Well "assault with a weapon" can carry a penalty of up to 16 years imprisonment and "dangerous operation of a vehicle" resulting in injury is good for up to ten years. That won't be the outcome here, but it's unlikely to be just a slap on the wrist if there is a conviction. The media report calls it an argument that led to an incident of road rage. I guess we'll only know more when it gets to court.
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There appears to be a planned detour on the Laurel trail. I must say, this is an extremely detailed, albeit slightly upside down, description of the detour. Bravo City of Waterloo.
It's odd that the Laurel Trail is closed due to construction on Young Street, because Young doesn't actually intersect the trail there - the street curves to approach the housing co-op. Unless they're digging up utilities that pass under both the street and the trail, but the trail is so close to the creek it seems unlikely anything would go under it.
I suspect it may be storm sewer. It appears that the creek is used as part of the storm sewer system. There has been construction fence on both sides of the trail in the highlighted area for a month or two now.
I went for a walk with my parents this afternoon in Columbia Forest. There are so many parts of the region that I haven't visited in over ten years of living here that I've finally been lucky enough to visit over the past month or so. I was first introduced to the forest last week as a part of the RunWaterloo Trail Tour, and I was eager to return to explore some more. It's a bit of a maze of trails with only the GeoTime Trail reasonably well documented (and even then, it could use serious improvement). Much of the forest is surrounded by a trail, but it is best to make your way under the high canopy and explore the trails within.
![[Image: rTDhNxP.jpg]](http://i.imgur.com/rTDhNxP.jpg)
My house backs on to the larger forest. The one north of the Geo Time trail. You csn go all the way to Wideman road through it. And it easy to get a tad lost. Some the hills are huge and give you some good exercise. I LOVE hiking in it!
You're so lucky - I was commenting on how nice it would be to back onto the woods there.
(06-15-2016, 04:20 PM)Pheidippides Wrote: [ -> ]Thanks to Zanate over on the cycling thread pointing out the that the City of Waterloo's active transportation counters on their trails was available via their open data portal I have been playing around with visualizing the data in Tableau.
Feel free to explore:
https://public.tableau.com/views/ActiveT...showTabs=y
The data is not a real-time feed so I'll have to manually download the data every month, but it currently up to 31-May-2016.
I'm still new to Tableau so let me know if you see anything wonky and I'll try and fix it!
As an update, the City of Waterloo trail counter data now refreshed daily. I'm still trying to figure out how to read it in to Tableau (public) automatically (rather than downloading it in excel format each day).
Also, the City of Kitchener assured me at the end of June that their trail data would be made open data in about 6 weeks, which should be any day now. I will try to add that data in as well as soon as it is out.
(08-13-2016, 05:18 PM)Canard Wrote: [ -> ]That's very cool! How does the hardware work? I can see the diamonds for the inductive loops in the trails, but what happens after that? Some kind of small PC in an enclosure with an internet connection and some software?
I suspect this is the system in use:
http://www.eco-compteur.com/en/solutions...collection
Given that it matches pretty exactly the posts we see:
http://www.eco-compteur.com/en/products/...ycled-post
If we are getting daily updates, the city must be using the GSM data synchronization option. I can only speculate about the actual hardware involved, but given the battery life claimed, it isn't a "PC", in the traditional sense. It is most likely an ARM based system very similar to what you find in a cell phone, but far lower power.
(07-23-2016, 09:52 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: [ -> ]There appears to be a planned detour on the Laurel trail. I must say, this is an extremely detailed, albeit slightly upside down, description of the detour. Bravo City of Waterloo.
I really appreciated these construction signs aimed at the trail user, and the fact that they updated them when the timeline changed (August 1st was changed to August 22nd). But the 22nd has come and gone and the closure hasn't happened yet, which is fine, just update the signs again. There have been a lot of people, myself included, taking long detours for the last two days for no apparent reason on belief the section was closed and not wanting to risk an even longer detour by taking a chance it was open and finding it closed and having to double back to go around. It erodes users belief that signs mean what they say.
Also, is there any reason the gates on the trail are closed along the stretch of the Laurel trail between Weber and Peppler? With the gates closed it can make for some really tricky crossings at Bridgeport when the road is busy, the speeds excessive, and the gaps few and far between particularly if you are hauling a child in a trailer like myself. If someone on the other side isn't paying attention you end up not being able to get off the road quickly enough with oncoming traffic approaching.
The gates are an ever present issue on the trail. A cyclist was killed in Victoria park after hitting a gate at night. That crossing has been redesigned and the iron horse trail gates have been opened after a long fight. I was disappointed to discover that only the iron horse trail gates were opened in Waterloo.
And in the last week, someone tweeted out a picture of a driver who had gone down the IHT until having trouble navigating the rail crossing that was redesigned :-S.
The shocking level of idiocy demonstrated by a few drivers should not justify inconvenience and danger to the vastly larger number of trail users. And if this is a real and continual problem. Better designed entrance bollards are an option.
I'm not trying to argue that, it's just a sad reality that it happens at all.