The Nerdy Stuff

Safer Streets

We build all of our new streets to meet the standards for heavy industrial roads. This makes our roads wide, unsafe, and fast. Though vehicle to vehicle accidents are on the decline, vehicle to pedestrian-cyclist serious injuries are getting more frequent, and severe.

In the City’s recently released Annual Collision Report, you can see that 15 of the 25 most dangerous intersections are in Ward 4. That is 60% of ALL the high danger intersections in the city.

I already analyze traffic using software like QGIS. Running simulations beyond only cars allows traffic engineering to become transportation engineering and lead to safer streets for everyone. Wider international studies show that speed and distractions are the largest contributing factors to severe accidents and fatalities. If we reduce speed, we make our streets safer.

For Ward 4, I will push to take external community traffic away from Kenmount and Thorburn Road and direct it onto the Outer Ring and Team Gushue Highway where it belongs. I would also work to enact traffic delay increases, leading pedestrian signal priority (LPI’s), and red-light cameras at the worst intersections across the city, including the most dangerous in the city, Thorburn Road at Goldstone. Finally, I would push hard for a total local road speed reduction in all of St. John’s down to 30km/h, so we all have safer streets.

Better Public Transit

Metrobus has had funding cut by the City because it ‘made more money than anticipated’. That is a horrible reason to cut funding to any service, let alone one that is at record ridership.

Council has left Metrobus to their devices via By-Law 1308, leading to delayed buses, no new orders for vehicles, barely any accessible service to speak of, and not a single city controlled transit hub.

We used to have buses in St. John’s every 3-15 minutes in the 1960’s!

One of the first mapping projects my not for profit started was the collaboration with Happy City to analyze the true accessibility of Metrobus. I’ve spent a large amount of time deeply analyzing transit data with Metrobus Transit staff. Working with other advocates has also allowed me to analyze bus delays onto mapping.

I will work hard to ensure that Ward 4 and the rest of the city gets the Transit system we desperately need. Transit signal priorities and transit only lane will be a priority for my platform. We need express semi-regional frequent buses so that an alternative to owning a car for every person in your house is achievable.

Connected Active Transportation

The current method of building out active transportation in the city is ad-hoc, costly, and complex. Every project is a one-off which means expensive engineering. It doesn’t have to be like this. We have the perfect place to place active transportation lanes to quickly build out a dependable network: streets.

When planning an actual cycle route, we need to toss out the concern of maintaining vehicle space. We have lots of vehicle space. What we don’t have is any actual network to ride a bike or other active mode on. It is 8 separate sections that provide virtually no connectivity to required services. Would you drive on the roads if they just went a half km and stopped at a river? No.

As a note, I went nearly a year car free in 2022 and rode my e-bike to work nearly every day for 10 months. It was horrible. I was assaulted by 4 drivers for doing what I was legally supposed to do. I know what it is like to try to be active in this city and we must do better.

Ward 4 contains MUN, Health Sciences, Confederation, Kelsey Drive, and the Avalon Mall. All represent some of the highest traffic drivers in the city. For Ward 4, I will put forth a plan to rapidly build protected cost effective active transportation space that can be plowed in winter by full size city equipment using engineering best practices. This will give thousands of residents the confidence to try active transportation and help reduce car-dependency.

Simplified Regulations

I’ve worked on dozens of developments across the North East Avalon, including higher density apartments downtown, higher density subdivisions, and affordable housing developments right in Ward 4. The first steps for a developer involve seeing if some land on the market is even worthwhile to invest in.

What I see time and time again is a worthwhile development gets mothballed because of a needless requirement. Examples are requiring expensive underground storm-water when surface storage would work, or adding parking to meet a minimum although the area has high transit use in the area. The most egregious was a rear lot slope being too high because the city demanded unusable on street parking next to a townhouse which drove up snow storage and pushed the houses further from the street and further into a hill. It was completely unnecessary.

The issue comes down to the highly complex regulations to develop anything in St. John’s other than a single detached homes on car only streets. Any other development type is mired with regulations.

Our regulations are too strict, complex, and needlessly car-focused. Our zoning regulations are inconsistent, to exclusionary, and do not promote communities. Just look at the next image. If a developer wants to build a one way narrow street with a wide shared use path and cover the street in row houses and small stores, so long as it meets national rules, it should be permitted, but it is not.

Ward 4 still has room to grow, but if we keep out strict zoning laws and car only engineering manuals, roads will be wide enough for planes to land, with noisy speeding cars, and no stores to be seen. I will promote a simplified zoning and regulatory framework that will help increase density and revenue, loosen complexities for developers, and build safer streets for your families and friends.

More Affordable Housing

Housing should be a right. Thousands of residents in this city want to own a home but they aren’t catered to.

Just look at Henry Larsen Street in Kenmount Terrace. ALL the duplex units sold before they broke ground, yet the large lots have sat empty for nearly a decade.

I’ve used the above example dozens of times in development meetings. The primary factor that matters is the price of a unit whether renting or buying. People will live in a different neighbourhood, or accept a different commute, or a different school, so long as they can afford their home. Since cost of the unit is directly proportional to the area, smaller units mean lower costs. Pretty simple stuff.

The issue is that developers cannot build affordable without huge risk. Most of the city residential develop ready area is zoned R1, which you can read about here. The city requires minimum lot widths, minimum parking, minimum floor areas, minimum setbacks, and of course restricts what structures can be built in which zoning. That is the opposite of how it should be.

The City just released the New Housing Needs Assessment document. The document clearly states that large single detached homes are in abundance, and smaller affordable units are not. To shows that our seniors and elderly cannot afford their homes and have nowhere to go.

To get affordable houses built, the city can help those developments, reduce the burden and complex studies needed, and fast-track higher density developments. I will propose major amendments to our development regulations to make it easier to build the housing we need. This will involve removing complex traffic, lighting, and parking requirements for affordable units, allow them to be placed closer to streets, on smaller lots, and on smaller streets. The entire burden on developers must be reduced to make affordability viable.

True Accessibility

Accessibility… It is so sad how little we have in this city. Those of us who are able-bodied do not really understand accessibility. Things we take for granted are overlooked not just by us, but by our engineers, planners, and consultants. I’ve already talked about the first large advocacy project I worked on was analyzing Metrobus Transits actual accessibility and how we discovered errors and made Metrobus aware of them.

However our lack of accessibility goes far beyond that. Most of us can just walk outside, get in a car, and drive where we want. For someone who depends on GoBus and sidewalk clearing, that may be an entire day lost. Just look below at our complete lack of sidewalk clearing.

I fully understand that it is financially near impossible to clear our sidewalks in the winter and ensure taxes remain the same. I do not have a simple solution for existing sidewalks. We would need to use barriers to make protected spaces and one way roads for pedestrians. Whatever the solution is, those with accessibility requirements must have a voice.

However, for new accessibility, we need universally compliant developments with mountable accessible curbs, on narrow traffic calmed streets that can be plowed completely in one pass with heavy machinery. Sidewalk plows are cute in all, but they are a fiscal and maintenance nightmare, pushing as little as 5% of the snow of a machine with the same mechanic and employee burden.

I want to direct our engineering and planning department to accept universal design in our engineering manuals. We need continuous grade sidewalks to be standard. We need all bus stops on accessible routes to actually be accessible. We need to ensure that users can rely on something other than GoBus. We must do better for existing infrastructure. We can fix these issues for the future. No studies. Just make the changes.

Transportation Management

I’ve wrote some posts and a few reports for clients on the difference between Transportation and Traffic management/ engineering. The former looks at all modes of transportation and assesses the total system function. The later looks at ONLY cars and results in lots of money spent and lots of roads built. When you career depends on building roads, you’ll suggest building them.

If you were to assess St. John’s and ask a Traffic Engineer to come up with a solution, you get a hundred million dollar price tag to add lanes, highways, bridges, ramps, and roundabouts when a few buses and bike lanes would alleviate the issue. Take a look at the Traffic study around Mun from just 2016. It looks at transit for a few pages, but transit does not factor into the conclusion. The conclusion is spend tens of millions to ‘fix traffic’. More roads and lanes cannot fix traffic.

I will analyze how the City writes traffic analysis proposals and ask the questions of why it cannot be for all transportation modes. For Ward 4, I will propose a data driven people first approach to transportation engineering and management to ensure out streets are safer for people inside and outside of cars.

A lot of work to be done

This sounds like a lot. I would say that was true if I wasn’t already working on these proposals. Being a Councillor would allow me to get the right concepts to the correct people quicker.