11-24-2020, 05:33 PM
(11-24-2020, 04:10 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: Honestly, our engineers are basically just automatons. Every time this was raised they repeated the mantra "the design guide allows a MUT where the driveways are fewer than x per 100 meters". Yes, Victoria satisfies this. But the design guide does not consider, and the engineers refused to consider the nature of those driveway conflicts. They would refuse to put a MUT on a section of residential street which had a dozen driveways for single family homes that are 6 meters wide and see 2-4 cars turn per day moving at a crawling pace. Victoria has commercial driveways with massive turn radii which are 20-60 meters wide and see thousands of turns per day with turning speeds in excess of 40km/h. Yet they treat these the same. Makes me angry. They refused to even consider additional measures to make the driveway conflicts more visible to drivers (and there are many options). Honestly...I'm glad there's something here now, but our engineers are bad at what they do.
Anybody who would write or quote favourably from a design guide that says that is a bad and incompetent engineer.
Obviously, it should relate to the total amount and nature of traffic crossing the MUT, with considerable leeway to take into account local conditions. Also it is inappropriate to use what is written in a design guide as a way of silencing citizen input.
How do our bridges stay up? They must be designed by a different and higher quality of engineer. Or maybe it turns out that physics is easier than the complicated combination of psychology, economics, game theory, and other disciplines involved in designing good complete streets infrastructure.