Miovision

[danbrotherston]

I wasn't sure of the best place to post this, but I noticed this interaction on Twitter the other day that I really liked. A former coworker of mine highlighted a bad intersection and tagged Miovision in the tweet. A little while later, Kurtis McBride responded with some data and some guidance. I'm looking forward to the Region, cities and townships having access to this information and making effective changes to the network.

I'm bad at embedding tweets. I tried getting this one in at this point in the post but could not.

This is a "improve flow for cars" style thing, so it's not inherently good and I don't know if there are factors involved for other modes of transportation, but Glasgow and Westmount is definitely a point were things snare up.

There's also a highlight if you follow the original thread where the City's twitter account responds with one of my more hated aspects of our infrastructure "that's the Region's responsibility", but at least the Region's twitter account also responds in saying they're forwarding it to their traffic engineers. It's an interesting sort of case where it seems like social media is leading to productive outcomes.

I'm not going to bother getting involved in a twitter discussion at this point, but Westmount and Glasgow is an example of a complete failure of government.

Years and years ago when Westmount was rebuilt, engineers felt turn lanes were needed at Glasgow, but that would have taken trees and frontage from the property owners on Westmount, so that didn't happen. Then the intersection, not surprisingly had an excessive number of collisions.

Region staff went to work, and came up with some options:

1) Widen the road to put turn lanes in (expensive, and same problems as before).
2) Restrict turns (non-starter for the [wealthy] folks on Glasgow).
3) Just barely enough capacity to turn one lane into turn only and have one through lane.

They selected 3, and that was the configuration for a long time.

During LRT construction traffic shifts meant that the volume of traffic at Westmount/Union now justified a light, and Regional Staff proceeded under a plan to add that (never mind that this was largely driven by temporary construction).

To that end, they found that traffic backups along Westmount reached to Union, which would be a problem if there was a light there, so they needed to relieve the bottleneck at Glasgow.  They had the same 3 options.  But they chose option 4, revert the intersection to a four lane through street with excessive numbers of collisions.

That's the conditions we have today.  Because people's lives are worth less than wealthy people's frontages, than forcing wealthy people to drive around the block, or than simply suffering through a little bit of congestion for total 1 hour per week day.  This is traffic planning in our region in a single intersection.

This understanding is derived from public documents (regional council reports) which I spent time reading when I was curious as to the change.

Oh, and just so we're clear on the current situation, now that LRT construction has ended, the light at Union is no longer justified, and Glasgow/Westmount retains it's (dangerous) configuration. Now I haven't seen traffic numbers from that intersection (and I don't think they have 5 years of history yet--that's how long they usually average the results over), but it's the only intersection in the city I've actually witnessed collisions at, and I've seen two there. So, take that anecdote with a grain of salt, but I'm guessing it's still the dangerous poorly designed intersection it's always been.