ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[ac3r]

According to the article the fire department had to lift the train to extract the victim before transporting them to the air ambulance.
https://kitchener.ctvnews.ca/person-airl...-1.6304786

Doesn't sound good at all.

Hope this forum doesn't victim blame or jump to conclusions, though, as it likes to do when it comes to 4+ wheel vehicles hitting people or inanimate objects like steel signs. We'll know when we're settled they're alive + well and subsequent investigations are concluded. Medical privacy and similar mean we don't really know who smashed down a centre island yield sign and curb hopped nor misjudged a turning radii (nor this, should parties really try to hide the news) so it's impossible to shift blame. Quite often it doesn't even matter if a pedestrian hit knows they should not be, say, jaywalking...but it happens...so it wouldn't be fair to say "whoever was hit should have crossed where they should have". Regardless of outcome it should have been designed in a way to not allow the potentiality in the first place (one reason why subway systems are now putting walls on platforms, for example).

Also political viability shouldn't mean a thing at this point. 45+ collisions and 1 (possibly 2) deaths at this point should show it doesn't mean how much we've spent on grade separating or not. Look at how angry people have become over the LRT not operating a couple times this year from ice (which was a known potential issue and contractually agreed on whether they knew they could operate in or have to shut down, within reason). Maybe it's just the industry I work in? But you do it the most perfect you can the first time when you are involving actual lives. I wouldn't allow a floor of a building I made collapse each year or power outages in it to occur once a month (which more equal to hitting LRT incidents) seem acceptable no more than you do design a rapid transit system and green stamp it, knowing it's going to have problems that can be minimized should you simply not just be cheap.

Just 1 human life would be the cost of the entire LRT being a subway.

[danbrotherston]

Obviously I hope for the best but the pedestrian was crossing the street mid block, half way between the Cameron st intersection and the Cameron heights driveway. By walking the extra two minutes to cross at Cameron it would've been entirely avoided. So while it is obviously best for the whole system to be grade separated the pedestrian wouldn't have been struck had they crossed where they are supposed to. Not to mention that it was not political possible at the time to do grade separation.

According to the article the fire department had to lift the train to extract the victim before transporting them to the air ambulance.
https://kitchener.ctvnews.ca/person-airl...-1.6304786

Not just crossing mid-block, but doing so very carelessly, it would seem. LRTs are easy to see and easy to avoid; the level of carelessness required to be severely injured by one is sufficient that crossing at a traffic light would not be sufficient to guarantee safety. Anyway, it’s pure coincidence that the LRT was involved. The exact same person attempting the exact same crossing at a different time would have been hit by a truck on the motor vehicle lanes. All grade separation would accomplish would be to eliminate the tiny number of incidents that involve the LRT, leaving all the motor vehicle incidents unchanged. And I’m pretty sure nobody here would be in favour of grade separating our roads.

Took the words out of my mouth. That said maybe the region should lower the speed limits outside of schools. As we’ve been advocating for decades.

[ijmorlan]

Hope this forum doesn't victim blame or jump to conclusions, though, as it likes to do when it comes to 4+ wheel vehicles hitting people or inanimate objects like steel signs. We'll know when we're settled they're alive + well and subsequent investigations are concluded. Medical privacy and similar mean we don't really know who smashed down a centre island yield sign and curb hopped nor misjudged a turning radii (nor this, should parties really try to hide the news) so it's impossible to shift blame. Quite often it doesn't even matter if a pedestrian hit knows they should not be, say, jaywalking...but it happens...so it wouldn't be fair to say "whoever was hit should have crossed where they should have". Regardless of outcome it should have been designed in a way to not allow the potentiality in the first place (one reason why subway systems are now putting walls on platforms, for example).

That is infeasible. You talk about grade separation as if it’s a minor tweak to the design, like having heated platforms. It’s not.

And in any case, it makes no sense to spend a huge amount of money grade separating the system to save one life per year (or whatever; probably not even that many) when you could save many more lives by building more LRT lines similar to the one we have and getting more traffic out of cars.

More fundamentally, you cannot make the world safe. There are situations in which one can feasibly eliminate classes of hazard. For example, machinery that takes both hands to activate, ensuring that one does not accidentally amputate ones other hand. There are other situations where similar preventive measures are either infeasible or outright impossible.

[neonjoe]

Not just crossing mid-block, but doing so very carelessly, it would seem. LRTs are easy to see and easy to avoid; the level of carelessness required to be severely injured by one is sufficient that crossing at a traffic light would not be sufficient to guarantee safety. Anyway, it’s pure coincidence that the LRT was involved. The exact same person attempting the exact same crossing at a different time would have been hit by a truck on the motor vehicle lanes. All grade separation would accomplish would be to eliminate the tiny number of incidents that involve the LRT, leaving all the motor vehicle incidents unchanged. And I’m pretty sure nobody here would be in favour of grade separating our roads.

Took the words out of my mouth. That said maybe the region should lower the speed limits outside of schools. As we’ve been advocating for decades.

Hasn’t the region lowered speed limits outside of schools to 40 between 8-5 MF. At least all the schools I drive by on Westmount and Fisher Hallman have the reduced time of day speeds.

[danbrotherston]

Took the words out of my mouth. That said maybe the region should lower the speed limits outside of schools. As we’ve been advocating for decades.

Hasn’t the region lowered speed limits outside of schools to 40 between 8-5 MF. At least all the schools I drive by on Westmount and Fisher Hallman have the reduced time of day speeds.

Have they? I'll be honest, I'm getting more and more out of touch. I recall that they voted against lowering limits universally outside of schools, and more, the City of Kitchener was all upset a few weeks back because speed limits were "Inconsistent" outside of schools (which means speeding motorists who endanger children near schools were all butthurt about getting ticketed, which is somehow...a bigger problem than their dangerous behaviour), so I assumed they haven't lowered speed limits, but I don't know for sure.

[danbrotherston]

Hope this forum doesn't victim blame or jump to conclusions, though, as it likes to do when it comes to 4+ wheel vehicles hitting people or inanimate objects like steel signs. We'll know when we're settled they're alive + well and subsequent investigations are concluded. Medical privacy and similar mean we don't really know who smashed down a centre island yield sign and curb hopped nor misjudged a turning radii (nor this, should parties really try to hide the news) so it's impossible to shift blame. Quite often it doesn't even matter if a pedestrian hit knows they should not be, say, jaywalking...but it happens...so it wouldn't be fair to say "whoever was hit should have crossed where they should have". Regardless of outcome it should have been designed in a way to not allow the potentiality in the first place (one reason why subway systems are now putting walls on platforms, for example).

That is infeasible. You talk about grade separation as if it’s a minor tweak to the design, like having heated platforms. It’s not.

And in any case, it makes no sense to spend a huge amount of money grade separating the system to save one life per year (or whatever; probably not even that many) when you could save many more lives by building more LRT lines similar to the one we have and getting more traffic out of cars.

More fundamentally, you cannot make the world safe. There are situations in which one can feasibly eliminate classes of hazard. For example, machinery that takes both hands to activate, ensuring that one does not accidentally amputate ones other hand. There are other situations where similar preventive measures are either infeasible or outright impossible.

This is the thing that pisses me off the most.

People even on our councils complain that costs are their main obstacle. But it's self delusion. Money is barely an obstacle. It's an excuse sometimes, but when there's something we want to do, magically there's money for that.

Instead, it's political expediency that's the obstacle. You see it today on Lancaster, with Mayor Berry arguing against closing the highway ramps. There's no lack of money, there's a lack of political will to make meaningful changes.

On the LRT, the biggest thing that would make the LRT safer is closing some of the intersections in Midtown... But again, it's not a lack of money, those intersections were expensive to build, it would have been cheaper to remove them from the plan originally, and yet, here we are with a less safe, more expensive system.

This is why people keep going on about elevation. Because certain people perceive elevation to be 'free' in the political sense, even if it costs a ton of money. Of course, the only reason it's perceived as "free" politically is because those who would be impacted by elevating the system (you know, the passengers) have almost no political agency.

[neonjoe]

Hasn’t the region lowered speed limits outside of schools to 40 between 8-5 MF. At least all the schools I drive by on Westmount and Fisher Hallman have the reduced time of day speeds.

Have they? I'll be honest, I'm getting more and more out of touch. I recall that they voted against lowering limits universally outside of schools, and more, the City of Kitchener was all upset a few weeks back because speed limits were "Inconsistent" outside of schools (which means speeding motorists who endanger children near schools were all butthurt about getting ticketed, which is somehow...a bigger problem than their dangerous behaviour), so I assumed they haven't lowered speed limits, but I don't know for sure.

I had to look it up, it may not be universal. The region does have a list of school zone speed limits.
https://www.regionofwaterloo.ca/en/resou...limits.pdf

[bravado]

There’s all sorts of local trams right at ground level across the world. Is this a uniquely bad design in KW or just the unfortunate growing pains period?

I don’t go downtown much, but in terms of safety I was shocked by how many kids were crammed on the 1m wide sidewalk in front of KCI. Why aren’t our streets designed for the modes that actually move the most people?

[Joedelay Highhoe]

For some reason, I'm pretty sure that Charles St. is 50 km/h in front of Cameron Heights. I could be wrong though. Charles St. has a 40 km/h speed limit between Ottawa and where it merges with King, which doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. Half that block is empty right now, and you don't see too many students jay-walking in that area.

The stretch of Charles near HoF and Cameron Heights is much sketchier. I often see people staggering out onto the street or across the tracks without even looking for traffic or trains. I saw a near miss last week when a kid walked directly in front of the train without even lifting his head.

[ZEBuilder]

For some reason, I'm pretty sure that Charles St. is 50 km/h in front of Cameron Heights. I could be wrong though. Charles St. has a 40 km/h speed limit between Ottawa and where it merges with King, which doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. Half that block is empty right now, and you don't see too many students jay-walking in that area.

The stretch of Charles near HoF and Cameron Heights is much sketchier. I often see people staggering out onto the street or across the tracks without even looking for traffic or trains. I saw a near miss last week when a kid walked directly in front of the train without even lifting his head.

Charles drops down to 40 again at Stirling so in front of Cameron Heights it's 40. The amount of people jaywalking is really insane, it happens in front of KCI as well and it was only really a matter of time before a tragic situation like this occured. In Europe they have similar systems yet don't have the same problems so it seems like one of the strange North American problems.

[dtkvictim]

Charles drops down to 40 again at Stirling so in front of Cameron Heights it's 40. The amount of people jaywalking is really insane, it happens in front of KCI as well and it was only really a matter of time before a tragic situation like this occured. In Europe they have similar systems yet don't have the same problems so it seems like one of the strange North American problems.

Only a matter of time before the ION was involved, but it has already happened with cars. I went to CHCI before the ION existed and when Charles St was 4 lanes wide. When the school let out for lunch, hundreds of students would stream across Charles St with only about 5% using the signalized crossing directly out front. Many didn't care or notice if there was oncoming traffic, they would bully their way across with their numbers. As a result, students got hit many times while I went there.

I don't know if there are infrastructure changes that can accommodate the cavalier attitude of teenagers, but I can say that a huge number of students have no respect for the previous (and presumably current) infrastructure and rules of the road.

[Rainrider22]

Its hard to tell a teen-ager something. My daughter will be going there next year for the IB program, I already told her to not cross in front of the school.

[bravado]

I think we have a responsibility to design around human behaviour, and to me it seems like excessive space for cars is what’s causing the LRT and pedestrian space to not be as safe as they could be.

[tomh009]

Just 1 human life would be the cost of the entire LRT being a subway.

This horse is quite dead so I really think we should stop beating it.

But the choice was not between a surface LRT and a subway, it was a surface LRT or nothing (or a BRT), a subway was not a viable option politically or financially. And, for that matter, if we had gone with a BRT, I expect the number of collisions and fatalities would have been similar as well.

[ac3r]

That is infeasible. You talk about grade separation as if it’s a minor tweak to the design, like having heated platforms. It’s not.

And in any case, it makes no sense to spend a huge amount of money grade separating the system to save one life per year (or whatever; probably not even that many) when you could save many more lives by building more LRT lines similar to the one we have and getting more traffic out of cars.

More fundamentally, you cannot make the world safe. There are situations in which one can feasibly eliminate classes of hazard. For example, machinery that takes both hands to activate, ensuring that one does not accidentally amputate ones other hand. There are other situations where similar preventive measures are either infeasible or outright impossible.

Here is your mental gymnastics award: http://www.americare-health.com/wp-conte.../award.jpg

There is nothing "infeasible" about designing a rapid transit system to be as safe as it possibly can be to prevent accidents and death as often as possible. Not sure why you would attempt to argue otherwise. As it stands, the LRT essentially has no real safety features to prevent collisions (whether it is with a vehicle or individual) other than putting the burden of not getting maimed or killed on the victim rather than a technology whose safety essentially boils down to a loud horn and "please stay off tracks" signage due to the region and tax payers being too damn cheap. Look what that has got us...a guarantee for a lifetime of endless collisions and deaths because there's no tweaking it. It's built already and it was built poorly. There's no tweaking it at this point because we screwed up in the first place by clutching the regional purse when it was planning and bidding time.