General Road and Highway Discussion

[tomh009]

Right. So starting with regular road tests on older drivers might be an easier first step. (And maybe more thorough initial driver training/testing ...)

[SammyOES]

I'm not sure why you guys think road tests will be useful when real driving isn't. Things like aggressive/distracted driving will never be caught because these people can still drive fine when they need to. Maybe we need to step up enforcement / demerit point penalties, but I'd still like to judge people on their everyday driving.

I guess a driving test is good for finding people that have forgotten / don't know basic rules, but that seems like a really small group of 'bad drivers'. More often than not people know the rules and just don't care.

Or take something like people not knowing the rules about roundabouts. Maybe instead of spending a crazy amount of money on testing we could spend a fraction of that on enforcing problem areas. A blitz of roundabouts where we ticket people that swerve through lanes, don't signal properly, don't yield, etc. etc. would go really far to straightening people out.

[SammyOES]

I can easily see the political blowback - 'Cash grab!' 'War on cars!' 'Nanny state!', etc - but I would certainly support it, personally.

My blowback would be I now need to go through a fairly onerous process and waste a bunch of time and money on something that's not going to do much.  

It's also probably fairly regressive.

[tomh009]

I'm not sure why you guys think road tests will be useful when real driving isn't.  Things like aggressive/distracted driving will never be caught because these people can still drive fine when they need to.  Maybe we need to step up enforcement / demerit point penalties, but I'd still like to judge people on their everyday driving.

Given the number of police available for traffic duty vs the number of drivers and the number of km of roads/streets, 99.99% of bad driving goes unobserved.  And there is no public appetite for increasing that number 10x.  So unless we do it with unattended cameras (increasing number of violations can be identified automatically based on live camera input) we really will not catch most of the problem drivers through enforcement.

And old people should absolutely need to do a driving test. Most 90-year-olds (an increasing segment of the population!) do not have reaction times necessary to be driving in city traffic.

[Elmira Guy]

I am all for the wide usage of traffic cams and photo radar. Money grab arguments are absurd. How can it be wrong to police, discourage, and identify and charge those who break the law?

As I have said before, I have nearly been hit a number of times at my local intersection (Lincoln and Weber) by boneheads turning right off Lincoln despite the fact that pedestrians are waiting and have the right-of-way. Either the drivers don't know the law or don't care. Neither is an acceptable reason. So a traffic cam that discourages drivers from doing so and catches those who do so anyway gets my complete support.

[ijmorlan]

I am all for the wide usage of traffic cams and photo radar. Money grab arguments are absurd. How can it be wrong to police, discourage, and identify and charge those who break the law?

If the law is written so as to be impractical or unreasonable to obey, then there is a problem.

For example, in some jurisdictions it is required to stop for 2s at a stop sign. This doesn’t add anything to safety if we assume the driver was already going to come to a near stop and look around thoroughly before proceeding; it’s just a way of making it crystal clear that the police are permitted to ticket perfectly safe behaviour.

Or if it is commonly accepted that the normal speed on a road is 120km/h, then it is unreasonable to ticket somebody for driving 120km/h unless there is something that sets their driving apart from the others on the road.

Or if the yellow time at a traffic light is timed to require people either to slam on their brakes or risk a red-light ticket, then we have a problem. I understand this has been a real problem in the USA, where corrupt local administrations have set signal timing and traffic cam configuration to maximize revenue rather than to achieve legitimate engineering goals.

Having said this, if the law is fundamentally legitimate, you are correct, and there shouldn’t even be a requirement to tell people when and where the automatic enforcement is operating — they are required to drive correctly everywhere, all the time. The suggestion that always comes up that the warning sign will cause people to slow down or whatever is frivolous because they’re supposed to be doing that anyway.

There is another consideration, which is that use of automatic or ubiquitous enforcement is a de facto (even though not de jure) change in the law. As a result, appropriate changes need to be made. For example, take red light running. An officer will use judgement and won’t be everywhere, so most red light running won’t be caught. As a result, the fine needs to be quite significant to act as any sort of deterrent. If however essentially every instance of running a red light will be caught, the fine doesn’t need to be anywhere near as high. Also, there should be some leeway for minor mistakes. Personally, I would go so far as to say that everybody should get one instance per year of entering the intersection in the second or two after the light has turned red for free — they would be sent a warning notice, but no penalty would be assessed (this wouldn’t apply to brazen red light runners, presumably, although even that wouldn’t be that bad because at one per year nobody could really plan to do much with their free strike).

And finally, returning to the revenue issue, the budget must not come to depend on traffic infraction revenue. The goal should be to minimize traffic infractions, not to make money from them. I’m not sure what the best approach here is, but definitely if the revenue is significant it should not become part of the general budget. If we had a user-pay policy for roads it might be OK to put the enforcement revenue in there. Then the idea would be that offenders would pay a greater share of the road cost.

[Coke6pk]

I don't think you need regular driving tests because you're not driving totally unchecked.  The feedback loop is in tickets / infractions / accidents.  Bad drivers will get more of those and should ultimately be removed from the road.  Its much more accurate feedback than a regular test would be.  Although we probably need changes to get 'bad' drivers off the road quicker.

I would love to see evidence of this working but the real experience on the road doesn't suggest that it is.  The complaints and problems surrounding roundabouts throw further doubt.

I would be curious to see someone run statistics like how many drivers who cause collisions had at least one prior ticket though.

I will attest to this.... yesterday during the black-out in Stanley Park, all the lights along Ottawa were out.  Drivers DID NOT revert to treating like a four way stop, and some just blew thru the intersection like they had a green light.  I'm surprised there weren't any accidents along Ottawa St (That I am aware of)

Coke

[danbrotherston]

This is most frustrating and in pervious blackouts I have had a few close calls both as a driver and pedestrian. It's really shocking.

[creative]

I drove through 4 lights on River Road during the blackout and all were being treated as 4 way stops when I went through.

[Canard]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Year 17 of the Krug St. work <a href="https://t.co/SBRU4LtJVn">pic.twitter.com/SBRU4LtJVn</a></p>&mdash; Iain Hendry (@Canardiain) <a href="https://twitter.com/Canardiain/status/920045075366928384?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 16, 2017</a></blockquote>

(honestly can't believe this is still ongoing)

[creative]

Tell me about it. That used to be a regular route for me under that bridge.

[embe]

As a driver, I've wondered what the heck is taking so long (as a closed alternate route, due to other road/ramp closures in the area).

On a walk however, the reduced traffic is kind of nice.

Just wait until Victoria st. bridge work is more underway, I'd wager Krug is going to see heavy usage. Could be what they're planning in advance for.

[KevinT]

Kitchener council OKs extension of Strasburg Road

Strasburg Road now stops just south of Rush Meadow Street. Extending the street to connect with Robert Ferrie Drive "is a significant project for us," said Chris Spere, Kitchener's manager of construction engineering.

[SammyOES]

I will attest to this.... yesterday during the black-out in Stanley Park, all the lights along Ottawa were out.  Drivers DID NOT revert to treating like a four way stop, and some just blew thru the intersection like they had a green light.  I'm surprised there weren't any accidents along Ottawa St (That I am aware of)

Coke

Driving tests aren't going to catch this either.

[Coke6pk]

I drove through 4 lights on River Road during the blackout and all were being treated as 4 way stops when I went through.

Maybe River Rd drivers had more patience.  I think with the Ottawa St construction (that already delays traffic) peoples patience to "wait" at the blank lights wasn't there.  I drove thru all Ottawa/River, Ottawa/Franklin and Ottawa/NB Expressway ramp intersections 3 times that afternoon, and saw near misses each time at at least one of the above intersections.

Coke

(EDIT: Yes Sammy, unfortunately tests would not catch this)