of our time. But the Laurier Avenue gerbils know better.
We expect the bus lanes down the glorified back-alley-sized Bank Street will fail because that part of the street is not meant for commutes but parking (yes parking) and walking and shopping. Really not the place for a bus freeway though said freeway is likely to be blocked by the first person who decides it is a good place to park and this ground-breaker’s followers.
So, in brief, the bus lanes when they are open will be a terror and when they aren’t, they’ll restore the ambiance of the walkable Glebe through traffic jams. But the operative words are “don’t work” if one means speeding traffic in the Glebe. Traffic is not supposed to speed there and that’s part of what makes the Glebarama what it is today. Bustling, crowded and quaint. Not a bus freeway. It’s just the Glebe. Hear it roar.
And if onlookers would like to see the planning department in action, take a boo at Lansdowne … $1 billion of failure. For all that the city gets a million bucks out of Lansdowne, now and then.
City Reaches Peak Incompetence: PATTON
Of course, the city calls the Glebe bus freeway and periodic parking lot a “pilot project” which means that no matter the outcome, it’s permanent. A pilot project is invariably dubbed a success by the much-committed planners who knew beforehand and afterwards that it would be a triumph even when it isn’t.
How could city planners possibly go wrong? Never happens. Just ask them.
And what could go wrong with bus lanes? Well nothing of course, as mentioned above, from the people who gave us the failed bus system and failed light rail. We look forward to a rare triple of transit failure in the Glebe bus freeway.
This city would be so much better if the planners and schemers would just leave us alone and play with their pinwheels and wear their dunce caps in the corner. This keeps them away from real residents who get tired of paying (let’s tally the just city errors in this missive) about $8.4 billion of mistakes. You could train a monkey to do that. We might have already … expensively no doubt.
Democracy? How’s that again? Our planners will give the Glebonauts the same amount of democracy that the anti-sidewalk majority got in Manor Park. One size fits all, except when it doesn’t.
The planning pinheads will likely get the Glebe wrong, snatching defeat out of the maws of victory. Let’s fix something that doesn’t need fixing. Like the Glebe. Maybe our planning types just see the Glebe as something in the way of getting suburbanites to the almighty suburbs.
A speed bump on the way to urban conformity and governance stupidity.
Ken Gray is the editor of The Bulldog.
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As noted above the addition of bus lanes on bank Street will reduce the number of available parking spaces (I don’t recall the actual numbers, but they were discussed in a previous Bulldog article). As it currently stands, it is safe for bicycles to drive along Bank Street. One of the biggest gotchas for cyclists currently is avoiding car doors that open onto the street when drivers don’t check for bicycles before exiting their vehicles. However, the addition of bus lanes will force bicycles to drive in the same lane as buses which will be moving faster than they do presently. This will cause a safety issue since the space for riders to drive will be reduced due to the width of buses vs cars. The solution? Add bicycle lanes? This will increase the cost of the project and reduce the space for pedestrians in an area where “the street is not meant for commutes but parking (yes parking) and walking and shopping”. Let’s return to problem solving 101 yet again. 1) What other solutions were considered (other than bus lanes)? 2) Why were the other solutions discarded in favour of the proposed solution? 3) What is the impact of the proposed solution? Current members of city council preach “safety, safety, safety”, but the bus lane solution raises a number of safety concerns. Last question – Why does city council continually deploy an elementary school approach to solving complex problems.