Cycling in Waterloo Region

[danbrotherston]

To be fair, I don't think--in theory at least--detailed designs should be put out to public input...I mean, the point of having engineers is to understand how to build detailed designs that work well...the public (and our representatives) should only be setting the general direction. 

I think the detailed designs should be put out for comment. It should be a limited sort where they announce where they are in the project and put everything on the Web; no drop-in sessions (even in normal times). There are enough sufficiently knowledgeable or just curious people that it’s reasonable to do this, and given the designs need to be created and shared between project members, they can just be shared on a public site.

The real need is for designers to take seriously the public input and not pretend that they are all-knowing.

I’m sure they don’t consciously consider themselves all-knowing, but I am quite confident they feel comfortable dismissing most public input as being based on a lack of knowledge. By contrast, in my work I frequently get suggestions that are problematic from a technical perspective, but I think about them from the perspective of the person asking for it, and frequently am able to come up with a way of incorporating their needs into the overall design. The final form isn’t usually exactly what the person asked for (“please add a button right here to do this”) but still makes them as happy as, or even happier than they would have been.

In traffic engineering it’s a bit different, where so much of the professional knowledge is wrong. Not the knowledge about how big a bridge girder has to be to support a particular road, but the so-called knowledge about how wide lanes need to be, what turn radii need to be, and what is acceptable protection for non-motor-vehicle users of the infrastructure.

I'm not against the data being public (and indeed, it is, when the tender is issued), but I really don't believe there should be any public comment. The fact is, for every 100 people who have the knowledge and understanding to comment thoughtfully, 99.9 of them will not be interested and have better things to do, and then there are 1,000,000 cranks who don't understand the thing one bit, but have more than enough to say. All it really would be is a make work project for the city to listen to people who don't know anything but are convinced they are experts.

We aren't talking about public input on things the public wants--where should a bike lane be, do we need a crossing here--what you describe as user needs/user stories --"I need to cross the road here, make it safe". The engineers--YOU are the one to say "here's how we do that"--in your case, you design a button here, using a callback and whatever calls are required to implement that button. That's detailed design, so it's more like "what granularity of fill do we need here", "how should this curb be profiled", and "what dimensions and specifications should this island be"...Yes, I happen have an opinion on the second two, but I have no idea about the first, and the only reason I have an opinion on the second two is because the regional engineers (and city engineers) get it wrong 9 times out of 10.

Basically, nobody in this city EXCEPT engineers should have any input on what granularity of fill is needed under roads, but the only reason I feel that is the case is because AFAIK our engineers generally get that right. I would like the same to be true for curb profiles and ped islands too--sadly that isn't the case right now, but that doesn't change my opinion about what the situation SHOULD be.

This is why we pay engineers, and few people with the actual expertise are going to be giving comments for free unless they the engineers in the city are regularly doing something wrong...