Cycling in Waterloo Region

[danbrotherston]

I have never been impressed by the Region's traffic signal staff. They presented to ATAC a while back and were basically useless. They didn't care to change anything at all about their practices, and find them to be absolutely fine as is, even something as trivial as copying Ottawa's (you know, a peer Ontario city) traffic signal programming was literally abhorrent to them. They expressed emphatically that their policies put pedestrians first, despite clearly not being so. I have little surprise that they would be lagging on enabling bicycle signals around the region.

And I'm not saying that every employee feels this way, only that the ones that were tasked with representing their department to the ATAC committee expressed this disdain for the idea that they should change anything about how they manage signals.

And yeah, over here in the Netherlands, the traffic signals are shockingly complex, and yet somehow they work remarkably well. So whose to say who is right. The user, or the engineer.

In any case, it's nice they've built the Duke St. cycle track, it's just a shame that the rest of the project has been effectively cancelled so it will never (at least not in my probable lifetime) be completed.

It's really based on what the higher ups want to do in terms of capital allocation. Some municipalities have decided vision zero/active transit is important and implemented various features to make progress towards it, we're talking millions of dollars to bring things up to AODA standards and implement your LPI and LBI.

The other thing that is a pain having worked on the public side of traffic signals is the constant complaints from the public. If you change a phasing to better align with other road users (pedestrians/bikes) so the LOS for them is B/C it might make vehicles go to C/D/E. You will inevitably get complaints because of it and once you get a councillor riding an issue it's constant until you basically revert to the previous iteration. It obviously shouldn't work like this but it unfortunately does. There's various things the signals department may want to do but just fundamentally can't because of pressure from outside sources.

Often times the user gets to make the calls because of public pressure (generally car users). Many of us engineers/EITs/CETs want to do things but we just can't due to either budget or politics around it which is the unfortunate reality of a car dominated society.

Yeah, and if the traffic signal engineer had stood in front of us and said that, I'd respect them, I'd still complain, but I'd be complaining to the politicians and telling them to change their priorities. But that wasn't what they were saying. They were standing there, with a straight face, and telling me that they were prioritizing pedestrians with their traffic signal system, and I know that they are not. Whether they are lying, or deluding themselves doesn't matter. The problem is that if politicians do tell them to change their priorities, nothing will change.

And I saw this very clear. You say what others have said that the budget is the governments priority statement. But I have realized that isn't entirely true. Tons of money is spent on cycling, and yet we still won't install bike lanes when they would delay drivers. Duke St. (or Weber, or King) won't get a complete cycle track, not for lack of funding, but for lack of willingness to prioritize cycling over other road traffic. The CoK fully funded this project, the money is there, the political will is not. Money is in fact a great way to pretend to have political will without actually spending much political capital.