Councillors green light public engagement on lowering city speed limits

[MarchHare]

Originally Posted by undercoverbrother

Where in NB is that?

My neighbourhood in NB growing didn't look like that, but in fairness it wasn't as packed as the photo of YYC that you posted.

Quispamsis, about 25 minutes driving time from Saint John city centre.

[TorqueDog]

Originally Posted by Torture

How much of your commutes are you all spending on residential roads?

I don't think you realize how all encompassing this change is if that's your take.

Take a look at this map: https://www.calgary.ca/content/dam/w...etwork-map.pdf

Collector Roads (the thin gray lines) and roads not seen at all will drop to 40 KM/H and eventually 30 KM/H under this change. That is ridiculous.

[Torture]

Originally Posted by TorqueDog

I don't think you realize how all encompassing this change is if that's your take.

Take a look at this map: https://www.calgary.ca/content/dam/w...etwork-map.pdf

Collector Roads (the thin gray lines) and roads not seen at all will drop to 40 KM/H and eventually 30 KM/H under this change. That is ridiculous.

Nope, I get it. I am curious though, who spends most of their commute on a collector or residential road?

I actually would be curious to see what some people's commutes or drives are that they're concerned about. Because for me, the beginning of my commute before I get on to 16th Ave NW will change and then it's normal from there on. Half of my distance leading up to 16th Ave is already a playground zone so I'd be going 30 anyways. Not a big deal.
Same for getting to my old office, a little bit slower at the beginning/end and then no change. Maybe I'm unique (but I don't think so), but when I'm driving, most of the time it's not on a residential or collector road. You use those to get to the main roadways and then it's smooth sailing.

[accord1999]

Originally Posted by Roughneck

Cars are amazing until the property tax assessments come. There seems to be a high correlation between people who bitch most about costs and taxes and people who support the prioritization of the most costly public infrastructure to build and maintain per user.

You mean transit? Because roads on a per passenger trip basis are incredibly cheap.



And the biggest complainers about property tax I see on social media seem to be inner-city residents who talk about how they subsidize suburbs and how the new communities are raising their taxes while ignoring how much transit is available, or their extremely high per-capita policing and fire department incidents or how the levy to pay for the East Village matches or exceeds all of the 14 new communities put together.

[MarchHare]

Originally Posted by Torture

Nope, I get it. I am curious though, who spends most of their commute on a collector or residential road?

For me, the beginning of my commute before I get on to 16th Ave NW will change and then it's normal from there on. Half of my distance leading up to 16th Ave is already a playground zone so I'd be going 30 anyways. Not a big deal.
Same for getting to my old office, a little bit slower at the beginning/end and then no change.

According to the City of Calgary's Transportation Planning group, where they have professional transportation engineers who analyze mountains of data using sophisticated traffic modeling software, a typical commute will increase by 85 seconds on average due to this change. People are getting upset over that?

[Torture]

Originally Posted by MarchHare

According to the City of Calgary's Transportation Planning group, where they have professional transportation engineers who analyze mountains of data using sophisticated traffic modeling software, a typical commute will increase by 85 seconds on average due to this change. People are getting upset over that?

And yet they'll still stop and line up at the Tim Hortons drive through every morning and we all know that's going to take a LOT more than 85 seconds.

[accord1999]

Originally Posted by MarchHare

According to the City of Calgary's Transportation Planning group, where they have professional transportation engineers who analyze mountains of data using sophisticated traffic modeling software, a typical commute will increase by 85 seconds on average due to this change. People are getting upset over that?

For every trip, over the course of a year that many hours per person. Over the entire population of Calgary, that's tens of millions of hours extra time spent traveling. And that's just at 40 km/h, the City hopes to get it down to 30 km/h in the future.

[PepsiFree]

Originally Posted by accord1999

For every trip, over the course of a year that many hours per person. Over the entire population of Calgary, that's tens of millions of hours extra time spent traveling. And that's just at 40 km/h, the City hopes to get it down to 30 km/h in the future.

That’s if you think everyone drives. The average Calgarian spends 71 hours in their car, if the average commute is 30 minutes and this adds 1.25, that bumps the average by just under 3 hours per year.

So... nowhere close to tens of millions.

[accord1999]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

That’s if you think everyone drives. The average Calgarian spends 71 hours in their car, if the average commute is 30 minutes and this adds 1.25, that bumps the average by just under 3 hours per year.

So... nowhere close to tens of millions.

Commutes only account for some of trips taken. My previous post has the City estimating 3.2 million passenger trips/(probably work) day, which would equate to about 1 billion trips over a year. 1 minute extra per trip is over 16 million hours. Slower speeds will also likely effect buses, where many useful and important routes travel on these 40 km/h roads.

[Oling_Roachinen]

Originally Posted by Bill Bumface

Yes. The streets used to be for everyone.

You can still find places like this today, and frankly they are just plain better. North America bought into the propaganda that cars = freedom and happiness, and our urban planning has utterly suffered to actually serve humans living in cities because of it.

And it was actually propaganda and lobbying by the car manufacturers.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26073797

The idea of being fined for crossing the road at the wrong place can bemuse foreign visitors to the US, where the origins of so-called jaywalking lie in a propaganda campaign by the motor industry in the 1920s....

Jaywalking was first used to describe "someone from the countryside who goes to the city and is so dazzled by the lights and the show windows that they keep stopping and getting in the way of other pedestrians".

The use of jaywalking as a term of ridicule against pedestrians crossing roads took off in the 1920s.

A key moment, says Norton, was a petition signed by 42,000 people in Cincinnati in 1923 to limit the speed of cars mechanically to 25mph (40kph). Though the petition failed, an alarmed auto industry scrambled to shift the blame for pedestrian casualties from drivers to walkers.

Local car firms got boy scouts to hand out cards to pedestrians explaining jaywalking. "These kids would be posted on sidewalks and when they saw someone starting to jaywalk they'd hand them one of these cards," says Norton. "It would tell them that it was dangerous and old fashioned and that it's a new era and we can't cross streets that way."

...
Another ruse was to provide local newspapers with a free service. Reporters would submit a few facts about local traffic accidents to Detroit, and the auto industry's safety committee would send back a full report on the situation in their city.

"The newspaper coverage quite suddenly changes, so that in 1923 they're all blaming the drivers, and by late 1924 they're all blaming jaywalking," Norton says.

[GGG]

Originally Posted by accord1999

Commutes only account for some of trips taken. My previous post has the City estimating 3.2 million passenger trips/(probably work) day, which would equate to about 1 billion trips over a year. 1 minute extra per trip is over 16 million hours. Slower speeds will also likely effect buses, where many useful and important routes travel on these 40 km/h roads.

And you should multiply those 16 million hours by $30 per hour to get the cost of this proposal of 450 million Dollars when comparing to the benefits.

I still like the 40km/h unsigned part of this proposal they just need to make the speed limit higher on some of the collectors through signage.

[PepsiFree]

Originally Posted by accord1999

Commutes only account for some of trips taken. My previous post has the City estimating 3.2 million passenger trips/(probably work) day, which would equate to about 1 billion trips over a year. 1 minute extra per trip is over 16 million hours. Slower speeds will also likely effect buses, where many useful and important routes travel on these 40 km/h roads.

Sure, but the 85 second figure is based on the typical commute, not the typical "trip." Your 3.2million figure counts both driver and passenger trips, so if you simply add 1 minute to each of those trips you're double or triple counting trips where multiple people are in the same vehicle.

I think my original figure was wrong because looking back it's time spent in "congested traffic," not overall time in a car. But I'm not seeing any reasonable calculation that creeps close to tens of millions of hours extra.

[Roughneck]

Originally Posted by accord1999

You mean transit? Because roads on a per passenger trip basis are incredibly cheap.

Incredibly cheap provided you ignore the construction and upgrade costs that go along with them. Throw a toll on to recover construction costs and you aren't coming back with 20 cents per trip. 20 cents per trip on Deerfoot wouldn't even cover the costs for it alone (albeit that's still a provincial responsibility for the time being).



Between provincial and municipal investment in roads we're seeing billions thrown around each four year budget. Hell, the city is spending $200M just to connect it's own roads to the provinces $3.2B highway. Last major investment in transit like that was a decade ago, which was the first in 25 years. And unlike those projects, Ring Road investment hasn't actually taken pressure of the city's roads like the Red Line did with Macleod and Crowchild. Almost $2B (not included in the previous $3.2B figure, which only goes to the SW and W portions of the Ring Road) and Deerfoot didn't see a reduction in traffic (not a sustained one anyway).

how the levy to pay for the East Village matches or exceeds all of the 14 new communities put together.

I'd be all for making the new communities subject to a similar levy plan to fund development as it would ensure none of them get built, because nobody would take the risk on the property taxes funding themselves over that time.

[accord1999]

Originally Posted by Roughneck

Incredibly cheap provided you ignore the construction and upgrade costs that go along with them. Throw a toll on to recover construction costs and you aren't coming back with 20 cents per trip. 20 cents per trip on Deerfoot wouldn't even cover the costs for it alone (albeit that's still a provincial responsibility for the time being).

Transit is capital intensive in its own right. The City's capital budget for transit over the next several years is comparable to its capital budget for roads.

Between provincial and municipal investment in roads we're seeing billions thrown around each four year budget. Hell, the city is spending $200M just to connect it's own roads to the provinces $3.2B highway.

The Ring Road is expensive but it already carries hundreds of thousands of trips/day. The Green Line Stage 1 is comparably expensive, but will only carry 55000-65000 trips/day. A completed Green Line will exceed the costs of the entire Ring Road. And the Ring Road (and other roads) carry freight and goods, which transit does not.

I'd be all for making the new communities subject to a similar levy plan to fund development as it would ensure none of them get built, because nobody would take the risk on the property taxes funding themselves over that time.

Well, that's why the East Village levy area includes parts of downtown Calgary, including the Bow tower. That's the only way it's generating enough levies to fund and finance the many hundreds of millions of dollar in infrastructure upgrades and beautification for a community that will max out at just 10-12K residents.

[accord1999]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

Sure, but the 85 second figure is based on the typical commute, not the typical "trip." Your 3.2million figure counts both driver and passenger trips, so if you simply add 1 minute to each of those trips you're double or triple counting trips where multiple people are in the same vehicle.

I think delays for passengers should be accounted for in the same manner that if a bus is slower to go through one stop to another, the delay affects all of its passengers that were on the bus at that time.

[Bunk]

I don't think you realize how all encompassing this change is if that's your take.

Take a look at this map: https://www.calgary.ca/content/dam/w...etwork-map.pdf

Collector Roads (the thin gray lines) and roads not seen at all will drop to 40 KM/H and eventually 30 KM/H under this change. That is ridiculous.

No - collectors proposed to stay at 50

Here's the ward by ward map of the proposal

https://www.calgary.ca/transportatio...ed-limits.html

[TorqueDog]

Originally Posted by Bunk

No - collectors proposed to stay at 50

Here's the ward by ward map of the proposal

https://www.calgary.ca/transportatio...ed-limits.html

I'm glad it has been updated. Still cannot say I'm in favour of this change.

[Bill Bumface]

Originally Posted by accord1999

You mean transit? Because roads on a per passenger trip basis are incredibly cheap.



And the biggest complainers about property tax I see on social media seem to be inner-city residents who talk about how they subsidize suburbs and how the new communities are raising their taxes while ignoring how much transit is available, or their extremely high per-capita policing and fire department incidents or how the levy to pay for the East Village matches or exceeds all of the 14 new communities put together.

You know that for people to take advantage of the low trip cost of personal motor vehicle trips they have to, you know, own and operate a car.

Let's add that cost in, because it's included in the transit costs.

Let's also establish that the requirement to own and operate a vehicle to participate in the workforce in a city drives up the living wage as a result, and that cost is passed along to everyone consuming anything from service industries.

[para transit fellow]

didn't we have this complaint about the bike lanes?

[accord1999]

Originally Posted by Bill Bumface

You know that for people to take advantage of the low trip cost of personal motor vehicle trips they have to, you know, own and operate a car.

What's wrong with user pay? The original argument was about subsidies of infrastructure, roads have low subsidies because car users are paying most of the costs of driving directly. Even for a successful transit system (by North American standards), Calgary transit users pay less than 50% of the cost of operating transit and essentially 0% of the capital costs.

Let's also establish that the requirement to own and operate a vehicle to participate in the workforce in a city drives up the living wage as a result, and that cost is passed along to everyone consuming anything from service industries.

Not as much as the costs of being forced to live near where you work, and work near you live, or hope that you have direct transit routes or are willing to waste time waiting and transferring.

For all the idyllic photos of present-day European city cores, none of that would exist if Europeans weren't overwhelmingly traveling by car, for trips that don't need to be in the core.