Road design, transportation and walkability

[ijmorlan]

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.

Yeah, I'm not so sure of that.  It's a nice thought, but usually contacts are between two parties, third parties/subcontractors/consultants all covered under a blanket clause in a NDA/CDA and if you're lucky some of it might show up on the public record after the fact (once the tender has been awarded).  Sooo, not sure what part of the design/decision process the general pulbic would be privy to?  Maybe I missed something, like an variance application, that the people in the area would have been invited to attend? 

No disrespect, just trying to understand where the design transparency is warranted in this case

We’re talking about road design, right? So this is the public realm, not the inside of some factory or detailed design of a data centre. We all have to live in the resulting space. So if the engineers claim that 4 lanes are required, or that only so much time can be given to pedestrian crossing, or whatever, we’re entitled to understand why they are saying that, and challenge the model and the assumptions and inputs that go into the model. This is especially true when planning has had so many failures over the last century or so. Remember, all the best places to live, the ones that keep getting more expensive and forcing people of modest means to move out into the auto-dependent suburbs, were built before planning and zoning.

Again, if by using a proprietary model we could get some absolutely amazing result that was impossible without it, it might be a different story: our right to know might be trumped by the amazing result. The cost involved and other alternatives also come into play. Consider if a government website has a Google search link. In an ideal world, I would say that the public has a right to understand how the website works, including the search feature on it. In the real world however, the ability to just throw a Google search link on the website for free provides so much utility that I don’t care that I’m not allowed to know the details of the algorithm.

But with road design, the models keep pushing road widenings, and we’re suspicious of the actual need, for good reasons. So it’s very on-point to want to know what assumptions are being used, and how the model calculates the results. There are many existing roads built with 4 lanes that clearly don’t need that many lanes.

It’s actually a weird situation: if I were in charge, the Region would have few to no 4 lane roads and way more transit. It would be just as prosperous, probably more prosperous, than it is, and much safer. But even if we take it as a given that roads should be widened to take their traffic, we still have many unjustified 4 lane roads. Maybe they’re not doing it any more, because of the models; but it sure looks like the engineers just want to do road widenings, and a proprietary model is a great way of avoiding informed criticism.