We achieve safer streets with the three E’s — education, enforcement and engineering (road design). Education is only the first step. On the enforcement front, we have hired more officers, reduced speed limits and introduced school-zone automated speed enforcement. Even with these efforts, engineering, or road design, is an important part of the mix. Of course, major road changes are expensive. So, we’ve started with the most economical improvements we can make to enhance safety on many streets. Simple features like centre and edge lines, speed cushions, marked crosswalks and interactive speed signs have been mainstays of this work.

Safer streets are also more livable. People identify their favourite streets in a community as being those with places for walking, cycling and recreation. Favourite streets also have slower speeds and fewer lanes. While we will always need streets, people really do like when we have a better balance between people and cars — even when people consider the slightly increased travel times this can create for drivers.

The circular road in the middle of The Credit Woodlands has been there for decades. It was likely built for greenspace reasons rather than with safety as its primary goal. While the road layout today might suggest it was required, it could have easily been laid out as a traditional four-way intersection at the time when the subdivision streets were yet to be constructed.

The road around Bert Fleming Park was not a roundabout. The British often call the design a gyratory — an irregular, non-urban traffic circle designed for vehicles to travel at speed. Roundabouts have smaller, much tighter circles. The problem with the street, as designed, has been underscored by the multiple traffic studies that have shown the majority of drivers driving much too fast around the circle. So, while roundabouts are safer overall than standard intersections, this circular road created real safety challenges — particularly with the adjacent and nearby school, retail and townhouse properties. In addition to the speed issue, the design meant that pedestrians had to cross the road twice with vehicles not required to stop and often busy watching for traffic already travelling around the ring.

The importance of reducing speeds can’t be overstated as the following graphic clearly explains:

Imagine a river with rapids too fast to swim across. We wouldn’t say the river was safe for swimming just because nobody had drowned, and nor would we say there was no need for a bridge simply because nobody crossed the stream. Likewise, pedestrian and cyclist collision statistics don’t tell the whole story. People avoid travelling where they don’t feel safe. We have streets like Terry Fox at Windsor Hill and Rathburn by St. David of Wales School where it’s not easy crossing the road. We have to do more in such locations and we are doing so.

The Credit Woodlands is a place where many people haven’t felt safe and, as City leaders, it’s not enough to accept the status quo just because change is hard. Furthermore, we have to look at whole streets. Slowing down traffic on one part of a street tends to improve safety along the entire street. We still need to address the entirety of a street, but any one safety measure contributes to the broader safety.

It is with the desire to inexpensively create safer, more livable streets that the City of Mississauga created the Sharing Lanes program. Sharing Lanes is part of our Tactical Urbanism effort. While tactical urbanism might sound like a program run by army special forces, it’s actually an implementation approach that develops low-cost, quick-to-implement ideas, pilot projects and experimental solutions. The ideas are designed to be initiatives that can be tailored and rolled out to different parts of the city, or can be relatively easily rolled back if deemed unsuccessful. Sharing Lanes is about enabling new ideas and new ways to achieve results. As such, each Sharing Lanes project is not just an investment in one neighbourhood, but is also part of a broader effort to design a better city. The pace of change in our city and society overall is ever increasing and we need not just new ideas, but new kinds of solutions and new ways of arriving at them.

The Sharing Lanes approach recognizes that streets are about much more than just getting cars from one place to another. Streets help tie together neighbourhoods. Our homes are oriented around them. Couples go for walks, people take their dogs for exercise, children (and people of all ages) ride their bikes. On the best of our streets, people gather on park benches under shady trees and enjoy features that make their street unique. Sharing Lanes seeks to lean into this — creating places for people to interact where only cars could go in the past. Sharing Lanes animates these new people spaces encouraging fun and interaction.

While every project has its own engagement requirements, there are three community feedback periods that every project tends to have — Need Identification, Options Assessment, Post-Implementation Review. The Credit Woodlands project is consistent with this.

Traffic volume and traffic safety have been an issue that has been raised by the residents of The Credit Woodlands for years. Members of our team met residents of The Credit Woodlands at their doors for multiple election cycles. It has even been a top issue raised during federal elections. The Mayor’s office has been contacted over the years as well and our 311 service has received numerous calls. Not that it takes feedback to see traffic safety needs addressing on the street. Anyone crossing at any one of a number of points can see how chaotic the street can be at busy times. It’s for these reasons that The Credit Woodlands is a priority for our team.

If the City was considering putting a splash pad in a park and nobody wanted it, it wouldn’t make much sense to do. There’s more involved though with some issues. Sometimes, we have to cut down trees people would prefer remain. If a bridge needs repairs, the project has to go ahead regardless of area sentiment. Community engagement is not a public referendum — especially in those cases. However, we often learn useful information for even priority projects. Sometimes, we are presenting options where more than one course of action could easily be implemented. Other times, we tweak a project based on feedback.

We knew we needed to get started with The Credit Woodlands and do something. To move more quickly than our typical road projects take, our Sharing Lanes team proposed the changes to the traffic circle through their work. We jumped at the chance to make a difference sooner than later, but our commitment to feedback about the ideas is sincere.

The following is some of the work we did to make local residents aware of the project:

• We mailed information about the project to every resident between Dundas and Burnhamthorpe, the river and Erindale Station Rd.
• We contacted both School Trustees for the area as well as the Principals of St. Gerard’s and Springfield Public School and provided them with information they could share with parents.
• We canvassed door-to-door all those residents immediately adjacent to the traffic circle.
• We put up roadside signs on the traffic circle.
• We sent an email to everyone in the Ward who has provided us an email address.
• We promoted the projected on the City’s website and Councillor Horneck’s website.

This awareness effort directed people to the following engagement opportunities:

• Councillor Horneck held an online townhall meeting.
• The Sharing Lanes team created an online survey.
• We met with the Parent Councils for both schools in the immediate area.
• We held an in-person engagement session at Springfield School with our team and numerous City staff in attendance.
• To engage children, we invited area school kids to draw ideas for the road murals.

While some of our most vocal feedback was critical, the majority of residents support our efforts. Driving this, of course, is that 83 percent of people uneasy or scared about some aspects of the prior street design. The vast majority of people agreed we needed to take real action. Opinions on what we should specifically do, varied. Some insisted we should put in speed bumps. Others hate that idea. Some people want speed cameras the full length of the street while others wish we would get rid of the existing cameras in school zones. The same varied opinions exist about more policing.

People were clearer about which segment of the circle we should close though. We were originally thinking of closing the south segment, but residents in the local townhouse development were rightfully concerned about crosswalk conflicts with the entrance to their complex. Keeping the southern segment open also provides crosswalks closer to St. Gerard’s School. So, that’s the route we took.

Note: This article covers the third period of public engagement — Post-Implementation Review below after outlining The Credit Woodlands project design.

1. Foster conversations both within the City of Mississauga as an organization and in the broader community about the re-evaluating the priorities of neighbourhood streets — from solely car oriented to pedestrian, cycling, transit and car balanced to better serve all users.
2. Reduce the speed of traffic through the area of Bert Fleming Park as part of a longer-term plan to reduce speed along all of The Credit Woodlands.
3. Create safer pedestrian crossings at locations where traffic is required to come to a full stop.
4. Create greater opportunities for recreation and play including providing better access to the greenspace of Bert Fleming Park.
5. Discourage the amount of out-of-neighbourhood traffic on The Credit Woodlands due to people using the street as a shortcut between Burnhamthorpe and Dundas.

1. Cost: To improve the traffic safety of our streets across Mississauga, we must explore inexpensive options. The traditional methods of road design take much too long from a budgeting perspective. You can see more about the budget for this project here.
2. Maintenance: The project needs to be easy to maintain for our Transportation and Works team.
3. Future Adaptability: As a pilot project the design needs to be relatively easy to revise or even completely reverse over time.

1. Keeping the new design and making the changes permanent with long-term features replacing temporary features such as the traffic barriers.
2. Removing the asphalt on the closed section of street and expanding the park.
3. Adding new features and landscaping to the park. Note: Flower beds have already been added and tulip bulbs have been planted. Additional park work is planned for the Spring.
4. Implementing a properly designed roundabout. Note that this option was NOT implemented already because roundabouts can cost several times that of the redesign that was implemented.
5. Reversing various changes.

As already mentioned, much more work on improving traffic safety on our streets is needed — both on The Credit Woodlands and across the city. We will continue to make that work a priority in the months and years ahead.

Learn more about the importance of traffic calming and our efforts to make streets safer below:

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