6. West end of Knowledge Park Drive

This is a big mess. At the end of it, where it intersects with Arnold Dr and Regent St, the traffic lights don’t have advance left turn signals, yet most of the traffic is turning traffic. The lane markings weren’t thought out very well, there are stripes where a left turn lane should be and there isn’t enough warning when the right hand lane turns into a right turn only lane. (thanks Orser!)

5. No median on Route 8 between PMB and Hanwell Rd.

Part of the point of having a divided highway is so that you don’t have the risk of oncoming traffic ending up in your lane. With nothing but a narrow grass strip, there isn’t anything to stop a drifting vehicle.

Will this stop a car?

4. Removal of “scramble” intersections.

Back in the day, downtown Fredericton was the friendliest of places to stroll about. City planners loved pedestrians, and it showed. Being able to cross an intersection diagonally was thought of as being one of the most progressive things the city ever did. Sadly, the city’s love of the downtown has long come to an end. The removal of the scramble intersections, along with the desire to collect more revenue from parking makes the downtown a different place than it used to be. We are lucky that there is still a single scramble intersection left on Prospect St., in front of F.H.S.  Hopefully it will get heritage protection status.

3. Fast lane off-ramp on TCH west of Fredericton.

Now it’s MRDC’s turn to get on the list. Why do I have to turn off in the fast lane? So MRDC can make more profit by not building an overpass.

2. Fast lane on-ramp to TCH east of Fredericton.

Cheapness comes in pairs.

1. Oromocto’s TCH ramps.

Boy, did they ever get screwed on this one. They had two full intersections, but when MRDC came in, they tore up two perfectly good ramps to give them one and a half intersections. They also didn’t finish the intersection to Hwy 7 which makes it annoying if you are coming from Gagetown and want to go to Saint john.

This was handy for a lot of people

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Watched council again. There was another sudden surprise in that the gas station wasn’t part of the property that was being rezoned (it will be on another part of the property). This time it was the councilors that were unprepared as they had spent all that time researching and reading reports on gasoline leak prevention. So what was the vote all about?

A parking lot. They want to move a man-made wetland in order to make a parking lot. All of the decisions about the Costco and gas bar had already been made years ago. This time, it was the councilors who had the off-topic speeches.

This heated debate has been going on for well over a month. A lot of time was spent by groups on both sides preparing speeches, organizing opposition and supporters. This was all for nothing as nobody knew what the actual debate was about until the very last minute.

This was caused by one of two things:

1. Bad organization. The City is notorious for doing everything behind closed doors. It really concerns me that they can be this disorganized. Is this is a result of nepotism and cronyism? Do they have people that can actually do their job at City Hall? If new information came in at the last minute, wouldn’t it have been best to postpone the vote so people could be more prepared?
2. Intentional misdirection. They may have intentionally misdirected the opposition to wear them down. I sincerely hope this is not the case as it is not an honest way to debate things. Yes, some of the opposition has been misleading people, but the debate has raised some serious issues about the need for better urban planning.

I’ll be firing off an e-mail to the mayor about this. I’ll post the letter and any responses I get from him (if any).

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Saw a press release for Fredericton’s new doctor recruitment web site that’s available at: http://www.gofredericton.ca/

I then imagined myself as a doctor looking to set up shop somewhere. I’m first greeted with a fairly blank page that has the YFC flight status and the weather. I’m happy to see an efficient airport with on-time flights so all the donated organs will arrive nice and fresh.

I read around the site a bit and see that it has all the artsy and cultury stuff that I need to entertain my highly educated brain. Looks like I’ll fit right in. I want to see what my peers have to say so I click on the link titled “what our doctors say” and get this:

Maybe someone should make sure they finish the web site before making the press release for it. Come on, we can do better than this.

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If the driver starts the bus moving before you’ve had a chance to sit down, be careful of what you grab onto, it just might not be connected:

(photo taken 2009-04-08 on fleet #8992)

I also saw one of those “Ambulance rides are now FREE” ads yesterday (2009-04-08 on fleet #8851).  This comes after the NB Government decided to reintroduce the ambulance fees. This is just another example of an out-of-date ad.

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Colin Mochrie recently wrote an article about how there aren’t any Canadian content regulations for the Internet:

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/Technology/Canadian+content+getting+lost+online/1296977/story.html

He’s an old media personality and it’s clear from the article that he doesn’t really understand how the Internet works. His biggest mistake is that he is using the “old media” model for production. The CRTC’s rules for old media were intended to reduce barriers for entry into the TV industry (production costs, distribution). For Internet productions, those barriers are virtually non-existent. You can make movies with a $500 video camera, some free editing software and you don’t even have to pay actors (like Colin Mochrie). One of Canada’s funniest Internet comedians is Jon LaJoie. His videos are very low budget, yet he’s one of the most popular producers on YouTube.

He is right about there being lots of Canadian content out there on the Internet, all mixed in with the rest.  Sometimes there are only subtle clues that let us know that it’s Canadian. For example, this picture below (which has been featured on many “funny pictures” sites) should count as Canadian content:

Did you see it? The newspaper on the toilet is the “Times Globe”, a defunct newspaper from Saint John, NB.

Now, look at this entry from failblog:

Did you notice the web site on that ad? It’s from Halifax, NS.

Here’s another one that’s been floating around for several years:

As you’ll see, it’s a clipping from the National Post.

We’ll never know how many pictures of funny cats, badly parked cars, or people falling of skateboards are from Canada. Should we really care? They don’t really define or promote our culture.

There is plenty of Canadian content on the web, it’s just not easy to identify and most of it doesn’t get government grants.  If he wants a “showcase” of Canadian content, he should go find it and start a web site that showcases it. In today’s world, if you want change, you get off your butt and start a web site.

The technical requirements for any kind of ISP filtering would be a nightmare to implement. How do you identify Canadian content when it’s mixed in with everything else? Sure, the ISPs could partner with YouTube and other sites to explicitly identify Canadian content, but for every YouTube, there are hundreds of other sites who will have no interest in segregating content.

What about porn? A lot of Internet traffic is for porn, would the proposed ISP levy support the porn industry?

I suspect his position is just to shill for ACTRA so actors get paid more when their TV shows are streamed from broadcaster’s web sites. He also wants to start a fund for “new media” ventures, presumably so that ACTRA actors will get paid. This is just the classic protectionist attitude that the CRTC has heralded for years.  Hopefully common sense will prevail.

More coverage at: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3680/125/

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What have we become? Why is it so hard for people to accept the fact that when they park in a spot that doesn’t belong to them that they will get clamped? It saddens me to think that there is a significant amount of the population that believes the rules don’t apply to them.  It concerns me that the Fredericton Police Force thinks a charge is warranted in this case.  It’s bad enough that they don’t enforce existing traffic laws (a topic I’ve covered a few times before), but when they act two-faced about private matters, it makes them appear bad. On one side, they are telling property owners that the police will not handle private matters, yet on the other side, they aren’t letting property owners deal with the problem themselves.

So after reading a couple of articles on the matter, I decided to see for myself. The complainant parked in the lot in front of the old liquor store on King St.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/new-brunswick/story/2009/02/09/nb-parking-boot.html?ref=rss

http://dailygleaner.canadaeast.com/cityregion/article/565888

So here’s a picture of the lot in question.  I had to highlight the sign in red as it isn’t all that obvious where it is.

The sign is pretty small and if that van was parked directly in front of it, you wouldn’t see it if you were sitting in the driver’s seat of a low car.  Most lots have bigger signs, but something tells me it is more profitable for the clamping company if they have smaller signs. I think this debate will be interesting, I bet that 99% of the population will side for the clamping company. Of course Mrs. Kelly (whose husband reads this blog BTW) should have known the golden rule of downtowns: there’s no such thing as free parking.

This may be going before the courts, but I think the real solution would be for Mrs. Kelly to eat the $75 fee and have her husband work on a by-law to regulate the clampers. They just need to make sure that the signs are the right size and in the right location. This would be a reasonable compromise that will keep the people that pay for parking happy and make sure that poachers know what they will be facing before they park.

Don’t forget that you could just get Yosemite Sam to guard your lot (from here)

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While having a conversation (about less than prime eating establishments) with my coworkers, I tried to look up locations of Captain Submarine, but came across this:

Click to make bigger.

Go try it out for yourself (using Firefox).  I’m not going to link to the site directly, but you should see it in the image above.

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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?

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Someone decides to spend $50,000 on a report to see what’s wrong with the transit system.  Many people are questioning the value of that report.

Along with stating the obvious, they did seem to miss a few things.

• The biggest thing that they missed was any mention of Saint John’s very successful transit system. It has a much higher ridership and it even serves the outlying communities. Moncton, on the other hand has a terrible transit service with even worse ridership than Fredericton’s, yet it got included. I guess they don’t want to be embarrassed by our neighbours to the south.
• Ridership will be low when you don’t advertise. The majority of the $3,000 marketing budget goes to printing the schedules. Saint John has always spent a lot on advertising, they even have a jingle (which you can listen to on their web site).
• They also seem to forget that the transit service does have competition: Taxis and carpools. When making decisions regarding the transit service they need to take these into account. For instance, taxis are air conditioned, buses are not (unless they start buying buses with air conditioning). Taxis don’t make you cross the river twice while you go to 2 points on the North side.

There seems to be a general attitude problem. They believe that public transit is only for the downtrodden. In fact, it seems that nobody at the transit system cares about their job (some of the drivers are an exception to this). Let’s look at some examples:

• The destination signs are inconsistent. Some show what direction the bus is going in, others don’t. 11S still says “K-Mart Plaza” even though the K-Mart has been long gone for over 10 years.
• This destination sign below is broken. I actually took this picture over a year ago (I’ve been meaning to blog about it since then, but never got around to it). The sign still hasn’t been fixed. Really, how much does a new sign cost?
• 
• One of the buses has the destination sign on the side that is stuck on “Special”.
• Many buses don’t have signs on the side at all.
• Here we see an example of seat repair, stuffing garbage bags to fill the space where the foam should be. They didn’t even bother to use duct tape:
• 
• Here, we see 2 different fonts. It’s obvious that they repaired the door at some point. Nobody bothered to tell the painter which font to use.
• 

Their biggest failure is their inability to listen to what people actually want. Recently, transit users have been asking for the 3 following things:

• Service to Two Nations Crossing
• Sunday service (and better hours during the week)
• A bus that stays on the North side of the river.

Those would be the most obvious things to implement, yet only 1 of the 3 was ever under consideration. The report claims that the survey of existing transit users showed low interest in the Sunday service or the North side run. It looks like they didn’t factor in the fact that the people who want these things aren’t able to take the bus, therefore they did not participate in the survey. Please, can we order some common sense with the next report?

So here’s 2 easy ways on how to fix the transit system:

1. Listen to what people are asking for
2. Copy Saint John Transit as much as possible.

Update: Here’s an update to some of what was posted here.

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So today there’s a big storm. How are city services affected? A quick check of the City of Fredericton’s website shows: NOTHING. That’s right, the so called “smart city” isn’t smart enough to do a simple web site update when there’s a storm. At a minimum people need to know:

• Is transit running?
• Are any roads closed?
• Are city run sports facilities open?

The only option that’s available online is the radio station’s web site which is out of date and updated sporadically. Of course you can always just listen to the radio, but then you have to sit there listening to 3 craptastic remakes of classic Christmas tunes before you get a live DJ who will tell you that you have to wait until the next news broadcast for the latest list of cancellations.

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