Sep 25
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Mississauga road has reopened
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December 17th

Roads are now paved. I will post specific building shots in the respective threads. Overviews are posted here.
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afransen said:
Those curb radii. Looks like we still are not learning, even in essentially greenfield high density neighbourhoods.
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Mississauga has always been particularly terrible for that kind of thing. It's especially crazy here as these streets will see effectively 0 truck traffic - the typical excuse for wider radii. No reason these can't be much smaller intersections.
 
afransen said:
Those curb radii. Looks like we still are not learning, even in essentially greenfield high density neighbourhoods.
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innsertnamehere said:
Mississauga has always been particularly terrible for that kind of thing. It's especially crazy here as these streets will see effectively 0 truck traffic - the typical excuse for wider radii. No reason these can't be much smaller intersections.
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There's going to be more truck traffic than you think. The property does have a commercial aspect so you will see tractor trailers making deliveries to the new LCBO, a new school is planned so there will be school buses to turn and what about snow plows in the winter and garbage/recycling trucks? How about fire trucks? Even a 28 foot straight truck can be challenging on narrow streets and if you combine that with pedestrians buried on the phone while standing right at the edge it is no wonder they can be clipped by right turning trucks.
 
Tim MacDonald said:
There's going to be more truck traffic than you think. The property does have a commercial aspect so you will see tractor trailers making deliveries to the new LCBO, a new school is planned so there will be school buses to turn and what about snow plows in the winter and garbage/recycling trucks? How about fire trucks? Even a 28 foot straight truck can be challenging on narrow streets and if you combine that with pedestrians buried on the phone while standing right at the edge it is no wonder they can be clipped by right turning trucks.
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There's nothing stopping anyone from using smaller vehicles. The notion that you need a tractor trailer to make a local delivery to a neighbourhood LCBO is, frankly, ridiculous. 28-foot firetrucks are also too big for dense metropolitan neighbourhoods.

It's time to adapt our vehicles to our neighbourhoods instead of the ridiculous notion that neighbourhoods must be built to accommodate impractically-sized vehicles. It's pedestrians (e.g. everyone) who suffer having to cross large windswept vehicular spaces and people in general who end up suffering from the effects of overly wide roads and the resulting lower density--fewer places to walk to, less affordable housing, higher property taxes, and more speeding and dangerous driving.

There's really no pedestrian safety advantage to it, either. The typically large turning radii in Mississauga and in many parts of Toronto increase the amount of time that pedestrians have to spend on the roadway at intersections. They therefore increase the chances of getting hit by a vehicle. Since drivers can make a turn at a higher rate of speed when there's a wider curb radius, there's an increased risk of serious injuries to pedestrians, as the risk of serious injuries increases with vehicle speed.

If Mississauga and Toronto are serious about the quality of their roads, they need to decrease the turning radii at intersections and narrow their streets in general. There are neighbourhood streets in Mississauga where a two lane street has enough space for 5 or 6 cars side by side. It's excessive, and it's the result of a mentality where every street has to maximize driver convenience and accommodate oversized vehicles before anything else.
 
junctionist said:
There's nothing stopping anyone from using smaller vehicles. The notion that you need a tractor trailer to make a local delivery to a neighbourhood LCBO is, frankly, ridiculous. 28-foot firetrucks are also too big for dense metropolitan neighbourhoods.

It's time to adapt our vehicles to our neighbourhoods instead of the ridiculous notion that neighbourhoods must be built to accommodate impractically-sized vehicles. It's pedestrians (e.g. everyone) who suffer having to cross large windswept vehicular spaces and people in general who end up suffering from the effects of overly wide roads and the resulting lower density--fewer places to walk to, less affordable housing, higher property taxes, and more speeding and dangerous driving.

There's really no pedestrian safety advantage to it, either. The typically large turning radii in Mississauga and in many parts of Toronto increase the amount of time that pedestrians have to spend on the roadway at intersections. They therefore increase the chances of getting hit by a vehicle. Since drivers can make a turn at a higher rate of speed when there's a wider curb radius, there's an increased risk of serious injuries to pedestrians, as the risk of serious injuries increases with vehicle speed.

If Mississauga and Toronto are serious about the quality of their roads, they need to decrease the turning radii at intersections and narrow their streets in general. There are neighbourhood streets in Mississauga where a two lane street has enough space for 5 or 6 cars side by side. It's excessive, and it's the result of a mentality where every street has to maximize driver convenience and accommodate oversized vehicles before anything else.
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You're right about all of that, but it'll take a massive effort to get cities to change their thinking about such things. Getting consensus on new smaller vehicles for such fleets is a minimum three year effort because of budgeting, and a prerequisite of allowing changes to engineering changes to for roads. (There's just no way they'd make changes until most or all of the fleet is changed over. "What if we cannot send the new truck one day and we have to send an old one?!?!" That kind of thing.)

It all should happen, but the fleets need to change first so that the infrastructure changes can follow (in a decade).

42
 
interchange42 said:
You're right about all of that, but it'll take a massive effort to get cities to change their thinking about such things. Getting consensus on new smaller vehicles for such fleets is a minimum three year effort because of budgeting, and a prerequisite of allowing changes to engineering changes to for roads. (There's just no way they'd make changes until most or all of the fleet is changed over. "What if we cannot send the new truck one day and we have to send an old one?!?!" That kind of thing.)

It all should happen, but the fleets need to change first so that the infrastructure changes can follow (in a decade).

42
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I know that there are specific regulations regarding turning radius and access widths (with and without parked cars) for private access roads or lanes for emergency vehicles. These are mandated by the Province. I imagine much the same governs public streets as well.

San Fran introduced 'smaller' response trucks i.e. pumpers, that were shorter and could operate within a 25 ft turning radius from 30? This was a few years ago. All designed to operate in the 'pedestrian' city. To my mind they looked much like the general response trucks you see on Toronto Streets. All of these trucks have some basic requirements, to carry X gallons of water (500?) and a ton of equipment.

There has been some suggestion that many North American Trucks are overbuilt for their requirements - massive engines and transmissions providing far more power then their pumps require. (I would exclude any truck supporting aerial fire fighting from this example.) There is a generally accepted standard shared in the USA and Canada that directs much fire truck design - NFPA 1901 issued by the NFPA themselves.

European trucks are generally smaller in dimensions, and those smaller sizes may also reflect differences in fire fighting tactics and equipment. It may also require more trucks to respond in any given situation due to specialization. But we should be careful not to generalize.

As long as your urban area includes streets of 4 plus story buildings, specialized aerial equipment and access for those larger pieces will still be part of the design. But changes in fire truck design could, I think, shrink some of the size of those larger trucks. The offset to that size reduction, may be the requirements for a second truck to help 'service' the first.
 
Tim MacDonald said:
There's going to be more truck traffic than you think. The property does have a commercial aspect so you will see tractor trailers making deliveries to the new LCBO, a new school is planned so there will be school buses to turn and what about snow plows in the winter and garbage/recycling trucks? How about fire trucks? Even a 28 foot straight truck can be challenging on narrow streets and if you combine that with pedestrians buried on the phone while standing right at the edge it is no wonder they can be clipped by right turning trucks.
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That's no different than any urban neighbourhood, and honestly most of that traffic will stick to the block immediately south of Lakeshore.

The turning radii here look more appropriate for semi-trailers, not local delivery trucks and garbage trucks. 6m radii corners can accommodate these vehicles - the radii of those intersections looks closer to 12m.

You can't drop 0m radii here, no, but the size as constructed is well in excess of provincial minimums or even what is typically required for residential streets almost anywhere else in the GTA. This has long been the case in Mississauga as well, which generally has wider streets with larger turning radii than basically any other municipality. It's hugely expensive for the municipality to maintain all that extra asphalt and produces nothing but more dangerous, anti-urban roads.
 
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just east of the creek said:
I know that there are specific regulations regarding turning radius and access widths (with and without parked cars) for private access roads or lanes for emergency vehicles. These are mandated by the Province. I imagine much the same governs public streets as well.

San Fran introduced 'smaller' response trucks i.e. pumpers, that were shorter and could operate within a 25 ft turning radius from 30? This was a few years ago. All designed to operate in the 'pedestrian' city. To my mind they looked much like the general response trucks you see on Toronto Streets. All of these trucks have some basic requirements, to carry X gallons of water (500?) and a ton of equipment.

There has been some suggestion that many North American Trucks are overbuilt for their requirements - massive engines and transmissions providing far more power then their pumps require. (I would exclude any truck supporting aerial fire fighting from this example.) There is a generally accepted standard shared in the USA and Canada that directs much fire truck design - NFPA 1901 issued by the NFPA themselves.

European trucks are generally smaller in dimensions, and those smaller sizes may also reflect differences in fire fighting tactics and equipment. It may also require more trucks to respond in any given situation due to specialization. But we should be careful not to generalize.

As long as your urban area includes streets of 4 plus story buildings, specialized aerial equipment and access for those larger pieces will still be part of the design. But changes in fire truck design could, I think, shrink some of the size of those larger trucks. The offset to that size reduction, may be the requirements for a second truck to help 'service' the first.
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The province recently changed the OTM to reduce required turning radii. I can tell you right now, those are MASSIVE turning radii for a pedestrian focused private development site. Perhaps Mississauga has large turning requirements, but I'm almost sure I've seen smaller turning radii. I know in Hamilton they've slowly been retrofitting smaller turns into old intersections designed seemingly for planet Earth's largest trailer trucks.

Some turning radii here are truly tiny, like almost European level small where you can't make a turn in a pick up truck if someone is stopping at the stop sign. It's beautiful.
 
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