Totally Toronto (2)
Posted by gigantichound on 06 Oct 2007 at 01:46 pm | Tagged as: Media, The nine-oh-five
It’s an easy target, but:
The Current on Friday morning had a long segment on roundabouts, hooked to Case Ootes’s proposal that Toronto should have some. There aren’t any at the moment.
The main interview was with the City of Toronto’s transportation manager, who discussed them intelligently enough from theory – he’s not responsible for any real ones, there being none in the city, and none really contemplated. Roundabouts are hard to retrofit into an existing urban landscape, since they’re so space-intensive. Not impossible, but the expropriation is expensive.
Usually, new roundabouts are installed as a traffic-control measure in rural and suburban areas, which brings us to Ontario’s busiest roundabout, right here:
in scenic Ancaster, well within CBC Toronto’s listening area.
It’s sort of an interesting application of the idea, designed as a transition between an 80k rural highway, which many motorists drove at 100 km/h, and a 50k suburban arterial. Drivers were supposed to sharply cut their speed at a certain point, but not all of them wanted to. Signs and speed enforcement didn’t do the trick, but physical changes to the road actually did. Residents were resistant at first, but accepted it after it became clear it solved the problem.
Not far away in rural Ancaster, roundabouts may be the key to the life-and-death question of how to make Hwy. 52 less lethal. 52 has become very dangerous since it became connected to the new 403 extension for much the same reasons that Hwy. 2 was dangerous when I was growing up: a mixture of cars and trucks acting as if they were on a 400-series highway, school buses, pedestrians and slow-moving farm vehicles. Counting from the 403 extension opening in 1998, road deaths come to more than one per mile. You can read all about it here.
The Hamilton planners haven’t really solved it, beyond posting an oddball 70 km/h speed limit, but are proposing five new roundabouts in rural Ancaster, three of them on 52. I’d install them every mile and a quarter at each concession, but it’s a start. This may actually turn out to be the solution – physical changes to the road will always be a better way of controlling behaviour than enforcement.
There’s lots of room for them, as you can see. Here’s 52 and Jerseyville Rd., one of the proposed locations:
Now there’s an interesting story, if the CBC ever wanted to do a piece on roundabouts – a well-established and articulate community group, planners who have studied the issue in detail, local residents who have watched the road for years – everything you need, really. Pity it’s so far from the end of the subway.
Fight on, Captain Ancaster-Dundas-Flamborough-Westdale. A quick review of the shows from the last few weeks confirm that The Current does stories from all over. Not really fair to imply that they don’t just because they don’t happen to have noticed the Ancaster roundabout in the way that, say, someone who has a reason to be in the area on a regular basis has.
And if they really wanted to do a story on roundabouts in urban Canada in general, as opposed to the current sort-of debate in Toronto, they might well begin with the Armdale Rotary in Halifax, which funnels traffic out of the city streets of Halifax to several arterial roads and is gradually being changed into a traditional roundabout from… whatever it was it was before:
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/nova-scotia/story/2006/06/28/armdale-rotary.html
http://www.halifax.ca/districts/dist17/documents/RotaryInsert_WebRes.pdf
The point is that while the CBC talks about ‘the regions’ a great deal, Ontario’s regions might as well not exist. Hamilton is just the most extreme example, but it applies to the whole province outside Toronto and Ottawa.
That’s fine, but you’re picking on the wrong programs to make your point.
At least 60% of The Current’s programming is focused on international affairs. In the last few weeks they’ve also talked to people in Edmonton, Halifax, Haida Gwaii, and, yes, Toronto. Would they talk to an academic at McMaster about a story if the expert happened to reside there? No doubt. But it’s not a show that’s pouring over community newspapers to pick out interesting local debates.
Ontario Today is largely regional. The weekend show Fresh Air regularly features guests and callers from regional Ontario and has a long listing of activities in the regions.
Does CBC Radio really cover any regions well, though, aside from 4-5 key cities? Even Sounds Like Canada, which I admittedly never listen to, just seems to bounce back and forth from Winnipeg to Halifax, according to its program logs.
…my point being, in case it’s not clear, that I think Ontario’s regions are being overlooked in the same way non-capital cities in every other province are being overlooked. No better, no worse.