• Ward 2: Grandy
• Ward 4: Megarity
• Ward 5: Savoie
• Ward 6: LeTourneau
• Ward 7: Burhoe
• Ward 8: Ericson
• Ward 10: Levac
• Ward 11: Rogers
• Ward 12: Kelly
• Health Board: Mullin
• Mayor: Woodside

For the councillors, I evaluated their responses to the Chamber of Commerce survey and their online presences. In many cases, their responses were so close that there was no real clear winner. If it was a tie, I selected who had the best online presence.

For the health board, I had to choose Doug Mullin as he seems to be the only serious candidate. Some of the candidates didn’t even come up on Google. Some of them are chiropractors.

For mayor, it wasn’t an easy choice. Hayes has all the answers, but where the mayor doesn’t really set any of the policy, I had to go with Woodside for his political experience. Hayes would make an excellent mayor, but he would be much better if he had some time on council. Still, he raised some important issues and I hope those issues continue to get raised between now, and the next election.

Don’t know where to go vote? Locations are here: http://www1.gnb.ca/elections/municipal/allmunpollstationslist-e.asp

This is the Adams St. Traffic Circle. It’s not a roundabout, it’s a failabout. It was put in to address the concerns of a few loud complainers. It’s too bad it doesn’t actually work and may even make things worse. Although it’s hard to tell from the picture, it’s not quite in the centre. This is presumbly so the snowplough can make it past. This also means that when going in one direction, cars don’t actually have to slow down. In the other direction, cars have to slow to a near stop in order to make it through. Many (including transit buses) just go around it the wrong way. In fact, many speeders just go through it the wrong way anyway.

How do we prevent that?

First of all, you can promise to restore the police force’s traffic unit. They used to have three cars that just handed out tickets and responded to problem areas. Now, the cops just rotate the traffic jobs. You can also promise to listen to them when they do complain about speeding traffic.

Next, you will need to use science to prove that there is a speeding problem. Traffic counters also record speed so if the average speed is higher than the speed limit, then it has been proven that there is a real problem. The next step is for city staff to come up with a design of the calming measure (such as speed bumps). The citizens will then have to go to every house on the street and ask them if they want a speed bump in front of their house. If they can get enough people to agree, speed bumps will be put in.

This is exactly how it was done on McGibbon St. Science proved that there was a problem, the residents acted on it and got high-speed speed bumps installed. These allow cars to go over them at 40km/h, and don’t impact emergency vehicle response times as much as the low-speed ones.

Another idea is to install bike lanes. These will make the road look narrower and slow down the traffic.

If you do hear a lot of complaints about speeding traffic, remember that knee-jerk reactions don’t always work.

1. Know your demographic: old people

They have the highest turnout rate of any municipal election. They don’t know how to use a computer and the only way you’ll reach them is by knocking on their door. Make sure you promise enough things that they will like. This is probably where most of your votes will come from.

2. Know your demographic: Young people

The next highest turnout rate is young people. They are the ones using social media. You’ll need to reach out to them. And by reach out, I don’t mean just getting on social media, you’ll need to find people and encourage them to share your message. Easier said than done.

The other great challenge you’ll have with them is that they are disillusioned with politics. You are going to need to convince them that you will actually change things for the better.

3. Don’t be vague.

I’ve been looking at a number of campaign web sites. I don’t see a lot of details. I see things like “I believe in a strong downtown” and “I believe in transparency”. What exactly are you going to do to “strengthen” downtown? Change the zoning to allow taller buildings? Tax breaks for high density residential buildings? Diagonal parking? Elections for other levels of government usually have very specific promises. Municipal elections should be the same.

4. Fredericton is behind the times. Use that to your advantage.

Big city trends usually take a few years before they trickle down to places like Fredericton. For us, this is not a bad thing. This gives us the ability to look into the future. This is especially important when it comes to things like housing trends. Larger cities are seeing younger people want to move to higher density neighbourhoods where they will be able to walk to many of the places they want to go. Make sure your voters are aware of this and how it will benefit them (hint: lower taxes)

5. You won’t be able to stop sprawl.

The previous paragraph mentioned a trend to move to the cities. This will not stop sprawl. It will slow it down, but you can’t stop it. If you do manage to get elected, any attempts at stopping sprawl will just push it out of city limits. This will mean that you double-failed as you will decrease city revenues while increasing air pollution. Nobody wants that.

Oh, and if you make it seem like car-owning suburban single-family home dwellers are the enemy, you won’t get elected. Remember Toronto? Please don’t make that mistake (not that I’m saying that any of the current candidates are anywhere close to Rob Ford).

A quick check of the city’s website should provide an answer, right?

Well, not quite.

Let’s go and have a look at the city’s homepage:

You don’t see anything about city services on the holiday at all, except for a notice about the garbage being picked up on the holidays. So if the garbage collectors don’t get it off, what about the parking enforcement people? Let’s go check the parking section of their web page:

Information about all kinds of things relating to parking, but nothing about what days are free. Now, let’s use the search box on the top right corner of the page:

What will that bring us?

Oh, how about this?

Hmm, not promising. Maybe this search doesn’t work like Google:

And we get:

That isn’t the most helpful search results page. Instead of the page title, they show the file names. That probably wasn’t intentional, but maybe next time they should go with the second lowest bidder. Still, at least this way we’re warned in advance before we click on a PDF file.

As you can kind of tell, the top results are a series of press releases relating to hours around Christmas. The others are irrelevant. Let’s just try one more search before we give up:

Which gets us:

Some more results. Clicking on each one and reading it fully gives us our answer. Yes, it’s the one that I circled in red. I only found that after clicking through all the other ones. Let’s click on it and see what it says:

There you have it. That’s how “easy” it is to find out information about parking in downtown Fredericton.

Sorry about all the pictures, I hope you weren’t reading this on your phone on a pay-as-you-go data plan.

During the raid, they took his computer, monitor, speakers and cable modem. None of these were actually required as evidence, not even the computer.

Charles’ blog is hosted on blogspot.com, a Google service. His computer has nothing to do with serving web pages. During a normal investigation, the police would subpoena Google to get the IP address of the poster, then subpoena the Internet Service Provider (ISP) to get the owner of the IP address’s account. That is all that is needed as proof. Even with the PC, there is no way they can get any more proof that it was actually Charles sitting in that chair typing those words. In fact, assuming he used the online post editor, there would likely be no trace at all on his computer. Even if they needed to access the computer, there are forensic tools available that will make an image of the hard drive on-site, without the need for a complete seizure.

This is clear evidence that our court system does not understand technology at all. This will be abused. We now know that someone can have IT equipment removed at the mere accusation of libel. How often will we see this being used as an intimidation tactic?

All of the screenshots below were copied from the Android Market page as Android phones don’t have the ability to take screenshots (unless they are rooted).

The opening screen implies that this app won’t just be for bus tracking. Hopefully we’ll see some more services on there soon.

Here we have the main menu. The bus tracker is the important part of the app, the route planner just takes you to your phone’s built-in Google Maps Transit navigation service, the schedule just goes to the city’s web site.

Here, we can choose which route to track. For a really good test, you can click “all routes”

And here’s the main screen. The first issue that jumps out is that we see the fleet numbers in the bus icons. This is because they are getting their data from the dispatch system. The fleet numbers are very useful for dispatchers, but not that good for the general public. If you click on one of the icons (like you see above), you’ll see the route numbers listed. Trouble is, as in the example above, you see two route numbers and no direction (N or S). If you’re waiting for a specific bus, you won’t actually know which one is yours until it is close enough for you to see the destination sign.

Great start, but needs some work.

Future plans?

At this time, nothing has been divulged. One hopes that they are able to fix some of the issues above before they go out of beta. For that to happen, they would have to have access to the dispatch schedules to determine which actual run the bus is doing. From there, they could determine how long you have to wait for the next bus at any particular location. That would allow for a phone (text or IVR) interface as well as other innovations such as display signs.

It would also be nice if they indicated the accessibility level of the bus. They could display an icon for a low-floor bus.

Once that is complete, the next step would be to open the data so it could be used by anyone. Don’t want to support an obsolete phone platform? No problem, let someone else do it instead. Want to let a business make their own transit info sign? No problem!

It’s a great start, hopefully the momentum continues and allows the app to get better.

Update: iOS version now on iTunes

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/story/2011/12/07/nb-macknight-volunteer-speeding-616.html

A few things that may be at play here:

People are always complaining that speeding is an issue in their neighbourhood. The police are probably tired of hearing all the complaining so they came up with this proposal.

There is a perception that the police just don’t do enough enforcement of traffic laws. You perceive this every time you are stopped behind someone in a merge lane, or stuck at a blocked intersection. Sometimes you’ll see a cop car just sit there while this happens. Don’t forget all the media attention that the bicycles on the sidewalk got.

The city doesn’t receive a penny from the speeding fines. There is no incentive for them to write more tickets. This causes it to be considered a cost, instead of being revenue-neutral.

So where do you see speeders pulled over? Knowledge Park Drive, because it’s really easy. The speed limit is 50, yet the road just goes through the middle of the woods with no houses or businesses on either side. All of the officers can fill their ticket quotas on the first of the month on that street.

Maybe there’s more to this story than what we are hearing. Perhaps this is a hidden request by the police to have their budget increased? Isn’t the budget coming up for vote next week? Hmmmm. In any case, the Fredericton Police Force has an image problem, this will just make it worse. Stop coming up with questionable plans and start writing tickets.

Trouble is, there are a lot of places where it isn’t safe. Let’s have a look at our example intersection below, it looks like many in the city, particularly Exit 5 and Wilsey Rd (where I have witnessed this happen many times).

Driver A sees that there’s a long line of cars behind B who are waiting to turn left. He feels sorry for them waiting and decides to wave driver B out. Driver B can’t see driver C because of the long line of cars behind A, so he pulls out.

Both drivers B and C will need a clean pair of pants, or worse.

Yes, it’s nice to let people out, but please, don’t do it on roads that have more than a single lane.

1. It wasn’t cheap. Costs weren’t made public, but I can’t imagine it would have been cheap to equip every bus with it. As Fredericton Transit doesn’t seem to care that much about passenger amenities/comfort, they just decided not to spend the money.

2. It didn’t really work that well. During the test period, they had a live webcam attached to one of the buses. As that was using the same connection as the wifi, the connection could be tested without having to go on that specific bus. If you watched it for any period of time, you’d see that the camera image wouldn’t update if the bus was travelling more than 60km/h. It also had reception issues on some areas on the north side, including Marysville. They may have been able to fix them, but that could have been expensive.

Sadly, that also means that there won’t be any real-time GPS-based updates. That system came with the wi-fi. For the time being, you’ll have to call the transit info line for real-time updates. (Of course, that line is closed for most of the morning and evening rush).

• It does a better job of detecting motorcycles
• It can see cars coming from 100ft away and trigger the light change earlier
• If the light’s about to change, it can hold the green for you if you’re less than 100ft away
• It tracks the direction of traffic so someone turning left too tightly won’t trigger the lights for the cross-traffic
• It works in all kinds of weather
• It sits on the pole so the road won’t have to be dug up when it breaks

$15,000 sounds like a lot, but compared to digging up the road to install an underground metal-detector loop, it’s a bargain.