Road design, transportation and walkability

[ijmorlan]

Yes, they were asked and answered that this is proprietary information, covered under contract with consultants that isn’t permitted to be released. 

I suspect that council could see it if they wanted, but not us.

This makes a lot of sense, so I'm not sure where the disconnect is.  Engineering firm comes up with a proprietary design, arguably better than the competition, and they are bound by contract not to share it.  Not seeing anything shady here other than some IP being protected by the people that are paying, for said design.

No, that’s BS. We’re talking about public infrastructure that we all have to live with. We’re entitled to understand the decision process that goes into designing it. Also, there is no way that whatever proprietary model (or whatever) they’ve built is enough better than what everybody else is doing that it’s worth giving up transparency for access to the model.

It might be different if somebody could develop a model that was so amazingly accurate that it would allow us to cut in half the cost of our road network by building exactly the roads we need (or whatever), but that is simply not reality.

It’s more likely that staff are happy with the model being proprietary because it means they have a perfect excuse for not engaging in good faith discussion of the details of the resulting designs. They’re terrible at explaining themselves, so having an excuse not to even try is a good thing.

Example of what I mean: I suggested a pedestrian crossing refuge on Union at the Spur Line trail. The planner started mumbling something about signalized crossings and explaining that new legislation allows them to do things with pedestrian crossovers (or crosswalks) that they couldn’t before. No evidence that they understood why I think a crossing refuge is better. No explanation of what specifically the new legislation allows that they couldn’t do before. In fact, as far as I can tell, the new rules just codify standards for building crosswalks, which have been possible since I was a little bitty baby. Spoiler alert: they eventually built a (low-quality) pedestrian refuge at that location. I’d love to know how they decided to do that, given the reception the idea got when I presented it.