Living in the Future

Category: Politics

  • Rethinking Roads (Jeanne d’Arc)

    Rethinking Roads (Jeanne d’Arc)

    My Neighbourhood

    I live in a suburb of Ottawa called Orleans, and though the neighborhood is starting to work towards a modern understanding of good urban design, a lot of the transportation infrastructure in the community is based on 99% car traffic. There are affordances for other modes of transport in some places, but in many cases unless it is a brand-new change, these affordances are for leisure (like with most of the park paths), not transportation.

    Top: Current streetscape; Bottom: After the redesign.

    I have many qualms with the loopy, inefficient neighbourhood street layouts, and missing sidewalks, but I’ll save discussion of those for another time. Today, I want to talk about the main road granting access to my neighborhood, Jeanne d’Arc Boulevard.

    Jeanne d’Arc is about the least imaginative way I could imagine designing a road in the 80s, where I could imagine having trees and some green space alongside the road would be viewed as a vast improvement over the downtown core where trees would be few and far between, and grass would be a luxury.

    The Current Design

    Below, I’ve mocked up the average layout of the 32+ metre boulevard streetscape with a very cool tool called Streetmix. You can see the road has 4 lanes, plus extremely generous grassy areas on either side, followed by a <1.75m sidewalk at the very edge of the boulevard (Streetmix actually calls this ‘too narrow’ and throws up warnings when you put the sidewalk in).

    By the way, Streetmix also warns me that the 4m wide outer lanes of the road are considered far too wide. This boulevard was overbuilt at 14m wide for 4 lanes, presumably at a time when this was considered future-proofing for a time when it would just get busier and busier, something that has just never happened.

    Drivers who use this route to commute every morning at the absolute peak of traffic would probably tell you it gets backed up occasionally, but for the remaining 99% of the time you’re much more likely to see at MOST a handful of cars than anything resembling so much as a slowdown.

    On its own, this overbuilt road is underutilized, but this is true of many roads in many places all around North America. The true tragedy of this road in its current state is the missed opportunity to include other modes of transportation in its design.

    It’s clear from spending any amount of time on or around this road that cars are ABSOLUTELY the priority consideration of this road. Even though the road surface itself is in pretty desperate need of a resurfacing itself, the sidewalk is in even worse shape. Not only is it extremely narrow, but in a few places, every year overgrowth from adjacent bushes actively pushes users on to the grass. It’s not uncommon to see bikes on the sidewalk as well, since there is no safe way for less comfortable or experienced riders from sharing this already narrow space with anybody who walks here.

    A 32.2 m wide boulevard (all distances were measured using the measuring tool on Google Maps) is massive considering the traffic volume of all kinds here, and giving nearly half to cars (14 m), while having nearly 50% of the space dedicated to grass and trees, while all other road users are squished in to the outer <3.5 m (around 10-15% of the total road space) is frankly embarrassing.

    The embarrassment only gets worse when you find out that this road connects directly to a transportation hub with the LRT system opening in 2025, and buses come along this road at MOST every 10-15 minutes at peak times (all routes combined). With wide paths, multi-modal considerations, and a little creativity, we can rethink this road to not only accommodate a way larger variety of modes of transportation, but to carry a higher volume of actual people throughout the day, instead of just calculating for the most cars the road will ever see.

    The Redesign

    Below is a mockup of what Jeanne d’Arc could look like with a road design that offers multiple realistic options for travel. This is just one option, with all the added space that at this point can’t realistically be used for anything but this road, there is a LOT of flexibility.

    In this specific example layout, I’ve added an extra-wide sidewalk, added more trees and a bike lane in either direction. I have removed the extra car lane in each direction here as well, but there is space to keep it, although other changes to this road happening elsewhere mean that 1 lane at 40kph (instead of the current 2 lanes at 60kph) probably makes sense as the appropriate lane configuration.

    With this layout, the street is much safer (it is bordered by many parks and 2 schools in a relatively short stretch), and it is designed for travel at the safe speed of 40 kph instead of requiring annoying speed traps and red-light cameras to entrap drivers with big wide lanes. One other nice feature is that the road will be much quieter for houses backing on to it at 40 kph.

    Final Thoughts

    To wrap up this redesign, prioritizing safe transport, via multiple modes, and in a more sustainable way, seems like a pretty clear win for the community. At most, detractors could say that driving may get a few seconds slower, maybe 1-2 minutes longer to traverse the whole length of the several km section.

    Perhaps it is transparently a value judgment that these are my priorities, but the tradeoffs of designing a transportation system with redundancy and multiple good options and reducing suburban car dependency and sprawling overbuilt roadways are unquestionably positives compared to the alternative (what we have now in many cases).

  • SNC-Lavalin And Why It’s So Hard To Watch The News (For The Truth)

    I’ve noticed recently (maybe it’s just because I’m paying more attention to political news lately) this very annoying trend when it comes to news stories that get even a little bit of attention. This video by Vox is talking about the Green New Deal, but I feel like I feel the exact same way about the SNC-Lavalin incident, to name just one recent example.

    I’ve been feeling for the last year or three that whenever a big news story breaks where opinion could potentially break across political lines, all the news spends all of its airtime just talking about the political impact and outcomes of the story, and if the story still has traction in the days or weeks afterwards, you’ll hear endlessly about what other people are saying about it now.

    I really don’t like when this happens with the news, because it does nothing to inform the public about the actual issue at hand, it just applies a partisan lens to every news story.

    With the SNC-Lavalin ‘scandal’ news story, the Liberal government’s alleged pressure on the attorney general’s office to avoid prosecuting the company directly, we see a great example of this, in my opinion.

    How I have experienced news coverage of SNC-Lavalin

    When this story first came out, the narrative was that of a ‘scandal’ from the highest echelons of the federal Liberal government, with the office of the Prime Minister being accused of applying pressure to the attorney general in dealing with a bribery case with SNC-Lavalin and the Libyan government.

    From the time details started to come out, I was already looking to journalists and the news to understand what actually happened, to figure out if anything improper had taken place. However, what I found on the news, on Twitter, and from every pundit and opposition politician, is outrage that the Prime Minister would do something like this.

    Even the sparse details I put in the paragraph above were pieced together over a few days, and I still don’t feel like I really fully understand all that actually took place leading up to and after the events of the ‘scandal’. I am not of the opinion that absolutely nothing improper took place, or that an investigation should or shouldn’t happen (it probably should).

    I actually feel like I still don’t have enough details about the case to know whether I think deferred prosecution was the right call in the original case, much less whether anything unusual or improper took place afterwards. My main point in talking about all of this is that in spite of trying to stay up to date on the news surrounding this story, I feel woefully uninformed and end up hearing “Politician calls for Trudeau to resign” as the much bigger headline that “Here’s how deferred prosecution works, and the attorney general needs to remain independent”.

    I don’t know about you, but hearing that the head of the opposition thinks the current Prime Minister should step down (especially when it’s a conservative saying that about a liberal), is not a headline that should really exist (because he says it all the time). That’s a separate conversation altogether from considering what I would say is a more reasonable headline, which is “Should The PMO Get Involved In Federal Prosecution Cases?”, or something like that.

    What Can We Possibly Do About This?

    There’s no easy answer to this question. Staying informed is key, but it’s difficult to get partisanship on an issue out of your head once it wriggles its way in. The best thing I can think of to try is to be very careful when reading news to think about who is paying for it, how they are funded, whether the writer or editors might have a reason to be biased, and whether the objective facts are likely being described in the story.

    Using any social media to follow the news, whether you follow news organizations, or just friends and family, is very difficult, because many people are just there to push their preferred version of a story, or end up reinforcing biases and digging in even deeper on opinions and positions formed emotionally.

    Reading the news in general is easier than ever with the internet, but it’s also easier to write and publish anything you want, and otherwise legitimate news organizations can get caught up in this kind of bad journalism too from time to time. Nothing is black and white here, and pretending it is damages journalism and divides us in ways we don’t even consciously realize.