Road design, safety and Vision Zero

[Chris]

Went out for a drive today with my daughter (driving helps her anxiety) so we did our normal drive, which is taking the expressway and getting off at Baden (or New Hamburg) then normally we'd take the road that becomes Ottawa back to Kitchener.

Anyway, fog was real bad this morning, so I played safe -- which was doing about 92 in that 90 zone. Yes, I had bumper huggers and people zipping by me at 130, which is typical. Expensive gas and fog can't slow people down.

Not sure why, but people in Honda's, Volkswagen's, Mercedes and Audi's all drive like jerks all the time. Just an observation. Truck drivers in general are all crappy drivers.

I know it's a bias as to what I pay attention to or notice but I find the owners of the high-end German cars to be the worst. BMW - MB - Audi

[ac3r]

There's a stereotype about that because it's fairly true. They buy a standard Audi or whatever then act like they're driving around a Nismo GT3.

[KevinL]

A comedy Twitter bollard account (@WorldBollard) backs that up - a large proportion of bollard-crash incidents involve either a BMW or Audi.

[danbrotherston]

So, the ASE pilot is actually happening now, which is great news. It also appears to be effective...which is even better.

https://kitchener.ctvnews.ca/automated-s...-1.5892592

This is not a surprise to anyone. The media coverage kind of is. I'm surprised that they didn't choose to interview anyone opposing them, or complaining about a cash grab. Seems that is actually common, if unnecessary and problematic. It's pretty typical for the kind of false "both sides" nonsense that most media uses. So I am impressed here.

However, a tip for the public communication folks (at the region, and the paper) specifically the quote from Bob Henderson is poor.

"Approximately a five to six kilometre per hour reduction in the speeds"

This implies that everyone has slowed down by 5 or 6 km/h. Even if he more correctly said "average speeds", which he may have and it just got lost, it really isn't the important bit.

If everyone was going 45km/h and they slowed down to 39 or 40km/h. That would still be good, but would be a lot less meaningful than the ACTUAL change which is that most people were already doing 40-45km/h but SOME people were doing 50-70km/h and THOSE people have slowed down.

This is alluded to later in the article but it is buried pretty deeply, but good communications should raise it much more prominently because it focuses more on the biggest problem, and also those most impacted (i.e., the people getting tickets).

One other thing I noticed:

"He said there were some unanticipated costs, including hydro metering, and the hiring of electrical contractors to make connections between ASE sites and hydro services."

How did they not anticipate needing to make electrical connections to electrically powered cameras?

In any case, good on them for FINALLY getting these in place and in service. Seems like they dragged their feet on this, but the results speak for themselves.

[tomh009]

Success in school zones could prompt wider deployment on select other streets (regional roads?) as well.

[Bytor]

Still not a fan of ASE. The equipment costs money, and the maintenance, repair, and operations costs time and money, all of which piles up year over year, but proper street design is a "once and done" for decades option.

[danbrotherston]

Still not a fan of ASE. The equipment costs money, and the maintenance, repair, and operations costs time and money, all of which piles up year over year, but proper street design is a "once and done" for decades option.

A street redesign costs 5-10 million (at the low end), ASE equipment costs thousands, and signs for it cost hundreds.

I'm always in favour of redesigning streets, but ASE clearly has an ongoing place in our toolchest.

Also...roads absolutely have a maintenance cost. In fact, a top regional objection to better bike infra is maintenance and repair costs...

And those road costs absolutely dwarf ASE maintenance costs, and unlike ASE provide no functional income.

[Bytor]

A street redesign costs 5-10 million (at the low end)

No. Brand new residential streets are about $1M/lane-km to build and better designed streets do not cost more because it's still all the same things just laid out differently. So tha $5-10M is 2.5 yo 5km of residential streets.

ASE equipment costs thousands, and signs for it cost hundreds.

Try tens of thousands for the camera and controller in the box, plus tens of thousands more to hook it into a municipal-area network so it can report back to the central servers. A lot of the stop lights you see around are old and are running at dial-up speeds or lower. Certainly not the megabit speeds needed for a camera to send back pictures at a busy intersection.

How many cameras do you think you need to cover a residential street to get the same effect as a proper re-design? This article places each camera at $50k per year to lease and operate or the City of Toronto.

Also...roads absolutely have a maintenance cost. In fact, a top regional objection to better bike infra is maintenance and repair costs...

Not $50k/year per lane-kilometre, though.

So you're spending millions on a handful of cameras plus network connectivity that likely won't last the decade before neding replacement, or you can spend millions on a road that will last 30+ years, both to the same effect.

[danbrotherston]

A street redesign costs 5-10 million (at the low end)

No. Brand new residential streets are about $1M/lane-km to build and better designed streets do not cost more because it's still all the same things just laid out differently. So tha $5-10M is 2.5 yo 5km of residential streets.

Add in some intersections, and 5-10M is totally ballpark for a typical complete reconstruction project on a 2-4 km residential road. And that is the low side, because a collector or arterial road will see significantly higher per km costs.

ASE equipment costs thousands, and signs for it cost hundreds.

Try tens of thousands for the camera and controller in the box, plus tens of thousands more to hook it into a municipal-area network so it can report back to the central servers. A lot of the stop lights you see around are old and are running at dial-up speeds or lower. Certainly not the megabit speeds needed for a camera to send back pictures at a busy intersection.

How many cameras do you think you need to cover a residential street to get the same effect as a proper re-design? This article places each camera at $50k per year to lease and operate or the City of Toronto.

Maybe we're looking at 10s of thousands here, still orders of magnitude less than roads.

As for how many cameras, not that many, we need signage indicating ASE is in place, plus not telling people where cameras are. If they are consistently getting fined for speeding, and don't know where the cameras will be, they slow down everywhere, we don't actually need cameras *everywhere*.

Also...roads absolutely have a maintenance cost. In fact, a top regional objection to better bike infra is maintenance and repair costs...

Not $50k/year per lane-kilometre, though.

So you're spending millions on a handful of cameras plus network connectivity that likely won't last the decade before neding replacement, or you can spend millions on a road that will last 30+ years, both to the same effect.

First of all, yes, 50k/km/year is totally ballpark for road maintenance. Between ploughing, replacing damaged signage/bollards/planter boxes, painting, sweeping, etc. Roads are extremely expensive.

Second, no, don't give me that BS. If we are paying 50k/year for a camera, then we're throwing our money away. There's no reason to use a "municipal network"...buy a rogers sim...this isn't complicated.

Of course, you mislead about the price, even if cameras were 50k as you say a "handful" (say 5-10) come out to 1/4-1/2 million, not "millions".

And no, roads also don't last "30+" years. Typical surface asphalt lifespan is 10-12 years on arterials and somewhat longer (say 20-25 years) for residential streets if we're lucky.  Even the IHT which saw very very little vehicle traffic and so very little damage, lasted all of 22 years before needing resurfacing. Typically many resurfacings are done between complete reconstruction which means a design is baked in for 50+ years, but we still spend a few hundred to a million per km of road to repave every decade or two.

We should absolutely redesign our roads better. But cameras are many orders of magnitude cheaper, that is why we are able to deploy more of them than we are complete reconstructions.

I don't even know how this is remotely controversial...it's pretty basic accounting to show they're cheaper...

[Bob_McBob]

The Record also published an article about ASE yesterday. There's a throwaway line in it saying "one camera rotates among the 16 school sites" which I took to mean there was some kind of rotating supplemental camera. Looking at the regional council agenda from 2020, the proposal put to council was apparently the "semi-fixed" option provided by the vendor, which means they literally only have a single camera unit rotating between the 16 installations. Obviously if drivers don't know which unit has a camera it still acts as a deterrent, but that means the vast majority of speeders don't receive a ticket, and revenue from this system could be dramatically higher if the initial budget weren't so limited.

https://www.therecord.com/news/waterloo-...-down.html

[tomh009]

The Record also published an article about ASE yesterday. There's a throwaway line in it saying "one camera rotates among the 16 school sites" which I took to mean there was some kind of rotating supplemental camera. Looking at the regional council agenda from 2020, the proposal put to council was apparently the "semi-fixed" option provided by the vendor, which means they literally only have a single camera unit rotating between the 16 installations. Obviously if drivers don't know which unit has a camera it still acts as a deterrent, but that means the vast majority of speeders don't receive a ticket, and revenue from this system could be dramatically higher if the initial budget weren't so limited.

https://www.therecord.com/news/waterloo-...-down.html

That would be similar to the European model, where they have tons of camera locations and far fewer actual cameras. It also means that these are likely standalone cameras without network connections, with the images being picked up when the cameras are moved.

[bravado]

I'm becoming a big whiner in my middle age, but somebody in the City of Cambridge thought that installing these flexi-post things for 2 blocks (100 metres?) was a good idea?

[jamincan]

FWIW, they have a few streets in my neighbourhood with those, and my anecdotal experience seems to show that it does help slow down traffic.

[neonjoe]

Especially if there is road parking or bicycle lanes. It typically prevents drivers from blasting down the street straddling both sides of the road. In my area they also put an additional flexible bollard on the bike lane where these bollard signs are to prevent drivers from just using the bike lane to keep speeding.

[Chris]

https://kitchener.citynews.ca/local-news...ts-5408099

New bike lane on Bridge (University to Lancaster) and a couple new roundabouts. As someone that often bikes through the Ebycrest/Kraft/Sawmill intersection I'm glad they are making it a roundabout.