Review of Fredericton’s Queen St. modifications
Posted by Lamespotting on 30 Aug 2010 at 04:00 am | Tagged as: fail, Fredericton
As of this morning, construction has begun on the redirection of Queen St. The City posted their plans online so they can be reviewed by people like me. The idea is to make access in and out of the new parking garage easier. Unfortunately, this has some drawbacks and will cause complications in other situations.
Just a reminder that I’m not claiming to be a traffic engineer, nor am I blaming the employees of the city as they are only doing what they’ve been told. I also can’t draw very well.
The first issue is where it goes from 2-way to 1 way. Unlike Queen St. at Northumberland, there will be no concrete barrier or curb to stop traffic from continuing the wrong way. There will just be signs. We all know that with today’s distracted drivers, we’ll get a few of them heading up the wrong way.
The other big issue relates to the new left-turn lane on Regent St. for traffic heading South. To allow for this, the right-turn lane will be now shared with the only straight-ahead lane. The problem is that the straight-ahead traffic will be blocked by right-turning traffic waiting for pedestrians. This will cause drivers to swerve into the left-turn lane in order to go around the cars waiting to turn right and will probably cause accidents. During the morning rush-hour, there are quite a few pedestrians at that crosswalk. The new parking garage will probably increase the number of them.
Another problem are the double-parked delivery trucks on Queen St. that service the restaurants on that block. Will they block the new lane, or will the drivers have to cross a lane of traffic to deliver their goods?
The biggest problem is that all of this new traffic is purely speculation. They are going ahead and spending $1.2 million without any hard data to support it. I’m not going to be closed minded to making these changes in the future, as long as there is sufficient data to show they are warranted.
Neat drawings, well done.
I’m not convinced that this two-way bit will make things easier – if I were parking in that parkade, especially during a big convention or Playhouse event, I’d find it easier to just loop around the block on a one-way street, than have to wait through gridlocked traffic coming in opposite directions to get in/out. There’s a reason why most major downtowns in the world stick to one-way streets.
Looking at the Queen at St John diagramme, it does look like there’s a lip in the curb on that southeast corner – I wonder if that is what they are planning to discourage eastbound traffic from continuing along Queen. Hopefully cars parked along that south curb (facing west) will also clue drivers in that it’s one way westbound beyond that point.
Regarding southbound traffic on Regent at Queen – I wonder if they made the curb lane right-turn only, and then the centre lane straight-ahead and left: that way, the space a left-turning car leaves as it advances into the intersection would at least give some space for straight-going cars behind it to proceed around it southbound. How much volume are they expecting to be turning left from Regent southbound to Queen eastbound? To access the Crowne Plaza, parkade, Playhouse and businesses I wouldn’t think it needed a dedicated left-turn lane. Even if there was heavy traffic, it’s nothing that a standard-issue volume-adaptive traffic signal couldn’t handle.
I live on Queen St and overlook those restaurants – looking forward to watching delivery people playing Frogger through traffic…
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