Flexible infrastructure

As I wrote the post about B-Society and the advantages of business and society running in an early and late shift, I thought about the competition for space in our commuting infrastructure. I have so often been stuck in traffic based on volume. Three lanes of bumper-to-bumper line-ups, waiting to get ahead by inches, and then there is the three lanes that take traffic in the opposite direction, empty. Wouldn't it make sense to use a lane or two of those to ease on the unidirectional heavy flow?

The centre lane on Jarvis Street in Toronto, from Queen Street to Wellesley Street, can be either a northbound or southbound lane, depending on the time of day and rush-hour requirements. This is sort of what I'm talking about, except on a much larger scale. I'm actually imagining the centre cement guardrails on the major highways of our city being shifted over to increase the number of lanes for traffic in one direction, and reducing it for the opposite direction. Actually, true express lane segments of major North American highways can be operated as reversible flow facilities or bi-directional facilities. This means that the centre section of the highway can be used for one direction in the morning and the opposite direction in the afternoon.

With a limited quantity of on-line research, I have found a major infrastructure building project in the US that is pursuing a similar theme. There's an expressway in Florida that is putting in a major capital investment in building a second level, 3 lane express, segment on the median of an existing highway. It is intended to be reversible for morning and afternoon rush hours.

What Toronto needs is not so much the investment in concrete building, but an initial investment in understanding where the problems are, when they happen, and how the existing infrastructure can be used to ease the pressure.

A flexible system of transportation arteries, enabling non-time-bound infrastructure of city transactions, would waste less time, use less fuel and encourage more productivity. Furthermore, this type of innovation would be adapting the system to the people who are the users; rather than forcing people to adapt to the system.