If you’re driving in the university area this morning, heads up: The lights at the intersection of Elizabeth and Westerland are out.

It’s probably got something to do with the ridiculous winds out there (which I guess is the price we St. Johnsites pay for a sunny day in late November).

I’m pleased to report that, at least when I was walking by, drivers were handling the situation in an orderly fashion.

Be careful out there!

If your rush hour commute in any way involves driving downtown, you might want to try taking the long way around today. Chances are it’ll be shorter in the long run.

I went downtown today to take a look at the situation after last night’s fire. The cleanup from the demolition was still busily underway as of 4pm this afternoon.

As the excavator filled the dump truck, it would drive off and another one would arrive to take it’s place.

It’s weird, almost like Water Street is missing a tooth.

Here’s some video:

The cleanup efforts had to block off Water Street traffic from both sides of the block, making what was already a bad traffic area (due to the harbour cleanup construction) even worse. Bad as it was, drivers did appear to be taking it in stride.

On the bring side, it made crossing the roads much, much easier.

The section of Water Street between Waldegrave Street and Hamilton Avenue will be closed today until 10pm. Detours are in place to redirect traffic around the area.

To closure is necessary to allow for part of the harbour interceptor sewer’s construction, which is taking the sewage currently spewing into our harbour and redirecting it to the treatment plant on Southside Road.

On the corner of Prospect and King’s this afternoon. Can’t see this being legal, let along safe, but maybe they have special permissions or something.

Meanwhile, it looks like everyone’s getting off work early today. Check out the downtown traffic.

It’s 22 degrees as I type this, and it’s the middle of May.

Time to head back outside, I think.

Are drivers in St. John’s too friendly and courteous of the pedestrians walking our pothole lined streets?  Personally, I am beginning to think so.

When I initially moved back to St. John’s last year, after a seven year stint in the US and mainland Canada, I smiled at the novelty of seeing cars constantly stop for pedestrians crossing the street.  This is truly something unique that we experience in our little city.

But, fast forward a year, and my smile has turned into a snear from the annoying and constant use of my brakes anytime I drive more than a few blocks through the city.

It’s not that I don’t have a problem stopping for a person to cross the street here and there (especially when they are standing at a cross walk or intersection), however, there are countless drivers in the city that come to a screeching halt anytime they even sense a person on the sidewalk.

As a driver, there seems to be much more a hazard of smacking into the back of a car that stops with no notice, than there is ever hitting a pedestrian.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of drivers out there that do need to pay closer attention to the road, as, I’ve had a couple of close encounters while walking that made my short life life flash before my eyes (followed by me punching the hood, fender, window, basically anything I can reach on someones car as they speed off).  But, I do think we have almost become too courteous of pedestrians; I get constant non-friendly fingers and looks, if I don’t immediately stop for someone veering out in the street when they shouldn’t be.

Cross walks and traffic lights exist to handle both pedestrian and car traffic.  And, while most other places in the world ticket people who run out in front of cars, here in St. John’s we see it almost as a birthright.

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It’s about two and a half kilometers, give or take, between my place and my partner’s. Basically, to get from his to mine it’s a straight shot into the West End via Water Street. A simple physics equation tells me, uninterrupted and at the speed limit, the journey should take two minutes and eight seconds. Tack on two minutes for stoplights and parking, and you still have a nearly-effortless journey. Right?

Wrong. In fact, it’s been wrong since last summer at least. Construction along Water Street and/or Harbour Drive has wreaked havoc on the flow of traffic in and out of the downtown core since last summer, on and off. I can only recall one brief (and blissful) spell in which both Water Street AND Harbour Drive were free of construction, allowing my theoretical four-and-a-half-minute commute to be possible.

The City of St. John’s closed Harbour Drive down to thru-traffic April 16th in what will (optimistically) be the final stages of construction for the harbour cleanup.

While I think the harbour cleanup is a noble and long-overdue initiative, it’s hard to ignore the mayhem Harbour Drive’s closure has been causing for traffic on Water Street. On April 24th — which, as you’ll recall, was the first truly nice day of the year — it took me twenty minutes to traverse the short distance between Prescott and Waldegrave Streets along Water. This was at 3 p.m, not even peak hours. The CBC reported that the City of St. John’s had made a goal of August for completion of the Harbour Drive construction effort.

It looks like my Friday afternoon gridlock freakout might be a regular appointment up until August.

While my complaints could easily be dismissed as histrionics, for some, the daily gridlock caused by Harbour Drive’s closure could result real trouble. As the CBC reported, merchants (and, I editorialize, restaurant proprietors) on Water Street are concerned that this closure — and attendant traffic flow and parking issues — could result in a serious financial loss for the summer months.

With an already slumping economy (which we’re all sick of hearing about), could this interruption of commerce be the death knell for Water Street businesses?

I don’t think anyone will argue that the cleanup of the harbour — our friendly neighbourhood environmental disaster — is urgently required. And I suppose it’s comforting for frustrated commuters like myself that the end of our irritations is in the not-too-distant future. But I highly doubt business owners dependent on customer traffic will feel any such comfort between now and August.

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