Integrated Transportation and Urban Design Master Planning: A Case Study for the Village of Binbrook, ON

The Village of Binbrook, located in the southwest portion of the newly amalgamated City of Hamilton in southwestern Ontario, is a standalone community of under 1,000 people separated from the Hamilton urban area by 6 km of rural countryside. The Official Plan for the City, and a Secondary Plan for the Binbrook urban area, set out that the community will grow to an ultimate population of about 15,000 people, and dedicated water and sewer mains between Hamilton and Binbrook have been built to serve that population. The City of Hamilton commissioned a Transportation Master Plan to be prepared by Stantec Consulting Ltd., with the original intent being that the study be coordinated with an Urban Design Guidelines Study for the Village core to be undertaken by Planning staff of the City. City and consultant staff involved in the project determined very early on that a completely integrated approach should be adopted to realize a number of benefits, including: integration of public involvement events and contacts; efficient iterations of successive transportation and urban design alternatives; and, a richer and more adoptable product because of the synergies of one approach continually informing the other and vice versa. Interactions with the public and other stakeholders have been integrated throughout the study, including public information centres held in the same location on the same day with planned overlaps. Challenges met by the study approach included: effectively dealing with the competing interests of heavy truck traffic through the core of the village versus the desire for a historical and pedestrian-oriented design of the four corners in the village core; balancing the desire for on-street and off-street parking and centre median treatments with the need for left-turn storage lanes at the four corners traffic signal; and, establishing suitable roadway cross-sections to accommodate pedestrians, cyclists, vehicles, and urban design features throughout the community. The integrated study approach was unique, and resulted in a plan that recognized and resolved competing transportation and urban design issues in the Village of Binbrook.