Councillors green light public engagement on lowering city speed limits

[Snuffleupagus]

Originally Posted by Locke

The end goal should be to reduce collisions with pedestrians...maybe we should start with the pedestrians.

Maybe we should start fining pedestrians for texting and walking, city would probably raise far more than $1.2b

[GGG]

Originally Posted by #-3

I would be interested in seeing why the city thinks they will have a reduction in incidents. I haven't looked through the data in some time, but my understanding is that the more repressive speed limits become the more accidents there are.

Montana eliminated speed limits for a time, saw accidents drop, re-instated them and saw accidents and fatalities go up above the original levels.

I could be remembering the location long wrong. But I think it was somewhere in New Jersey, they had the opportunity to study average vehicle speed prior to and after a large reduction in speed limit, to find that speed limits had no impact on the median speed that cars drove, although they had a large effect on the outliers at the low end and high end of the distribution. There findings also noted a spike in incidents. They postulated that it is not in fact speed that causes traffic incidents put is having a wide variety of speeds on the same roadway.

All of this to say, enforcing speeds seems to be an non-optimal way of improving road safety. If they want people to slow down and be aware of pedestrians, they should narrow roadways, paint more lines, and widen sidewalk, if the end goal is to create safe pedestrians and roads that drivers want to slow down on.

A reductions in average severity of incidents is probably a reasonable thing to anticipate. But it would probably be difficult to predict total harm, with more lower impact problems.


Also: as a side note, I have always had a problem with them randomly taxing people for a rule few people respect and fewer adhere to as a means of finance those who issue the tax (I'm talking about speeding tickets) especially considering they only seem to enforce this rules in places where they are most flagrantly ludicrous. On the economist podcast today, they were talking about an Asian country that experiment with time-outs as a punishment for speeding (caught speeding, sit on the side of the road for 30 minutes), it seems like an oddly effective punishment for the crime, that would give those in a hurry allot more pause than a fine. Setting aside the administrative boondoggle, and waste of law enforcement time, its kind of a fun idea.

The Montana data that showed a fatality increase was not statically significant

[llwhiteoutll]

Originally Posted by Locke

The end goal should be to reduce collisions with pedestrians...maybe we should start with the pedestrians.

Its rare that vehicles and pedestrians collide on sidewalks.

I’d say calgary is pretty good. Average about 1 pedestrian involved collision per day and in half the cases the pedestrian had right of way. Something like 5 fatalities in residential areas in the last 7 years and none would have been prevented for sure with a 30kph vs 50kph limit

[Erick Estrada]

Originally Posted by llwhiteoutll

I’d say calgary is pretty good. Average about 1 pedestrian involved collision per day and in half the cases the pedestrian had right of way. Something like 5 fatalities in residential areas in the last 7 years and none would have been prevented for sure with a 30kph vs 50kph limit

I see it every day as Calgary drivers are really bad when it comes to crosswalks. People making left or right turns into crosswalks with pedestrians still crossing. It's really bad at an intersection I frequent. I get that some pedestrians drag their asses when crossing but if you are waiting to turn into a crosswalk you just can't decide that the pedestrian is too slow so you will just maneuver around them or just go right in front of them cutting them off. Changing speed limits won't affect this but I wonder if they will be able to make the photo radar lights one day be able to catch this kind of stuff.

[stone hands]

anecdote time:

we have to cross a road where there is a right turn coming out of a parking lot onto a major road when we get groceries, so we make this trip a few times a week. we have a little game of "will this driver yield to us when we have the walking sign or will they not even look in our direction and gun it when their light turns green" and its hilariously probably +85% of the time where they dont even look and just go, or they do look and go anyways because they cant wait 6 seconds for us to walk past them

people are so inattentive/impatient its ridiculous

[rotten42]

Originally Posted by stone hands

anecdote time:

we have to cross a road where there is a right turn coming out of a parking lot onto a major road when we get groceries, so we make this trip a few times a week. we have a little game of "will this driver yield to us when we have the walking sign or will they not even look in our direction and gun it when their light turns green" and its hilariously probably +85% of the time where they dont even look and just go, or they do look and go anyways because they cant wait 6 seconds for us to walk past them

people are so inattentive/impatient its ridiculous

Do you also continue to cross on the don't walk sign? Because that seems even more common.

[stone hands]

no? even if i did, the consequences of the action described in my post vs your whataboutism results in 5 seconds of inconvinence vs serious injury or death so i dont even really know how they're comparable or why you asked

[Erick Estrada]

Originally Posted by rotten42

Do you also continue to cross on the don't walk sign? Because that seems even more common.

Once a person is within a pedestrian crosswalk it matters not if the don't walk sign is flashing or solid as drivers still have to yield for them.

[BurningYears]

Originally Posted by Erick Estrada

Once a person is within a pedestrian crosswalk it matters not if the don't walk sign is flashing or solid as drivers still have to yield for them.

I'm guessing they were meaning start to cross instead of continue to cross above. but yea if they meant start to cross then you probably shouldn't


I wont lie if I'm not inconveniencing any traffic I will start on flashing and make sure I'm speedy getting across.

[chemgear]

Originally Posted by Torture

Let's try something...everybody repeat after me: "Hey Google what is 10% of 1.2 billion dollars per year" (Hint, it's 120 million)

Speaking of which, $1.2 billion or $0.12 billion? Or is the City just making up statistics like they did for the Olympics?

https://calgaryherald.com/news/traff...year-says-city

The financial impact of life-altering pedestrian collisions and fatalities in Calgary could be $120 million each year, and possibly higher, according to newly released city figures.

[Torture]

Originally Posted by chemgear

Speaking of which, $1.2 billion or $0.12 billion? Or is the City just making up statistics like they did for the Olympics?

Uhh...are you trying to argue they're saying different numbers in the two articles? You realize 0.12 billion is 120 million. Or said another way, 10% of 1.2 billion.

Dispute if the numbers are correct if you want, but they're saying the same number in different ways...

[getbak]

Originally Posted by chemgear

Speaking of which, $1.2 billion or $0.12 billion? Or is the City just making up statistics like they did for the Olympics?

https://calgaryherald.com/news/traff...year-says-city

The financial impact of life-altering pedestrian collisions and fatalities in Calgary could be $120 million each year, and possibly higher, according to newly released city figures.

Yeah, something is funky with the numbers.

That story from early 2016 says there are an average of 383 collisions per year. Now, they're claiming the number is over 10,000.

How are those numbers so wildly different?

[Swarly]

Originally Posted by getbak

Yeah, something is funky with the numbers.

That story from early 2016 says there are an average of 383 collisions per year. Now, they're claiming the number is over 10,000.

How are those numbers so wildly different?

I first article says "The city said around 35,000 collisions occur in Calgary every year, approximately 10,000 of which happen in residential neighbourhoods." and seems to be talking about all traffic collisions.

while this article chemgear posted

Originally Posted by chemgear

Speaking of which, $1.2 billion or $0.12 billion? Or is the City just making up statistics like they did for the Olympics?

https://calgaryherald.com/news/traff...year-says-city

The financial impact of life-altering pedestrian collisions and fatalities in Calgary could be $120 million each year, and possibly higher, according to newly released city figures.

seems to be talking specifically about pedestrian collisions, that's my best guess.

[Torture]

Originally Posted by Swarly

I first article says "The city said around 35,000 collisions occur in Calgary every year, approximately 10,000 of which happen in residential neighbourhoods." and seems to be talking about all traffic collisions.

while this article chemgear posted

seems to be talking specifically about pedestrian collisions, that's my best guess.

I'm not really sure how we were supposed to figure that out when chemgear specifically pointed out 1.2B and 0.12B but I see your point that the collision numbers are different metrics.

[chemgear]

Originally Posted by Torture

I'm not really sure how we were supposed to figure that out when chemgear specifically pointed out 1.2B and 0.12B but I see your point that the collision numbers are different metrics.

I was pointing out that the numbers that the City are putting out are totally different (out by a full order of magnitude) now that they're trying to shove this limit reduction down your throats.

I think your confusion was your random selection of "googling 10%" of their suddenly massive claim of $1.2 billion. Nobody else was doing that.

[llwhiteoutll]

Originally Posted by chemgear

I was pointing out that the numbers that the City are putting out are totally different (out by a full order of magnitude) now that they're trying to shove this limit reduction down your throats.

Not surprising. This started out as pedestrian safety, but the numbers don't make sense in terms of cost benefit, because Calgary doesn't have a problem with pedestrian involved collisions or pedestrians being killed on residential roads. Once that became obvious, it switched to include absolutely everything. The fact that they lump fatal and injury collisions into one bucket shows they don't want accurate figures out there.

Council has already decided what the plan is. They'll do their consultation, release the results and then say that they studied the issue and while they thank Calgarians for their input, the best solution is the one they want. The fact that council is even entertaining allowing transit and bylaw to do speed enforcement shows where this is likely heading.

[jwslam]

in case anyone is wondering
https://twitter.com/Joe_Magliocca/st...40368009216000

[GGG]

I really like Godnek.

Of councillors she seems to be the most likely to be in different camps on each vote. Very pragmatic.

[burn_this_city]

I was going to email my councilor about their yes vote, then I remembered boundary changed and my new guy voted no. The vast majority are against this, why are they trying to ram it through?

[CaptainYooh]

Fines. Revenue from fines is free, effortless and so tempting...