The Top 7 Fredericton Traffic Engineering Failures
Posted by Lamespotting on 12 Jan 2009 at 04:14 am | Tagged as: fail, Fredericton, Reviews
These aren’t examples of obsolete intersections or places where traffic grew too quickly. These are examples of things that were designed badly.
7. Bishop Dr. near Hanwell
Why are the lanes so wide? There’s enough room for 2 cars in each lane.
Update: Jan 2012: FIXED! The lines have been adjusted so that you now have two clear lanes to drive in.
6. Oromocto’s Gateway Roundabout
A well designed roundabout is an excellent device to control traffic flow. It is most useful in intersections where there is a lot of turning traffic. It really helps if you have all of the streets actually going into the roundabout. There’s no reason a roundabout has to be a perfect circle, ovals still work as well. Only 3 out of 4 roads going into it, not so much.
5. Two Nations Crossing
The city had the perfect opportunity to make a high speed east-west highway on the North side that would eventually connect to the Marysville Bypass. This would have made a ring road around 75% of the city (assuming it connects to the old TCH by the Princess Margaret Bridge). In fact, all they would need is a bridge at the end of the Ring Road to connect to the old TCH and we’d actually have a true ring road that goes all the way around the city. This would solve many traffic problems for years ahead. Unfortunately, city council can’t think any farther ahead than their 4 year term so they decided to not limit access to the road and it will soon be full of box stores which will plug up the traffic on that street.
4. Uptown traffic lights not being timed
Every try to go up Regent St in rush hour? Traffic doesn’t move a lot because each of those sets of lights run on sensors and none of them are linked to each other. They also only have sensors at the stop lines so they can’t predict if a wave of traffic is coming up the street. The simple solution here is more sensors and linking them so you can get a good amount of traffic up Regent St. on each cycle.
3. Non-continuous street names
- Forest Hill / Beaverbrook / Dundonald / Waggonners Lane
- Gibson / Canada
- Union / Main
When cities become amalgamated, or streets rearranged to join up, they are reluctant to change the street names for fear of annoying people. This, however, make it really confusing for newcomers and tourists. They just need to suck it up and make the residents change their addresses.
2. Spaghetti Junction
“Spaghetti Junction” is the only name I know of this intersection that won’t cause this post to get blocked by filters. Originally, there was a train track running through it which made it difficult to work with. Now, there’s only a trail which can easily be moved. There’s no excuse for this mess, it’s confusing, badly signed and difficult to navigate through during rush hour. Please hurry up and replace it with a roundabout.
1. The drivers
You can design the greatest road system around, but you’ll still fail when 25% of the drivers don’t know how to use it. It’s common knowledge that Fredericton drivers are terrible, there’s even a Facebook group and a live MergeFailCam. For some reason, city police overlook these offenses. It isn’t about money as the city doesn’t get to keep any of the fine from a speeding ticket. They run ads on TV telling people how to cross the street, but they won’t run ads telling people how to merge.
Much congestion could be solved in a few key places:
- When taking the ramp to exit to Regent St from the Westmorland St. Bridge, drivers tend to stop at the end of the cloverleaf when attempting to go on to St.Anne’s Pt. Bvd.
- When at a traffic light downtown, drivers will enter an intersection when there is no way out and block traffic
- When heading north on Westmorland towards the bridge, drivers will stop and let Queen St. traffic in front of them. They do this despite the fact that the Queen St. traffic will soon have a green light of their own
- When heading South on Regent St., turning right on to Arnold Dr. (in front of Walmart), drivers stop despite having their own lane.
- When taking the Regent. St. exit when coming South from the old TCH (#8), drivers stop when it joins up with the Vanier, despite having their own lane.
Enforcing the basic rules of the road (and educating drivers) will clear up some of the traffic headaches that are experienced. Doing so can even save on costly expansion projects. It will most certainly cut down on road rage. For some mysterious reason, these rules aren’t enforced. Perhaps all the decision-makers are bad drivers?
The biggest traffic fail is that Route 8 does not continue directly north after the Princess Margaret Bridge onto the Bypass, avoiding the underpass and the lights on Riverside Dr.
I love that incoming traffic from Jemseg gets priority onto the bridge over everyone coming from Devon/Barkers Pt/Marysville.
The Oromocto traffic circle is accessible from all 4 streets. In my experience it is actually a very efficient roundabout and I’ve never seen it at all congested; especially considering that there is a great deal of large vehicle (18 wheeler) traffic. They made the lane extra wide so that tractor trailers can turn around the circle.
[...] The worst traffic engineering failure in Fredericton [...]
A few comments on this year-old post:
1. Another thing I would add to the list is the complete lack of flashing amber/flashing red traffic control during the night. When I lived in Antigonish, all of the traffic signals in town went to flashing around 10 or 11 at night.
This would make perfect sense at many intersections in Fredericton:
- Regent street downtown should be flashing yellow all the way through
- Cliffe and MacLaren
- Most lights on Main Street
- Hanwell and Waggoner’s Lane
- I’m sure there are many more…
2. Regarding turning right onto Arnold Drive, I actually had someone honk at me there the other day. This person was northbound on Regent and turning left onto Arnold. Idiots…
3. The super-wide lanes on Bishop should be split into two, that way you could have dedicated turning lanes. Driving behind someone there is always a guessing game because you have no idea what anyone intends to do.
4. Union/Main is actually Royal Road/Main/Union/Riverside Drive.
5. I definitely agree regarding Two Nations Crossing. Would be perfect to link that up with the Marysville Bypass. Unfortunately it isn’t going to happen anytime soon.
6. Another terrible intersection is the front entrance to the Superstore on Waggoner’s Lane. When traveling west, there are two lanes by the Superstore. When this intersection was modified a few years back, the lanes weren’t marked. I assumed that the left lane was for traffic going straight and for turning left, while the right lane was for traffic turning into the Superstore. That would evenly split the traffct, as a LOT of people using Waggoner’s Lane go into the Superstore. Apparently that is far too logical, and when they were finally marked the left lane became a dedicated left turn lane for the 2% of traffic that actually turns left, leaving the 98% of traffic that is split between going straight and turning right for the right lane.
7. Finally, I hear a lot about “Fredericton drivers” and how terrible they are. I think that is unfair. Drivers are terrible everywhere. I have seen very little evidence that Frederictonians are worse than any others.
I’ve noticed this traffic fail lately:
When travelling towards the PM Bridge on Highway 8 on the southside, two lanes of traffic merge into one, then diverge back into two. There is an old truck depot behind Poets Hill that used to have an onramp onto the old TCH. The onramp is still there, and becomes the exit lane for Forest Hill Rd.
So, instead of having two lanes merge into one, why not eliminate the Truck stop onramp, and have two continuous lanes until the Forest Hill offramp?
[...] Proper design: A badly designed roundabout will cause more accidents and drivers will fear them. An example of a badly designed roundabout is the one on Miramichi/Sobeys/Esso in Oromocto. [...]
As someone who traverses the city by bicycle during the fair-weather months, I couldn’t agree more with the list, but…. re-engineering of traffic flow and education of drivers will only go so far in correcting the problems identified. Contrary to Oliver D’s assertion, I think the “bad drivers” label is well-deserved. Having driven a lot in several different types of cities (Saint John, Moncton, Halifax, Montreal, Saskatoon, Washington D.C., etc.), I’ve developed a theory on bad driving. In a nutshell, there are two broad types moving violations:
1) “Having a bad day” violations, when we’re not paying as much attention to our driving, or we just didn’t see that car in our mirror, or some other momentary lapse of judgement.
2) “Chronic” bad driving violations. These are caused by two types of drivers: those who simply don’t know the rules of the road (how did they get their license?); and those who know the rules, but don’t figure that they apply to them (signal lights / stop signs are optional, get out of my way, bikes belong on the sidewalks, etc.).
Oliver D is partly right – although the total amount of diving “errors” made here may not be far off the average, in my experience, a disproportionate amount of them occur due to the “Chronic” violators, and namely the ones who know better.
There are pointed socialogical reasons that this type of behaviour proliferates in Fredericton, but I’ll leave that discussion for another day.
I disagree about Fredericton drivers – I have lived and driven in other cities such as Ottawa, Halifax, Calgary, Montreal and never have I witnessed such a an evident inability of drivers to do a simple merge – it is an unknown skill in this city. People will stop in the middle of a merge lane as they ‘wait’ for the best opportunity to come along – it is insane. Two of the best examples are the off-on ramp (onto St. Annes Point Drive) on south side of the Westmorland Bridge and the on ramp to the Vanier Highway – Regent Street intersection. I am actually in shock that there are not more accidents but then I also think that Fredericton has adapted to it merge-ignorant population.
The fact that the city/province is considering traffic circles for some of Fredericton’s busier intersections is very bad planning. There are plans for a traffic circle at the top of the north side of the PM Bridge – I think a far more ‘Fredericton-friendly’ option would be a four way traffic intersection – the same as the one that exists at the north side of the Westmorland Bridge…and best yet, Frederictonians know how to use it!