Time for two-way streets? Calls for change in downtown Brantford

Traffic moves along a one-way section of Colborne Street in downtown Brantford on Monday, March 28, 2016.

A decades-old debate is flaring up once again in downtown Brantford – one questioning whether ferrying one-way traffic is the best use of Colborne and Dalhousie streets.

“If you go with the two-way streets, it just makes it a lot easier for everyone to get around – and it improves safety,” Dwight Rose said Monday.

Specifically at issue are the stretches of Colborne and Dalhousie between Brant Avenue and Clarence Street.

Rose and fellow business owner John O’Neill say the one-way configuration of the side-by-side streets encourages motorists to drive straight through the downtown core, without paying much attention to what they’re passing by.

They also say the one-way streets encourage higher speeds, potentially putting the safety of all road users at risk.

“Everyone in the city knows that … you can go all the way (from Pauline Johnson CVI) to Brant Avenue without getting a red light, if you speed,” O’Neill said.

According to O’Neill, the streets were first converted to one-way to make it easier for trucks to pass through the city while driving between Detroit and Buffalo, on the old Highway 2.

Coun. Rick Weaver says that legacy carries through to today, with thousands of people who live in Brantford’s south and west using Colborne and Dalhousie to commute to jobs in places like Hamilton and Burlington.

Reconfiguring the roads for two-way travel without first building a bypass road would slow those commutes and inconvenience those drivers, he said.

One-way streets were once a regular fixture of southern Ontario downtowns.

That has slowly started to change over the past 20 years, with Kitchener converting Duke and Charles streets to two-way, and Cambridge doing the same with Water and Ainslie streets.

Erb Street and Bridgeport Road in Waterloo remain one-way, as do King and Main streets in Hamilton.

Brantford is putting together a public consultation process on the issue.