03-07-2022, 08:07 AM
(03-06-2022, 10:33 PM)bravado Wrote:(03-06-2022, 09:28 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: I am not an engineer, which means that I am not qualified to sign plans.
But I feel that I am more qualified to answer this question than our engineers are, since they actually build stuff like this, that is just utterly incompetent.
The first thing that should happen, is the path should be visually distinct from the driveway. They are both in asphalt right now, drivers don't have any reason to even know they are crossing paths with other road users.
Visual distinction could be the dotted line you mention, but even better would be a stronger signal using colour (most Dutch paths are red, we prefer green apparently.
Raising the path above the driveway would further strengthen this distinction for drivers.
Narrowing the driveway and squaring off the entrance would also reduce the speed drivers enter and exit the driveway.
Moving the path back from the road, so leave enough space between the path and the road for a driver to wait (allowing drivers to focus on the path, then after focus on the road).
Disallowing driveways on busy roads (which creates stroads) would make getting in and out of the driveway easier so the cognitive load on drivers is reduced giving them more attention to spend on you.
And I mean, this is off the top of my head. It's not like this is rocket science. It's not that our engineers couldn't figure this out (they certainly don't know it), but they don't care...this path meets all their engineering standards, so they aren't liable if you get hit, and it meets the requirements council gave them for active transportation without taking space from cars. That is their ONLY concern, they see this as a major success. Even better, they will later use the poor uptake of this infrastructure to justify NOT building more infra in the future.
What's even crazier is that the gas station has another entrance on the other side, they didn't close a single one to keep pedestrians and cyclists safe. This little miserable plaza has 3 entrances and they didn't get rid of any. The used car dealership next to it still has 2!
Yup! Yeah, our plazas always have lots of entrances like that, and I see why, it makes them easier to access, but makes our roads (stroads) much worse. To be fair, our engineers do understand the traffic flow disruptions that this causes (maybe they know about safety too, but don't really care), but even car traffic flow is not a big enough reason to limit access. It's a fundamentally broken transportation system.
What really bothers me about our engineers is the standards they blindly follow. There is a standard which says an MUT is acceptable if there are fewer than x driveways in y meters. But they refuse to make a distinction between a high frequency high speed driveway for a gas station and a tiny residential driveway that carries two trips a day at best.
Which is why they will put a MUT on a road like that, despite the obvious danger, but WON'T put it in a safer place that just happens to have homes on it.
It's crazy...I've had this conversation with them, and they literally just repeated the standard back at me. I have zero respect for these folks at that point.