Just a reminder that I’m not claiming to be a traffic engineer, nor am I blaming the employees of the city as they are only doing what they’ve been told. I also can’t draw very well.

The first issue is where it goes from 2-way to 1 way. Unlike Queen St. at Northumberland, there will be no concrete barrier or curb to stop traffic from continuing the wrong way. There will just be signs. We all know that with today’s distracted drivers, we’ll get a few of them heading up the wrong way.

The other big issue relates to the new left-turn lane on Regent St. for traffic heading South. To allow for this, the right-turn lane will be now shared with the only straight-ahead lane. The problem is that the straight-ahead traffic will be blocked by right-turning traffic waiting for pedestrians. This will cause drivers to swerve into the left-turn lane in order to go around the cars waiting to turn right and will probably cause accidents. During the morning rush-hour, there are quite a few pedestrians at that crosswalk. The new parking garage will probably increase the number of them.

Another problem are the double-parked delivery trucks on Queen St. that service the restaurants on that block. Will they block the new lane, or will the drivers have to cross a lane of traffic to deliver their goods?

The biggest problem is that all of this new traffic is purely speculation. They are going ahead and spending $1.2 million without any hard data to support it. I’m not going to be closed minded to making these changes in the future, as long as there is sufficient data to show they are warranted.

When will it open?
Rumored to be May 2011.

Are they hiring?
Not yet, but they will probably start hiring about 2 months before opening.

Where will it be?
Top of Regent St. on the UNB Woodlot.

UNB woodlot? Isn’t that environmentally sensitive wetland?
No. Other parts of the woodlot are, but not the area where the Costco is going.

Can NIMBY groups still block the construction of it?
No, it’s fully approved and the building permits have been issued

What’s the best way to get there?
You should avoid the Regent/Prospect intersection if possible. If you live in the city, you won’t have much choice, but if you come from away, you can easily avoid it.

From Woodstock and further places North-West, don’t turn off at the Fredericton exit (Hwy 8), keep going on TCH#2 towards Moncton, and take exit 285 (Hwy 101). At the end of the ramp, turn left, drive through the woods and Costco will be on your right.
From Oromocto and further places South-East, don’t turn off at the Fredericton exit (Hwy 7), keep going on TCH#2 towards Edmundston and take exit 285B (Hwy 101N). At the end of the ramp, turn right, drive through the woods and Costco will be on your right.

Will it kill other businesses in Fredericton?
Probably not. Downtown businesses won’t be affected as they won’t be directly competing with it. Some stores in the malls may have some difficulty if they can’t compete on price. However, the Costco will bring in more people from farther outside the city who will presumably go to other stores as well.

Roundabouts can be installed at almost any intersection, but they really shine in the following situations:

• intersections where the roads don’t all line up at 90 degree intersections
• intersections with 5 or more roads going into it
• intersections where a lot of the drivers would be making a left turn

Many opponents claim that they are less safe than traditional intersections, but that isn’t actually true.

• The average speed of a roundabout is typically 25 km/h
• You won’t get head-on or t-bone accidents
• Pedestrians are actually safer because they don’t have to worry about turning traffic and they only have to look one way before crossing
• Cyclists have the option of using the crosswalks or entering the circle as regular traffic (but without a bike lane in the circle)

The two biggest hurdles will be:

• 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.
• Education.  The CBC interview had the lead traffic engineer stress the importance of driver education. Unfortunately, I don’t see this happening as the “powers that be” don’t seem to have a problem with a large percentage of the local population not knowing how to merge. It will be up to the other drivers to honk at the ones who are doing it wrong. The Government of PEI did quite well on driver education, including a cute little Flash animation:

Hopefully Fredericton City Council won’t resist change and we’ll get to see some roundabouts fairly soon. Hopefully the first one will go at Waterloo/Beaverbrook/Future UNB Entrance/Forest Hill/Lincoln.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The biggest problem is that most of the calculations were done using simulators only. The report notes: “the simulation model was not calibrated to existing conditions to replicate local driver behaviour” (page 29).  Many of the intersections that were studied actually function much worse because of driver behaviour. Blocking intersections and stopping at merge lanes is probably one of the greatest causes of congestion in Fredericton.  While much of this could be cured with enforcement and education, it still should be factored into the planning process.

To keep this blog post short, I’ll only go over a few specific examples:

Beaverbrook Street/Forest Hill Road/Lincoln Road/Waterloo Row: They ran it through the simulator and decided to ignore it without giving any reason. If you ask any citizen as to which intersection they hate the most, you’ll get this one at the top of the list.  This would be a prime location for a traffic circle, yet that option wasn’t even explored.  The confusing layout wasn’t even examined either.  It also isn’t really a single intersection, it’s five intersections really close together; perhaps that skewed some of the statistics. (Page 29)

At Regent and Prospect, they completely ignored the existing proposal of a College Hill to Vanier Highway overpass.  They also ignored the fact that since you can’t turn left from Regent onto Vanier, you have to do a significant amount of driving around, which causes higher traffic on other streets.  In the end, they will spend $7.5 million just to get some double-left turn lanes, which doesn’t seem to have a lot of value. (page 78)

There is a lack of supporting data for the Queen St. redirection in front of the convention centre.  ”The impact” of that development is mentioned several times in the report, but not shown.  This omission still doesn’t answer the question of whether it is really necessary to spend $1.2 million to widen Queen St. (page 70)

In conclusion, they are planning to spend millions using decisions based on questionable simulator data.  Perhaps it would be a wise investment to spend some more money and do a more thorough analysis before spending millions on road improvements that may not work out.