Located in the City of Waterloo, Ontario and constructed in the late 1970's, Davenport Road is a 2km long, Major Collector road strategically linking area communities to Regional Shopping Centre and the city's primary transit terminal. Four lanes of fast moving traffic, restricted sight lines and lack of pedestrian and cycling facilities make it challenging to access the services by means other than the car. The study objective was to support the use of other travel modes resulting in a recommendation to redesign the road under a `Road Diet', which conforms to the city's' developing `Complete Streets' approach. The reduction in travel lanes from 4 to 2 would provide space for on-street bike lanes, landscaped medians, pedestrian refuge islands and dedicated traffic turn lanes. For monitoring purposes the following targets were established: reduction in average operating speed to 50km/h; a 20 percent reduction in left-turn type collisions (comparable 5 yr period); a 20 percent reduction in rear-end type collisions (comparable 5 yr period); a 20 percent reduction in non-fatal injury collisions (comparable 5 yr period); a 20 percent increase in pedestrian and cycling numbers. At time of preparation of this paper the project was at the tender stage, therefore, while it was impossible to draw any conclusions successes and failures, including rationale can be presented through a follow up paper. For the covering abstract of this conference see ITRD number E220308.
Abstract