Road design, safety and Vision Zero

[danbrotherston]

When talking about a crash on the 401 nobody ever describes it as "hundreds of people imprisoned" (though that's the way it may feel when I am driving there) even though it is exactly the same situation. That's why I call it fear mongering, which is maybe not the right term, but the point is, you wouldn't describe the same situation that way if caused by a crash instead of a protest.

OK, I think I understand better what you’re saying about crash vs. protest.

Although I have heard that police can be really bad at handling these situations. I have vague recollections of people being ticketed for reversing out; apparently they’re just supposed to sit there for hours, even though within well under an hour of the crash occurring it would be no problem for the police to organize a structured, managed, safe process of wrong-way-running the vehicles to the last interchange.

Yeah...the police are pretty inconsistent. I've had friends stopped for hours and police wouldn't say how long and wouldn't let them reverse out. But on the other hand, I've been stuck in a similar traffic jam from a serious crash and the police in less than half an hour of arriving conducted an orderly reversal up the shoulder to the last on-ramp.

I have no idea why there is the difference (and the right thing IMO is to do a reversal if police intend to close the road for an extended duration--say 2-3 times the time it takes to actually do the reversal) but police are generally just not that consistent. And, honestly, it could be a local vs. provincial police difference, who knows.

FWIW...and this is very much a tangent, the same thing should happen with a stuck GO train. Keeping people on a train car, especially one as packed as a rush hour train for an extended period of time is entirely unacceptable, there should be a procedure and a process for evacuating passengers in a timely fashion. Again, context dependent, but it's unacceptable to leave people for hours standing on a train as has happened.

These kind of unusual circumstance procedures are something nobody in society seems to be good at...