The Wrong Side of my Car

The blog that wants to go obsolete

A Note about Sale Street

I noted the Sale Street / Wellesley Street intersection in the previous post. This intersection got sanitised recently.

A picture can tell you many things:

• The entire area with the blue wavy lines was originally roadway, either the street itself or the little parking lane (under the thin island). And this is a pretty conservative treatment.

  This puts into perspective the question why cities feel cramped.

• Note the characteristic wear on the road surface of car drivers pushing it while making a turn. Maybe we will at some point see a follow-up. A continuous footway will deal with this speed pretty decisively.

• Note how small the white car still is compared to the intersection. This is after the treatment more or less halved the distance between the two corners.

There are some details on the project page as well:

• At 8 metres, the street is still pretty wide for what it is — you only need about 6 m to allow 2 trucks to pass each other. How many trucks do we need there anyway? Many cities disallow large trucks in city centres. Narrow it down to 5 m.

• Despite the speed bumps there is still a significant amount of traffic going faster than 30 km/h. (keep in mind this is before the speed limit dropped). I find this surprising. As a driver, why would you bother going this fast? It is just a few blocks of tiny back streets.

To be clear: this is a massive improvement. Man, how ridiculous was this intersection originally?

I did my own take on this sort of thing before. I would have filled up the entire area south of the traffic island. This is the intersection in its original glory:

Can you imagine crossing that thing on foot?

Just look at it. I don’t know what is more ridiculous, the sheer radius of that corner, or the fact that almost every square metre in this picture is either parking or roadway.

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