1. The Coggswell Interchange

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At some point in the 1960s, Halifax decided that it wanted an expressway running through their downtown (like Toronto’s Gardiner). Once the weed wore off, they cancelled the plan, neglecting the fact that they already started building it. Did they tear down the partially completed section? Nope, they just left it there and rearranged some of the lanes so it would kind of work with what’s already there. To this day, it carries little traffic, confuses tourists and costs a lot to maintain.

2. 101/102/7 interchange

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This one fails on several levels. Despite connecting two major highways 101/102, the clover-leaf style ramps have very tight turns that require you to slow down to 30 km/h in order to navigate them. You then have very little ramp space to get up to speed to merge onto the other highway.

If you’re on highway 33, this intersection connects with the 101, but not the 102. This is probably an intentional design to make it inconvenient for people from the north end of Dartmouth to avoid going over one of the bridges and paying the toll.

3. Yield signs for everything

Rather than having a separate sign to yield, merge, or continue in your own lane, they use yield signs for all three. If you’re unfamiliar with the area, you have to guess what you’re actually supposed to do.  If you’re wrong, you’ll either get rear-ended or drive into the side of another car.

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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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Since September 2009, I’ve been saving all of those ten-percenters that have arrived at my mailbox. Over 6 months, I’ve received 16 of them, that’s about 1 every two weeks.

Who has been sending them?

10 Keith Ashfield, Cons, Fredericton

1 Brian Storseth, Cons, Westlock – St. Paul (Alberta)

1 Alexandra Mendes, Lib, Brossard—La Prairie (Quebec)

1 Joseph Volpe, Lib, Eglinton-Lawrence (Ontario)

1 Keith Martin, Lib, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca (BC)

1 Gurbax Malhi, Lib, Bramalea—Gore—Malton (Ontario)

1 Andrew Kania, Lib, Brampton West (Ontario)

That gives us 11 Conservative flyers and 5 from the Liberals. Many of the Liberal sheets also had a picture of Lester Pearson on it.

As for the content the Conservatives have:

6 Promoting the “Economic Action Plan”

3 Attacks against Michael Ignatieff

2 Reminding us how tough Harper is on crime

The Liberals gave us:

3 Attacks against Harper’s right-wing politics

1 Attack on the ”Economic Action Plan”

1 Promotion of Michael Ignatieff

The best part is that your tax dollars paid for them.  Tax dollars for partisan advertising that often ends up offending people. Money well spent.

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To be fair, it isn’t really an engineering issue; it’s a simple case of plans that look good on paper, but may not work out so well once implemented.

The plan is to turn a single oversized lot and split it up into seven. That, in its self isn’t a bad thing; the problem is where the driveways will go.

You’ll have two going onto the Lincoln Rd. and five going onto Adams.

The worst will be the two driveways on the Lincoln Rd. Due to the small size of the lots, drivers would have to either back into, or out of those driveways. If you’ve ever been on the Lincoln Rd, you’ll know that backing out onto it isn’t the smartest of ideas.  A quick survey using Google Maps found that out of 69 driveways on that stretch of Lincoln Rd (from the Experimental Farm to the Vanier Industrial Dr intersection), 63 had an area on the property for cars to turn around. Only 6, or less than 9% did not have a turn-around. 63 out of 69 (91%) is a higher ratio than most dentists give to a brand of toothpaste. Canada Post also recently removed the roadside mailboxes with a community box as they considered stopping along the Lincoln Rd to be too dangerous.

Adams St has a history of problems, at the other end of it, there is a park with insufficient parking, which means it gets plugged up with cars parked on the side of the road. Many of these are minivans and SUVs that are parked a few feet away from the curb (I hate to use stereotypes, but this one is actually true). There’s also a badly built traffic-calming circle in the middle that only slows traffic going away from the Lincoln Rd. The intersection at the Lincoln Rd end has a steep hill, blind curve and a tall hedge that blocks your view. There’s also a blind hill and a blind curve that you have to deal with while pulling out into the Lincoln Rd.  Adding five driveways would just complicate this.  If one of those five houses decides to throw a party, there won’t be enough driveway space to accommodate all the guests.  This means they’ll have to park on the street, which if they park on both sides will plug it up just like at the other end. Since there’s a hedge blocking your view as you pull in from the Lincoln Rd, you’ll get quite a surprise to find only enough room for a single lane and a bus coming the other way.

View Larger Map- You can’t see what’s behind that hedge

Hopefully the developers will change their plans and allow for shared driveways or a space to turn around. They may have to reduce the number of lots, but they’ll be able to sell the ones on the Lincoln Rd for more as not having to back out of the driveway will make them more desirable.

The real solution is to block off Adams St. and build another exit by expropriating some of the experimental farm and making Lonewater go down to Lincoln.  There, you won’t have the blind hill, curve or hedge. This plan probably wouldn’t be popular with the people who live on Lonewater though.

View Adams Fix in a larger map

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UPDATE: Mar 8 2010 -
According to this article, the zoning request was denied and a failure was prevented. It is assumed that the developer will try again with a different (and presumably better) site plan.

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The debate about NBPower is a fast-moving one. In today’s age, information travels quickly. I’ll review how well each of the parties did.

The CBC – A+ Again, the CBC does a bang-up job. Not only have they been on top of the deal, they’re also using social media in the two way format that it was designed for. It’s good to see a local news source well ahead of the curve.

Twitter user @JoeFitzIII – A+ From what I can tell, Joe FitzPatrick is a Fredericton based lawyer. It almost looks like he is planning to enter politics. Of all the knowledgeable people in the group, he is the only one that is actually responding and interacting to concerns and questions (excluding the CBC). If he is going into politics, he’s on the right track.

The Liberals – F – They use Twitter and Facebook, but they fail at actually using it to engage. Many people have posted valid questions on Twitter, but have received nothing but silence from the Liberals. In fact, rahter than use the established hashtag of #nbpower4sale, they went ahead and started using #lowerrates. That actually leads to less discussion.

The Conservatives – F – They seem to be very disorganized.  Shortly after the deal was announced, they made some noise on Twitter, but it was closer to the quips yelled on the Legislature floor rather than anything of any actual substance. They had a great opportunity to engage and come up with a strong opposition front to the deal, but they missed the boat. They didn’t even respond or attempt to defend this disastrous video of their leader refusing to answer a question.

“NO to Sale of NB Power” Facebook group – B – Doing a great job, but they seem to be having some problems separating the loons from the valid concerns. Despite that, they’re actually having productive discussions and getting things organized to protest the sale.

For A Better Tomorrow, Sell NB Power – F – Another example of failing to engage. The Facebook group has been renamed several times, gone to invite-only and then gone back to being public. This makes it hard for anyone to join. Their loon-control policy is to delete everything that opposes the deal. This also removed a lot of legitimate debate. Most of the activity has been from the admins. Many of the legitimate complaints aren’t actually getting addressed, they are just being ignored.

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I’m not going to go into much detail as that’s already been covered before. There are a few points that I feel are important and are getting drowned out in the noise:

• There really isn’t much to gain in the long term. The value of the assets is about the same as the amount of the debt. Sure it erases the debt, but you lose assets that have potential to generate revenue.
• The 5 year rate freeze won’t be free. The loss of revenue for the frozen rates will have to be made up somehow. Presumably it will be made up from the revenues generated from exporting power to the US over NB’s transmission lines.
• Outside of the rate freeze, there appears to be little long-term benefit to NB. NB Power’s debt does not affect the borrowing capabilities or the interest rate for any other debt.
• In the long term, there will be no choice but to close down the thermal plants. Building replacement power plants will be expensive and difficult as they will have to be non-carbon plants (like nuclear). The easiest option is to purchase power from Quebec. In fact, they are currently supplying the power to replace the power that would have been generated by Pt. Lepreau.

NB Power’s reputation has been tainted recently due to some high-profile blunders. Rather than solving the real problem of incompetent executives that got their jobs through patronage appointments, Shawn Graham has opted to walk away from it.

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Many organizations and people are using the Internet. Some are better than others, here are some quick reviews:

Fredericton Mayor Brad Woodside – A+

He’s doing a great job with Twitter and he engaged the citizens with his Facebook group about the Costco (although may not have given him the desired result).

City of Fredericton – D

They have a website, but there’s barely anything on it.

CBC – A+

The CBC have fully embraced Twitter and are using it to post little tidbits of news that aren’t quite worthy of a story. They are also the fastest at getting stories online as they don’t have to wait until it has aired.

The Playhouse – B

They are using new technologies well, but they are missing one key thing. There is little to let you know what shows will have tickets for sale soon. You only get notified of new events after the tickets have been on sale and all the good seats have been taken.

CTV Atlantic – C+

They don’t post stories online, but they do make excellent use of the Facebook group. They regularly read comments from their group on the air.

The Daily Gleaner – B

The good: they post every story to their website. The bad: they wait until the paper has been printed until they post their story.

Astral Radio Stations – C

I’m referring to CapitalFM, The Fox and KHJ here. They post their news on the website, but it’s quite often only posted several hours after it airs. They don’t retain older newscasts, but they do take song requests over Twitter.

RogersTV – F

Local Matters, but only if you have cable.

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On July 6th 2009, CTV Atlantic used this as their “viewer photo of the day” for the weather report:

Yes, that’s exactly what you think it is, a bunch of kids dancing around a dead whale that washed up onto the beach.

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The building at 355 Queen St. in Fredericton recently got a substantial facelift. It’s a wooden-framed building whose before picture shows a worn-out pressed tin facade.

In the after shot, you’ll see they replaced the tin with stucco. As you can see, they didn’t try to make it a “fake heritage” building, instead, they opted for a clean and uncluttered look. I find that it works really well.

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The last time I suggested a building get torn down, it actually got torn down. Encouraged by my previous 100% success rate, I’m continuing to make some more suggestions.

On a more serious note, urban sprawl is an issue, but it doesn’t need to be as we have plenty of space downtown, we just aren’t using it very well.

Originally built as a grocery store, this eyesore has been vacant for years:

Not much you can do with a single story grocery store, but it does have a large footprint. Compare it to Frederick Square (in blue):

You could build a really nice building here (as long as you don’t mind the occasionally flooded basement). This would be a perfect spot for the rumoured courthouse.

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