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Waterloo's recent decision to lower the speed limits in residential areas to 30km/h was accompanied by previous policy decisions such that when complaints were made about speeding on residential roads, the speeds were checked against the signed speed limit rather than what the road was designed for. Thus a 50km/h residential road that was designed for 60-70km/h 50 years ago, previously nothing would get done and wouldn't even get modified to bring things down to 50. Now, the road has to be modified to bring drivers down to the posted speed of 30km/h.
Kitchener has a similar policy of stress being 40/km/h and 40 in school zone, but I do not know if Kitchener has a similar policy of comparing the speeds to the posted limit rather than the design limit.
Anybody got any information on that?
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08-02-2022, 07:43 PM
(This post was last modified: 08-02-2022, 07:44 PM by bravado.)
This site has been going around certain city planning twitters and I thought I'd share it here. I've been having some "fun" measuring the width of roads in google maps and trying to make my own version with the same dimensions.
https://streetmix.net
(I even made my own little future Hespeler Road: https://streetmix.net/-/1900367)
local cambridge weirdo
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(08-02-2022, 07:43 PM)bravado Wrote: This site has been going around certain city planning twitters and I thought I'd share it here. I've been having some "fun" measuring the width of roads in google maps and trying to make my own version with the same dimensions.
https://streetmix.net
(I even made my own little future Hespeler Road: https://streetmix.net/-/1900367)
Yeah, Streetmix is great, even some cities are starting to use it.
At first I thought "man, I'm surprised how constrained Hespeler Rd. is". Then I saw the scroll buttons at the bottom, and man Hespeler Rd. is HUGE! I cannot believe how badly we use the space.
One nitpick, bike lanes can go around transit shelters--although it's especially weird because there will also need to be central transit stations for the LRT.
Also, galaxy brain, if we were really ambitious, bike lanes can also go around gas stations.
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Teenage pedestrian struck at the Erb and Ira Needles roundabout.
https://kitchener.ctvnews.ca/teen-pedest...-1.6020179
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(08-09-2022, 03:17 PM)Bob_McBob Wrote: Teenage pedestrian struck at the Erb and Ira Needles roundabout.
https://kitchener.ctvnews.ca/teen-pedest...-1.6020179
As usual it seems perverse to me to discuss traffic/delays in the same message as someone getting seriously hurt or dying.
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Our car overlords demand it...
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(08-09-2022, 03:17 PM)Bob_McBob Wrote: Teenage pedestrian struck at the Erb and Ira Needles roundabout.
https://kitchener.ctvnews.ca/teen-pedest...-1.6020179
Story has been corrected. It was a 21-year old male who was hit.
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https://www.reddit.com/r/kitchener/comme...ord_every/
The replies say everything you need to know about local driver culture. Holy shit.
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I am happy (re: embarrassed) to announce that our Region has made it to the top of r/fuckcars.
This is the Franklin and Dundas roundabout in Cambridge. There are very nice new multi-use trails on either side that make it quite nice to cycle. It’s not so nice to use the crosswalk in the roundabout in comparison.
https://reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/w...ding_when/
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08-11-2022, 01:25 PM
(This post was last modified: 08-11-2022, 01:31 PM by danbrotherston.)
Yeah, and drivers complain about seeing pedestrians, that pedestrian was 100% visible for many seconds, that driver even moved to go around them.
They saw them, and decide that nearly running them over was the correct course of action.
Unfortunately that is Every. Fucking. Day....and our regional engineers do not care one bit. They will tell you it doesn't happen, when you show them, they pretend there's nothing they can do.
Holy fuck, I went and read the comments...I should not have done that. It's got me seeing red.
And also, thanking the good lord I don't live on the same continent as those sociopaths. Sorry guys, you have my sympathies, but I hate that so much, it's a big part of why we left.
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(08-11-2022, 01:25 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: Yeah, and drivers complain about seeing pedestrians, that pedestrian was 100% visible for many seconds, that driver even moved to go around them.
They saw them, and decide that nearly running them over was the correct course of action.
Unfortunately that is Every. Fucking. Day....and our regional engineers do not care one bit. They will tell you it doesn't happen, when you show them, they pretend there's nothing they can do.
I've thought about getting a body cam, if it didn't look so silly, to make a compilation of all the dangerous situations. I used to walk commute through Weber & Victoria every day and I'd probably have been dead 20 times over the course of 1.5 years if I always took my right of way.
Even on my daily casual walks where I specifically avoid areas with cars, I still see dangerous and illegal maneuvers at least once a week.
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Yeah, Weber and Vic is terrible.
Honestly...that's was one of the eye opening experiences for me...it really clicked...OOOOH...they aren't actually trying to fix anything. Our engineers need to change, they're bad at their jobs, they're bad for our city, they are dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists.
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(08-11-2022, 02:50 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: Yeah, Weber and Vic is terrible.
Honestly...that's was one of the eye opening experiences for me...it really clicked...OOOOH...they aren't actually trying to fix anything. Our engineers need to change, they're bad at their jobs, they're bad for our city, they are dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists.
They are dangerous for drivers too... I saw countless collisions, close calls, or leftover debris during my time walking through there. And I don't think it even reaches the top 10 highest collision intersections in the region.
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Since it has come up in a few places in the past few days, I made a big explainer/rant on Twitter about why our roundabouts are unsafe.
You can hear me wax poetic about how our engineers get most things right, but fail in the usual way creating very dangerous situations... if you want.
https://twitter.com/danbrotherston/statu...8648717313
But what really struck me as I was writing this was this image below. This is two roundabouts, one about two blocks from my home here in Amersfoort, a completely typical roundabout here (to the point that it is literally numbered one to 16...there are sixteen, they all look like this). It is between a four lane arterial road and a two lane collector road. (Now I'm simplifying a bit here, the "four lane arterial" is actually a six lane road with two general through lanes, two bus lanes, and two service road lanes, but this type of roundabout exists with more typical configurations as well). The image on the right is Ira Needles and Victoria, which is also a four lane arterial intersecting with a two lane collector road.
But the difference between them could not be more stark.
We are simply BAD at engineering. We KNOW what would be safer, we CHOOSE not to build it. There are days I feel embarrassed to work in the software engineering field. But if I was a traffic engineer, I would utterly HATE my field, it is SO regressive.
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I do think that the Ottawa St S roundabouts are much closer to the Dutch one in terms of design, though.
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