If being close to others is a comfort to you, downtown Barrie continues to be the place to be.

However, if being jammed in a crowd is too close for comfort, you’re probably wondering when the traffic will start to flow through and around the city core.

According to the city’s acting engineering director Wendel McArthur, that would have been Friday when Simcoe Street between Mary and Bayfield streets opened, to allow motorists to access Mulcaster Street and points east, through a right turn onto Bayfield Street, a left turn onto the remaining stretch of Lakeshore adjacent to Heritage Park, and onto Mulcaster.

Next year, work continues on Simcoe to make it a more direct, and wider, route between Bradford Street and Mulcaster.

Road crews were hard at it last week to get the stretch of Simcoe open by Friday. Thursday morning, the road had yet to be paved, but asphalt trucks were ready to go. By 2:30 in the afternoon, much of the road had been paved with crews moving fast to get it done.

I’m no expert in these things, but it appeared there was a lot of work still needing to be done to meet the Friday target. Still, even if the target was a little ambitious, there’s little doubt the road will be open soon; it’s entirely possible it’s already open as you read this.

Whether it will solve the downtown traffic hassles is another matter. No doubt it will help, but it won’t fix what ails downtown traffic flow.

To start with, the stretch of road opening will be two lanes, widening to three (two plus a turning lane) at intersections. Simcoe between Bradford and Mary is already a five-lane (with a turning lane in the middle) road. Moving west to east along Simcoe, motorists will find themselves squeezed into one lane from two.

That has the potential to back traffic along Simcoe to Bradford. If this happens, motorists may decide to continue north on Toronto Street or Bradford, getting around downtown along one of the residential streets running north from the city centre.

Sometime in 2008, Simcoe Street will be a five-laner running from Bradford to Mulcaster. That route will take a lot of the traffic heading east. But what of the traffic heading north? The problem for many of the residential streets in the downtown core is that traffic patterns are being set. They won’t be easy to change even when the wider and straighter Simcoe Street opens.

The impact of traffic on these downtown residential streets seems to be the forgotten factor in the muddle that serves for traffic flow in the city centre. Toronto Street, for instance, is bumper-to-bumper at times during the day, north and south, jammed from Simcoe to Wellington Street. Eastbound traffic – motorists accessing Wellington or Sophia from Toronto – may ease when Simcoe opens, but it’s likely northbound traffic will continue to use the street, and others, to get to the highway and Bayfield north.

And what of the southbound traffic on streets like Toronto? The opening of Simcoe may have little to no impact on that.

Around this time a year ago, I wrote a column that discussed - wait for it - downtown traffic hassles in the midst of realigning Lakeshore to Toronto and the beginning of the parking garage project on Collier. At that time, I opined the city had it backwards in a larger traffic project, of which Toronto/Lakeshore was but one part.

Other identified parts are a realignment of Lakeshore at Tiffin, to push traffic onto Bradford, the reconstruction of Simcoe and the eventual shift of Lakeshore, between downtown and Tiffin, to the old rail bed.

Logic seemed to dictate that the Lakeshore/Tiffin component be done first, to take advantage of the already reconstructed Bradford. Then, Simcoe could be built to handle east/west traffic between Bradford and Mulcaster. Thirdly, do the Toronto/Lakeshore link.
As stated, I’m no expert in these matters. But it made sense to me 12 months ago, and following a year of traffic stagnation downtown, it still does.