New Brunswick’s upcoming provincial election has promises about better “public consultation” on certain issues. The problem with the past Liberal government wasn’t the lack of consultation, it was because the policies were dumb:

Closing a university and turning it into a polytechnic: DUMB
Cancelling Early French Immersion: DUMB
Selling the power company: DUMB

Public consultation can help in some situations, but in many others, you need experts in the relevant fields. And by experts, I mean actual experts, not consulting firms that you paid to come up with a report that supports your pre-determined conclusion.

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The last two blog posts about Saint John were fairly negative, so here’s a list of things that they do better in Saint John:

Transit – They actually put some effort into providing a decent level of service. They advertise, the routes make sense and they cooperate with the suburbs. In fact, the service to the suburbs is so popular, they’ve upgraded to use a sixty foot bendy bus.

Environmentalism – The local environmentalists actually make sense. Instead of ranting on about big box stores, they lobbied hard to stop the raw sewage flowing into Marsh Creek.  Now that the sewage problem is being looked after, they are concentrating on restoring the creek and modifying wetlands to help with the flooding on the east side.

Pedways – In Saint John’s Uptown, you can pretty much go anywhere without having to step outside. The Inside Connection connects pretty much all of their significant buildings from the City Market to Harbour Station. It also helps that as the Uptown area is build on a hill, there are plenty of escalators to help you up the hill. Even UNB’s Saint John campus has all of their buildings connected by a pedway system.

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1. Rothesay Ave / Retail Dr.

To help with traffic for Saint John’s expanding east side retail area, a new road was constructed to connect the malls to Rothesay Ave. This new road almost meets up with the Ashburn Lake Rd highway intersection. Almost. Instead of a single intersection, they got two sets of traffic lights 50m (175 feet) apart. What was in the way of the new road? A mini-home sales lot. The kind of thing that you can very easily put on a truck and move. For some reason, they didn’t think of doing that.

2. Timed traffic lights

Most of Saint John’s traffic lights are based on a timer. They have very few traffic actuated lights. Timed lights are great for synchronization, but not so good when you have a single set of lights in an area with low traffic. Some people believe that there is a conspiracy where Irving Oil wants you to sit there idling at red lights wasting gas.

3. Sensor lights that only have sensors for one street

Some intersections have traffic actuated lights, but only have sensors on the side street. The light controller has no idea how much, if any, traffic is on the main street. This means that if you pull up to a light that’s turning yellow, you’ll have to wait a full minute before it turns green.

4. Lights you can’t see from the stop line

In most places, the traffic lights are at the other end of the intersection and clearly visible. At some intersections in Saint John, if you stop at the stop line, you really have to crane your neck to see it. If you pull too far ahead, you’ll have to wait until the person behind you honks for you to know that it turned green.

5. Orange arrows for right turns

Imagine coming up to an intersection with a red light, but an amber arrow pointing to the right. One would assume that you have a right turn on red that’s about to run out. You would then hurry up and make your right turn assuming that you only had another 5 seconds of right of way. Not in Saint John. Well, not in some parts of Saint John. Sometimes it means that you can make a right turn on a red light, but only after making a full stop and making sure that it is safe to proceed. So why bother with the arrow at all? Isn’t that just like a normal red light?

6. Simms Corner

World famous. The city keeps promising to fix it, but never gets around to it.  To people who aren’t familiar with it, good luck. Too bad it’s so close to a major tourist attraction and that many tourists are forced to use it to visit the falls.

7. Rothesay Ave / Hwy 1

At some point in the 1970s, traffic engineers decided that a maze of rams and one-way streets would be better than building a proper intersection.

8. Airport Road

Instead of building ramps on all points of two intersections that are 1.5 km apart, they chose to build a connector road that runs parallel to the highway. This might work in the city, but out in the country, the locals just do u-turns in the middle of the highway.

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http://www.regisbiginnewbrunswick.com/

That’s what you get when your tourism marketing goes to the lowest bidder. On the plus side, this will probably end up on those “worst viral video attempts ever” lists that keep popping up. There’s no such thing as bad publicity, right?

I will not be downloading the ringtone.

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I am continually seeing people protesting the NB government’s decision to add a lane to the highway leading to Saint John’s suburbs. Many people, including the Mayor, think that cancelling the project will solve all of Saint John’s problems by having the people living in the suburbs move back into the city.

People move to the suburbs for many reasons, not because there is a 6-lane highway for 7km. They have been doing it in Saint John for over 40 years, well before they widened the Mackay to 4 lanes from 2.

Will cancelling the expansion make the water more drinkable? One could argue that the money could be used for it, but one would have to assume that the city would spend it properly. Can you really trust them to do that considering they spent $23.5 million on a transit garage? (overspending by about $13M by my calculations)

Will cancelling the expansion make the city smell better? The raw sewage will eventually stop going into the harbour, but unless they can make the benzene smell like flowers, the suburbs will still smell better.

Will cancelling the expansion make the fog go away?

Will cancelling the expansion make housing more affordable and of higher quality?

Will cancelling the expansion get a police station built in a proper location? This is a textbook example of the pot calling the kettle black. They go and criticize the provincial government for their highway project, yet they try to build a 2 story police station on a prime piece of land that’s already zoned for a 22 story building.

Saint John has a long history of poor planning decisions: the hospital and university are out in the middle of the woods, the malls are built in a flood zone, there are 4-lane roads in the middle of nowhere, they don’t know where the boundaries of their largest park actually are, etc, etc.  Instead of simply bashing suburbanites, they need to take a long hard look at their own problems and at least make it look like they are trying to fix them.

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