City will spend more than $1M to make Upper James safer for walking
13 pedestrians were hit along the corridor from 2014 to 2018
Samantha Craggs · CBC News · Posted: Jun 17, 2020 3:20 PM
The city will spend more than $1 million to make Upper James Street more pedestrian friendly, including planter boxes to separate pedestrians from vehicles and $550,000 to study potential bus rapid transit (BRT).
Pending council approval next week, the city will spend about $500,000 to replace pedestrian signals and red light cameras at various locations along the major Mountain corridor. The seasonal planter boxes will stretch along the street north of Fennell Avenue and cost $6,000 per year to maintain.
But the priciest item on the list is doing a functional design and business case for the A-Line corridor, which goes from the Mountain brow to the John C. Munro Hamilton International Airport. The design would include numerous streetscape improvements to make the stretch safer for pedestrians.
Council requested the report in 2016, when then-Ward 7 councillor Donna Skelly said the street is dangerous. "It's important for us to recognize that people do walk in that area," she said then. Since then, some traffic signals and enhancements have been implemented from the Niagara Escarpment to Fennell Avenue.
This goes farther, and "offers some much-needed aesthetic improvements," said Coun. John-Paul Danko (Ward 8).
"It's a really good news story for the Upper James corridor," he said at Wednesday's public works meeting.
Terry Whitehead, Ward 14 councillor, said Upper James is "probably [Hamilton's] main economic corridor."
"I think there are still steps that need to be made," he said, but the report is "a good start."
The staff report says 23 pedestrians were hit along the corridor from 2014 to 2018. Ten were at the Mohawk Road or Fennell Avenue intersections. In five of them, the pedestrian was crossing without having the right of way. In the other five, the driver was at fault.
A new city report also shows there were six collisions causing death or injury at Upper James and Stone Church Road last year, and 12 mid-block crashes along the stretch. Upper James and Mohawk Road West also made the city's list of top 10 most crash-prone intersections from 2015 to 2019. As for the list of the 11 most prone spots for mid-block collisions, five were on Upper James.
"A review of locations with a high frequency of fatal and injury collisions during the past five years show that a more detailed review of the Upper James corridor is advisable," the report says.
As for rapid transit, Upper James is already part of the BLAST network, a plan for eventual rapid transit that stretches through most of the city. The now-called B-line light rail transit system would have been the first leg of that.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamil...ames-1.5615961
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