General Road and Highway Discussion

[clasher]

To put some context on my point.  If we say the extra detour (avoiding the two shorter routes available) requires an extra million km to be driven (which seems reasonable?) then using CRA numbers we're looking at a rough cost of half a million dollars in extra costs put on the people that have to take this detour.  And that's just driving related costs that says nothing of their time or related costs to the economy.

But because nobody sees these costs and the majority of us don't have to bear them, people making decisions don't actually care.

Without knowing where trips are originating and ending we have no idea if people are taking the shortest route or not... say people in Breslau are going to RIM park, the fastest way is probably ebycrest/sawmill despite the shortest route being through the city. There are many other possible trips and it seems like any back-of-the-envelope estimates of extra KM drive is just a wild guess. Everything is a trade-off and I think the only way to do all the work is to close the entire road. If they tried to do it in stages it would take twice as long and probably cost a lot more money and people would still detour because driving through a single lane with traffic-control peeps would still suck and someone would be complaining about those delays too.

[SammyOES2]

Without knowing where trips are originating and ending we have no idea if people are taking the shortest route or not... say people in Breslau are going to RIM park, the fastest way is probably ebycrest/sawmill despite the shortest route being through the city. There are many other possible trips and it seems like any back-of-the-envelope estimates of extra KM drive is just a wild guess. Everything is a trade-off and I think the only way to do all the work is to close the entire road. If they tried to do it in stages it would take twice as long and probably cost a lot more money and people would still detour because driving through a single lane with traffic-control peeps would still suck and someone would be complaining about those delays too.

We have a pretty good idea of the general effect of the detour and can come up with an order of magnitude approximation of the detour costs.  I think a million is reasonable.  Maybe its half a million, maybe it's 1.5 million.  Either way, we're talking about a very significant cost (hundreds of thousands of dollars) that shouldn't be hand waved away just because we can't know the exact number.

It irritates me that people think this kind of logic is ok, because its just a small minority of people that have to accept 8 months of a ridiculous long detour that sucks a bunch of their time and money.  

And I don't know enough about the actual construction work (I didn't even know about the detour until this weekend because its not a route I take regularly) to say if it needs to be a full closure this entire time (although from what I saw last year, I'm very skeptical).  But there are clearly other options on the table that aren't being used that would really help here.  I'm also curious to know who gets these 'official passes'.

[Bob_McBob]

This is the official project document. It's a complete closure for 8 months with only local and emergency traffic access. Despite the staged construction they are not allowing any access to through traffic for the entire duration of the project. The detour gets really crazy when they start work on Northfield.

http://www.regionofwaterloo.ca/en/gettin...April4.pdf

Due to the extent of excavation required to install the new watermain, the roadways cannot
remain open to through traffic while under construction. In order to minimize impacts to abutting
properties, construction will be completed in three (3) separate stages. Work in the vicinity of
Conestoga Public School is planned to be completed during July and August in order to avoid
disruption during the school season. Please refer to the attached drawing showing the
proposed construction staging plan. During each stage, the road(s) will be fully closed to
through traffic. Local and emergency traffic will be maintained during construction.

I don't know what the "official" situation is with the resident passes. The construction worker who stopped the person who told me about this said a resident had complained about a child almost being hit and they had instituted a pass system and would not be allowing any non-residents to enter the street. They are only there during regular business hours, so plenty of cars take the side street at other times anyway. No police presence to enforce anything.

[Canard]

I get they don't want people driving through, but I really don't like the way this whole "pass" thing smells.

We wanted to drive to Boblo Island a few years back, for historic reasons. There's a small ferry that goes over to it. It holds like 10-15 cars. About 5 cars were lined up to board. When it arrived, we all went to drive on. Ours was the only one stopped by some kid in an orange safety vest.

"Uh, where are you going?"
"...across to the other side?"
"Do you live there?"
"No...?"
"Well, uh... I can't really let you go across. We don't really want people going over that don't live there."
".....?"

It just felt totally unofficial and really pissed me off (and we'd driven for like 3 hours just to check it out), so we turned around and went home. Hate stuff like this.

[ijmorlan]

I get they don't want people driving through, but I really don't like the way this whole "pass" thing smells.

We wanted to drive to Boblo Island a few years back, for historic reasons. There's a small ferry that goes over to it. It holds like 10-15 cars. About 5 cars were lined up to board. When it arrived, we all went to drive on. Ours was the only one stopped by some kid in an orange safety vest.

"Uh, where are you going?"
"...across to the other side?"
"Do you live there?"
"No...?"
"Well, uh... I can't really let you go across. We don't really want people going over that don't live there."
".....?"

It just felt totally unofficial and really pissed me off (and we'd driven for like 3 hours just to check it out), so we turned around and went home. Hate stuff like this.

That does sound weird. I wonder what the actual ownership status and law say on the matter. Also, I can’t help but wonder if a heterosexual couple would get a different reaction. Sad that the thought even occurs to me. Either way it smells as you say but it would be a different smell.

Hmm, Google Maps suggests that there is a “Captain Bob’s Island Ice Cream and Coffee Cabin” on the island right next to another eating establishment. How do those places survive on just the few residents of the island? Street View isn’t available on the island, so I guess they didn’t use the ferry…

[MidTowner]

My reaction to hearing about this street closure to non-residents was...why can't we do this in more places? This quiet street in the township has for reasons of the construction been introduced to the dangers of rat running, has understandably been upset by it, and found a solution.

With electronically-controlled bollards, the cost of enforcing street restrictions is a lot less than paying construction workers to do it. We could make sure the streets that have been designed to serve as arterials do so, and not our residential streets.

[danbrotherston]

My reaction to hearing about this street closure to non-residents was...why can't we do this in more places? This quiet street in the township has for reasons of the construction been introduced to the dangers of rat running, has understandably been upset by it, and found a solution.

With electronically-controlled bollards, the cost of enforcing street restrictions is a lot less than paying construction workers to do it. We could make sure the streets that have been designed to serve as arterials do so, and not our residential streets.

Welcome to the Netherlands .    Bollards aren't even needed, it's easy enough to cut or make inconvenient enough those through routes by other means without actually blocking cycling or walking (which presumably you'd still want to allow/encourage).  Right now, we create easy cut-through routes then freak out when people use them and install traffic bumps, and then whine about those bumps.  Generally, we just need to be smarter about design.

Here's an article and video describing retrofitting a neighbourhood in Utrecht to do exactly this.

https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2013/...t-century/

[SammyOES2]

My reaction to hearing about this street closure to non-residents was...why can't we do this in more places? This quiet street in the township has for reasons of the construction been introduced to the dangers of rat running, has understandably been upset by it, and found a solution.

With electronically-controlled bollards, the cost of enforcing street restrictions is a lot less than paying construction workers to do it. We could make sure the streets that have been designed to serve as arterials do so, and not our residential streets.

Yeah, this makes sense in a city or town where the nearest alternative is a couple of minutes and a few hundred meters away.  When you force an alternative detour of 10km away, it seems pretty ridiculous to me.

People in this thread are justifiably upset that a previous detour over a bridge cost provincial taxpayers a million dollars.  But we don't seem to be equally upset that we're forcing a much smaller group to pay a significant fraction of that.

[clasher]

Looking at Flax Mill drive on streetview I really think using as a detour would probably mean repaving that road too, looks pretty rough and it's not very wide.

I don't think the cost of this detour was just hand-waved away, there really isn't any to replace the water main under the road without closing it completely. It seems to me that if it's possible to leave a road open during construction they usually do that. I like the implication made somewhere up thread that the people that plan construction aren't affected by those decisions, the engineers and planners all drive everywhere too and they get stuck in traffic like the rest of us common people.

It's far safer for the workers to close the road to traffic, people still run over construction workers in this day and age.

[SammyOES2]

It's far safer for the workers to close the road to traffic, people still run over construction workers in this day and age.

I would bet that the expected value of 'negative health effects' is significantly higher with the extra km driven then the risk to construction workers in a case like this.

[clasher]

It's far safer for the workers to close the road to traffic, people still run over construction workers in this day and age.

I would bet that the expected value of 'negative health effects' is significantly higher with the extra km driven then the risk to construction workers in a case like this.

LOL I dunno... I think a worker's death is worse than adding a bunch of stress and taking minutes or hours of life from thousands of people. Even at an extra 1.5 million km of driving I doubt that is more than a rounding error in the amount of driving that people in this region do in 8 months. It's just likely too that drivers that use this route might opt to take shorter detours that take a few more minutes instead of driving cross-country.

[SammyOES2]

I would bet that the expected value of 'negative health effects' is significantly higher with the extra km driven then the risk to construction workers in a case like this.

LOL I dunno... I think a worker's death is worse than adding a bunch of stress and taking minutes or hours of life from thousands of people. Even at an extra 1.5 million km of driving I doubt that is more than a rounding error in the amount of driving that people in this region do in 8 months. It's just likely too that drivers that use this route might opt to take shorter detours that take a few more minutes instead of driving cross-country.

You realize people die in car accidents, right?  And the more kms people drive, the more deaths occur.  And, even less concrete, people die from stress.

My point being there is some percentage chance that a construction worker dies when the road isn't closed.  There's some percentage chance that someone dies because of the extra kms being driven.  I don't think those percentage chances are actually particularly close - even if they're both really tiny.

I'm also not sure you understand that there are some set of people living in Conestogo that have no shorter detours available.  This isn't a city road.  It's a main route in a relatively rural area with a river nearby.

[MidTowner]

clasher, SammyOES2 is right that, economically, the costs may outweigh the cost of the risk of a worker's life. Emphasis on cost of risk, which can (and routinely is) quantified economically.

But, Sammy, really Clasher illustrates the fact that most of our decisions are entirely (or even mostly) based in economic calculations. Politically, you can not "sell" that you're going to put a worker's life at risk to avoid the impact on the environment and other people's time, even if those costs are clearly higher than the cost of that risk. Even if the risk of a child being struck and killed on that residential street is remote and therefore low cost, the township can not balance it against the costs of the added detour, because it's an emotional and not purely economic issue.

[SammyOES2]

MidTowner, I guess I have two responses:

1. That's telling me 'why' the decision was made. But doesn't change my point that its a bad decision.

2. I'm not just talking economically. I'm talking actual health outcomes - and even more than that - I'm talking about actual 'direct' health outcomes. If we were able to reproduce this construction situation thousands of times and test a complete road closure with long detour vs a non-road closure I believe there would be more dead people with the long detour because of accidents caused by more driving.

[clasher]

If I understand the stuff posted earlier in the thread about the passes it seems to me the people living in Conestogo would have access to their homes with those special passes. It's the through-traffic that suffers... and I think the people that planned this whole thing knew all the things we know about it and probably had access to some numbers to justify this decision. Even if someone drove this detour every day for the whole 8 months it would add what, 5000km to their driving for that year... that seems like a lot to me but over a lifetime of driving it isn't that much.

I just don't understand what you think a good decision would be for this? Assuming the construction people aren't lying and they have to completely close the road what is your alternative?