One of the issues that got a laugh at the all-candidates meeting last night was one particular feature at the south end of Prince Edward Street, and I’m delighted. In answering a question about economic development in Brighton, several candidates mentioned the Industrial Park, until one candidate added something along the lines of “how will truck traffic get into the industrial park, with those new curbs on Prince Edward Street?” Those curb extensions have drawn attention from the day they were installed, and that’s great news! That’s exactly what they’re supposed to do.
Design Speed
Engineers use a concept called “design speed” when calculating speed limits and road standards. It used to be that they’d build a road and then observe how quickly people drive on it before determining a speed limit; the theory was, people will drive as fast as they feel comfortable, and that feeling of comfort has to do with their safety. We can tell when the road feels safe at a given speed, regardless of what the posted limit is.
Now our roads are built to provincially-regulated standards that determine how wide and flat it must be, what constitutes acceptable visibility, and what speed limits are appropriate. The standards tend to emphasize roads that are wider and straighter, which are naturally safer. The problem with that is that when we feel safer, we drive faster.
I used to live in Manitoba, where almost every road is a straight line through a flat landscape with vast distances between towns and visibility to the ends of the earth. We drove real fast.
But speed limits aren’t (just) for the driver’s safety; they’re largely about everyone else’s safety. Just because I feel safe as I drive on a smooth, straight, wide road doesn’t mean it’s safe for the people around me. Collisions happen when we feel safer than we actually are, when something unexpected happens in an otherwise predictable driving experience. So even though Ontario Street is a smooth, flat, straight, wide street, built to the standard of a County Road (because it is one), we ask drivers to resist driving at a speed at which they feel comfortable, and instead limit themselves to 50km/h. We ask them to willfully override the instincts by which they would otherwise regulate their speed. And like other times that we ask humans to override their instincts (like dieting, or preaching sexual abstinence to teenagers), it rarely goes well. The mental effort it takes to constantly monitor our speed is more than any of us can expend all the time, and sooner or later we all find ourselves speeding.
Speed Limits
What we study is what we value, both because we care enough about it to study it and because we tend to value the things that we study. Once you start collecting stats on something, you create the basis for more study of that thing. And aside from professional sports, there are few things we have more statistics on than road safety. Driving is absolutely the most dangerous thing that we do, and we have tested every aspect of vehicle safety to reduce that risk. Vehicles are designed to protect the people inside of them, even at high speeds.
But vehicles are not designed to protect the things (or people) that those vehicles hit in a collision. One example of this is the prevalence of enormous pickups and SUVs whose design is largely about the aesthetics of looking big (which helps some folks feel safer!), but ultimately reduce the driver’s visibility in ways that are deadly to the people around them:
So we have stats about what happens to a human when they’re hit by vehicles at different speeds. We know that while 50km/h is relatively safe most of the time, it’s still fast enough to seriously injure or kill a pedestrian, and particularly a child. So we set speed limits around high-traffic areas down to 40, and near schools we reduce it further to 30. Your odds of walking away from getting hit by a car going 30km/h are decent; but at 60 (the speed we usually drive at through a 50 zone), they’re slim to nil.
I think we probably all agree, at least with our rational brains, that speed limits are important. So how do we stick to them?
Speed Controls
One of the other questions that got a big reaction last night was about the revenues from our short-lived Automated Speed Enforcement cameras. (The answer is that they were used largely to offset tax increases, which is to say that some of it went to new road safety efforts that we might otherwise not have done, while the rest paid for things we needed anyway but didn’t need to increase taxes to pay for. One candidate pointed out that when that ASE money runs out we’ll see another increase in taxes, which is very true; those ASE cameras prevented some tax increases for a few years, and we aren’t likely to cut services and lay off staff when the ASE money runs out. This candidate seemed to see this as a criticism of our council; I see it as a criticism of the Premier, who removed this resource because he thought it was a “tax grab”. Well, the alternative way to pay for things at the municipal level is always and only by raising property taxes or finding another new fee. The things we rely on cost money, there’s no getting around it.)
This question got some laughs in part because Catherine Stutt is a hoot, but largely because the speed cameras were hated even more than property taxes. The Premier’s language about it being a “tax grab” doesn’t make logical sense, because the whole point of the cameras is that they only ticket objectively and fairly, and the point of Mayor Ostrander’s decision to use them to offset tax increases was to show that they weren’t just a way to extract extra money from residents; but still, something about the cameras felt very unfair. That’s because the part of us that sets our internal speed limit by assessing the “design speed” of the road and driving accordingly objects to being penalized for it.
So we build roads like they’re drag strips, and then set speed limits that feel unfair and are almost impossible to make ourselves stick to.
Those Curbs
This is where the curb extensions come in. I’m delighted that everyone worries that trucks won’t be able to fit through there, because that’s the point: you’re supposed to worry that you can’t fit through there. By changing the landscape a little bit, we can override the part of your brain that feels safe doing 80 in a 50 zone.
That curb extension was added at the south end of Prince Edward Street, close to where it transitions into County Road 64. Drivers coming into town on the county road go from an 80 zone to a 50 zone, but nothing is different about the road’s width or its visibility, so the unconscious part of our brains that determine how fast we feel safe driving has no cue to slow down. But that physical obstruction works like a charm! Even if you totally blank on the speed limit sign that asks you to slow down, those curb extensions will do the job. No tickets needed.
And yes, you can actually fit through there. Two trucks can pass each other through there. But they’ll do so slowly, because they don’t want to take the risk.
My hope for the speed camera money was that we would use it for more traffic calming measures like this. In the end I’m less concerned for which account we draw from to build it, so long as we build it. Traffic control is one of our largest issues, and it will only get larger as we continue to grow. If our built environment encourages people to slow down, then we don’t need to waste policing resources on catching people driving at speeds that feel safe, even when they aren’t.
Some more videos
I’m a big fan of the YouTube/Nebula channel Not Just Bikes. The creator is from London, Ontario, but now lives in the Netherlands. His channel examines urban design, and particularly, getting around in cities. Here are a few of his videos related to speed limits and traffic calming that I’ve found interesting:
He’s sarcastic, but he’s not wrong: we could be making better streets by designing them for humans, not just for cars. Take a dive down the rabbit hole of urban design related to transit, and if you get a chance, check out his videos about the high costs of suburbia (or look through my back catalogue, because I’ve posted about that before too!).