What I’ve learned about traffic politics

I’ve been a bit of a transportation and planning nerd ever since I discovered the game SimCity. Which is a bit odd, as my work has nothing to do with transportation and planning. I’m not even educated in this field. I just enjoy reading about it, simulating it, discussing it, etc. I usually attend every open house the city organizes to do with streets and I do not waste any time getting involved in discussions, as well as analyzing and critiquing the plans they put on display.

A member of my community association recognized this interest and as a result, invited me to join a newly formed traffic safety committee for our neighbourhood. Needless to say, I agreed to join. One of the reasons I was so eager to participate, but definitely not the main reason, was that I have witnessed a problem first hand. In this case it was the dangers of a rather odd intersection in front of our house that the city deployed a solution for, which didn’t solve (in my unprofessional opinion) the root cause of the danger and in fact, possibly coincidentally, caused an impaired driver to lose control and crash into my next door neighbour’s front yard.

It took awhile for the committee to find its rhythm, but we had to sift through the many observations brought forth both by the residents at large and the committee members themselves. As you can imagine, not everyone on the committee agreed which problems were actual problems and which actual problems were solvable, and the ones that were, it was a challenge to rank them in order of priority.

This work was made a lot more difficult due to the following factors:

• Some residents perceive traffic problems where evidence contradicts their perceptions. For example, some people think vehicles drive at excessive speed on their street, but the measurements suggest the speeds are legal.
• Both residents and committee members expected that problems would be identified and solved in months. But the reality, as we learned, is that it takes years to go through this process. That created a lot of disillusionment.
• A lot of people who have identified issues come to the table with their own solutions, rather than just reporting the facts or even stopping their analysis at the root cause.
• A culture seems to have developed that groups residents into 3 camps. Those who think vehicles should get priority over bikes and pedestrians in both infrastructure and rules; the opposite - those who think bikes and pedestrians should get priority over motor vehicles; and those with a balanced approach to both.
• City traffic staff move very slowly (a common problem when dealing with government departments).
• City traffic staff don’t insist on a lot of engagement in the right situations. For example, while the problematic intersection solution mentioned earlier proceeded without the involvement of a lot of affected parties, a study on the future of a major roadway interchange took many months, had at least 6 open houses and workshops, only for participants to learn at the process’s end that the collaborative plan was 30 years from being realized.
• Budget cuts have eliminated funds that could have been used to try and solve some of the problems we’ve identified.
• Residents and committee members sense a bit of hypocrisy when they see the very solutions they want used in our community having been already rolled out in other communities. For example, there are plenty of communities with speed bumps and humps to help reduce speeds on certain streets, but traffic staff seem unwilling to consider them to solve some of our own issues.
• There does exist some publicly available processes to request improvements to traffic safety, but they suffer from a “been there, done that” issue. In the case of the web site where residents can request pedestrian crossing signals be installed, you can check first to see if the intersection in question has already had a request submitted and its status. A few of the ones we are interested in had already been reviewed and denied. This tends to stop people in their tracks from proceeding further, even though conditions may now merit a change.
• Where speed is a real issue, the process for proving it seems to involve getting law enforcement to be at the right place at the right time to measure incidents and if the numbers don’t meet a certain (unknowable) threshold, it’s not a real problem.
• Residents are told that they should bring their concerns to 311 so that at the very least data is created to represent the numbers of people experiencing the problem. Unfortunately, their 311 experiences vary in resident satisfaction, from being unable to navigate the web site, to phone operators telling them that they should be calling the police instead.

Now that we have identified some candidate issues in our community, one of the things we were recommended as a community, was to request a traffic study. As luck would have it, all traffic studies are on hold until city council finishes their study of a proposed reduction in residential street speed limits, the results of which are at least 6 months out, if not more.

Speaking of which, there is going to be a lot of public discussion about the proposed speed limit reduction options, which include a blanket reduction (of residential streets only) to 30 km/h, a blanket reduction to 40 km/h, a reduction of non-collector roads only to 30 km/h, or status quo. Here is where the 3 camps come into play. The ‘vehicles get priority’ camp consider any reduction at all as an infringement on their rights. The ‘people get priority’ camp would likely choose the 30 km/h speed limit if they couldn’t get away with an almost outright ban on cars altogether. As much as I think a reduced speed would be safer for pedestrians and cyclists (and cars for that matter), the lack of enforcement isn’t going to motivate many people to actually follow any new limit. As has been mentioned by those who know about roads, a wide street is an invitation to speed. Even city bureaucrats warn that changing the speed limit is a half measure if streets physically remain as they are.

Now we get to the politics of the issue. The councillor that proposed the speed limit reduction is a resident and represents an inner city neighbourhood separated for the most part from the downtown core by only a river and a few bridges. The part of this community closest to downtown is very walk-able, and is biased much more to cyclists and pedestrians than to cars. So the support for a reduction among the residents in this community is likely to be high. But Calgary is still a city built for cars. Many of its inhabitants still believe that bike lanes are not only a waste of time, but impinge on their right to drive and have somewhere to park with the least amount of obstacles. So considering that councillors usually want to get elected again, they are more likely to side with the majority of their constituents, who probably oppose a reduction. The only hope of the reduction getting traction is if parents who feel unsafe for their kids on their own streets rise up and take over the conversation.

Time will tell if this comes to pass.