Image courtesy City of Saskatoon

TriTAG supports the proposals in the Cycling Facilities and Downtown Branding report – the City staff responsible should be commended with such forward-thinking initiatives and thorough analysis. We would like to speak in particular about the plan to add sharrows to King Street in downtown Kitchener, and the critical importance of measuring the effect of this improvement.

In 2010, TriTAG saw an opportunity to measure the effects of new cycling lanes and markers in the city of Guelph. Over the next two years, we were able to gather evidence that showed: More citizens chose to cycle, and fewer rode on the sidewalk. This report has been of great use to the City of Guelph – all from a few volunteers taking time off of work to sit in brisk early morning temperatures at the side of the road with clipboards. If we’d had the right resources to allocate to further study, we would have been able to accomplish even more.

The “Kitchener Cycling Branding and Downtown Cycling Facilities” report draws from the experience of cities like San Francisco, Miami Beach, Seattle, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Experience there suggests that sharrows can work well where space is at a premium and traffic speed is low – but we lack study of local examples. In light of this, Kitchener staff, in collaboration with TriTAG and the Kitchener Cycling Advisory Committee, have developed a plan to measure the effect of sharrows in the downtown. We commend council’s support of the study – to assign a few hours of staff and volunteer time to measure the impact of this modest but important investment – because we believe that the sharrows approved for King Street can have a big impact – and that the city should have the proof to back up the success of their initiative.

Why stop here? We would love to see Kitchener take a more rigorous approach to measuring cycling traffic. Plans to gauge the effect of new cycling infrastructure over time ought to be routine. Our city needs to understand cause and effect if we’re going to live up to the cycling master plan’s vision of doubling cycling trips every three to five years. Learning what works is important – without measuring, we cannot truly say what works and what doesn’t.

As this report shows, we can learn from the experiences of other cities; with the addition of better measurement on our part, not only can we learn from our own experiences as well, but we can provide Kitchener’s hard data approach to measurement as a gold standard when other communities come calling to ask how we built a more efficient and complete cycling network.

]]> http://www.tritag.ca/blog/2013/04/10/supporting-an-evidence-based-approach-to-cycling-infrastructure/feed/ 1 http://www.tritag.ca/blog/2013/04/08/choosing-a-better-land-use-future/ http://www.tritag.ca/blog/2013/04/08/choosing-a-better-land-use-future/#comments Mon, 08 Apr 2013 10:30:54 +0000 Mike Boos http://www.tritag.ca/?p=1822 Transportation choice is inextricably linked to land use. When cities sprawl, the ability for citizens to freely choose their means of transportation diminishes as the number of trips requiring a car increases. If everyday destinations like home, work, retail, and leisure are located near each other however, it becomes easier to choose to walk, bike, or take transit between them. In addition, these kinds of places are much less costly to connect to each other with streets and transit than sprawled areas.

As renowned urban planner Brent Toderian writes, “the best transportation plan is a great land-use plan.”

In 2009, Waterloo Regional Council approved its Official Plan, a document outlining the shape of growth for our Region over the next 20 years. The plan encourages development to be mixed-use and to take place in already built-up areas, and limits sprawl over farmland by establishing a firm countryside line.

This plan has been appealed by a group of private developers who have benefited from previous sprawl-permitting policies. Earlier this year, the Ontario Municipal Board made a ruling in favour of these developers, requiring that the Region provide for more than 10 times as much development on new land (i.e. sprawl) than what was in its Official Plan. Essentially, the ruling forces Waterloo Region to provide farmland for another 20 years of full-speed sprawl, on the basis that sprawl is what the last 20 years looked like.

Waterloo Regional Council understands the threat this is to the Region and its ability to plan its own future, and has voted unanimously to appeal this decision in court. TriTAG applauds Waterloo Region for defending its progressive and responsible plan that would lead to greater transportation choice and quality of life for its citizens. It is vital that we citizens, through our elected government (rather than a handful of private developers), be in control of our own region’s destiny.

To learn more about the Region’s Official Plan and the Ontario Municipal Board appeal, visit smartgrowthwaterloo.ca

Public consultations on the service changes will be held at various locations in Waterloo and Kitchener between March 18 and 26.

We are very pleased to see a movement towards a grid system. A trade-off is present here however: it will take longer for customers within the neighbourhoods bordering Bridge Street to reach their bus stop. Once they get to a bus though, it will take much less time for them to reach their destination. We believe this change represents a net gain for GRT users and residents in general. [1]

Also of note is that route 29 has been saved from a ridiculous jog prior to heading to The Boardwalk. The 13 appears to have received a little jog in the north west to serve the Public School, but it should not delay travel time by very much.

With the 12 going down Weber all the way to Lincoln, it is now contiguous with the 8 all the way from Westmount/Union to Weber/Lincoln. This is a distance of over 5 km, a bus runtime of 18 minutes: a necessary doubling-up because of demand from the two Universities and Conestoga College. This could be made more efficient, however, by interleaving scheduled routes such that a bus passes every 15 minutes instead of two buses arriving at almost the same time every 30 minutes. This increase in effective bus frequency could improve the perceived reliability and convenience of transit, increasing ridership.

There may be some backlash, however, among those who are faced with a longer walk to the bus while at the same time, losing summer service frequency. Routes 200 and 201 are slated to lose summer service frequency, it remains to be seen whether or not these cuts will save the Region money or cost more in lost potential ridership. Evening service may also be reduced on several routes, making the bus a far less reliable choice for transportation.

Frequency cuts aside, we at TriTAG are pleased with the overall direction of the proposed 2013 GRT service improvements. Simpler, more direct routes are not only faster and easier to understand for passengers, but also allow for more frequent service as shorter travel times mean less operating expense per trip. We hope Grand River Transit will continue and accelerate this trend in improving route designs across the Region, in time for better integration with light rail and adapted bus rapid transit in 2017.

[1] What can GRT do to support those who might find they will have a longer walk to a bus stop? The 35 line would do well with bike racks at every stop, so that people have the option of cycling through quiet residential streets to reach their bus stop, but be given the option of taking a bus if they’re not comfortable cycling on busier roads.

Dear Council,

We were dismayed to learn of the staff recommendation at Licensing and Retail Committee for the taxi-cab license ratio of 1:1650 to be reduced to 1:1850. This is based on an industry request and would result in the issuance of no new taxi licenses for approximately the next 10 years based on current population projections for Waterloo Region. It would be a setback for the urbanization and transportation goals of the Region of Waterloo.

The recommendation follows a request from the Taxi Association, which claims their request is the result of current taxi providers experiencing decreasing revenues, a situation which they curiously expect will worsen as the population continues to rise. They justify this concern by citing “newer communities such as Deer Ridge, Eastbridge, and Doon South [which] have 2 or 3 cars in the driveways,” concluding that “these areas do not use taxi service very much.”

However, thanks to the reurbanization policy in Waterloo Region, the next 100,000 residents to this community will live much more urban lifestyles than current residents in the Region do now. In fact, the Region is already making excellent progress towards its urbanization and intensification targets. Taxis are a vital part of urban transport and are important in ensuring that more urban and less car-dependent lifestyles are easy and enjoyable for residents. Restricting access to taxis at this point in time runs counter to the rest of the Region’s urbanization goals. Simply put, the next 100,000 residents to this community will be more likely – not less – to require taxi services than the 500,000 residents before them.

In order to support the Region’s urbanization goals, it is important to ensure that the barriers to entry into the taxi market are not prohibitive to new service providers, ones who will seek to compete in our rapidly urbanizing community by delivering innovations and improvements in service. Conversely, decreasing the per-capita number of taxis on the road only serves to restrict customer choice, and only benefits those who currently hold licenses by making those licenses an artificially high-priced commodity for those who are eager to enter the market. Reducing the taxi-cab ratios serves a rent-seeking interest of existing taxi companies, but does nothing to benefit the residents of this Region.

More taxis means greater competition, which leads to better innovation, and ultimately more and better choices for residents. The Tri-Cities Transport Action Group asks that the Region of Waterloo Council should disregard the Taxi Association’s request to reduce the taxi-cab ratio, in the interest of increasing, rather than limiting, transportation choice, and in order to continue to support its own densification and urbanization goals.

Consultations will be held at the following dates and locations:

Thursday, November 15
4 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Kitchener Waterloo Bilingual School
Gymnasium
600 Erb St. W., Waterloo

Tuesday, November 20
12 p.m. to 4 p.m.
University of Waterloo
William G. Davis Computer Research Centre
Room 1301
200 University Ave. W., Waterloo

Wednesday, November 21
4 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Waterloo Mennonite Brethren Church
Chapel
245 Lexington Rd., Waterloo

Thursday, November 22
12 p.m. to 4 p.m.
Wilfrid Laurier University
Fred Nichols Campus Centre
Concourse
75 University Ave. W., Waterloo

You may also view these events on TriTAG’s Public Events Calendar and copy them to your own calendar.

You can preview the service changes beginning on page 117 of this Planning and Works Agenda [PDF]

[UPDATE] More information about the consultations can be found here on the GRT Site

However, this is not the case. You can often see two or three buses coming one after another down Queen, which means there are up to 16 minutes of no scheduled service at times. We should expect 6.5 minutes of delay based on the number of buses, making taking the bus marginally faster on average. But because of the variations in bus headways, it takes almost twice as long as walking at worst. I can’t simply step out my door and know whether walking or taking the bus at any given time would be faster. Clearly, the bus schedule is not very optimal for wait times near my home. If the departure times between buses travelling to Charles Street were equally spaced, rather than all arriving at once, the bus network could be made more efficient and predictable, for the same amount of service and expense.

The “cut the waits” challenge

I decided to investigate a little further, to see if there were other areas of Waterloo Region where this was a problem. My criterion for ’sub-optimal’ scheduling is that the maximum wait time between successive buses at a stop is higher than if those same buses were evenly spaced in the schedule. Thankfully, the Region provides its transit schedule as open data. Using this data, I created a map of inefficient scheduling from a user’s perspective:

Sub-optimal bus wait times in Waterloo Region. Click map for interactive version.

The map shows the discrepancy between the worst wait time at a stop and what the wait time would be if buses were evenly spaced. The longest extra waiting time (shown in red) is more than 17 minutes, which tends to be in areas where there are multiple routes at different frequencies.

The suburbs perform surprisingly well in this map compared to the cores. Suburban stops tend to be served by only a single route, and while infrequent, they’re generally scheduled with consistent headways. Transit hubs have many routes going in and out of them, and have more potential for suboptimal scheduling. (There’s a reason for why they’re scheduled the way they are, but we’ll get to that below.) There’s some correlation between sub-optimal wait times and bus frequency, because that’s where buses of different schedules overlap.

While a ‘perfect’ schedule with no local sub-optimalities may be impossible to achieve, it’s clear there are many places where shifting certain routes by a few minutes would help even out the schedule.

Making the connection

Why do the bus schedules have so much sub-optimal waiting for users? Hubs and pulses.

Hubs are places where many buses meet and from which they radiate out like spokes. They make good sense in low-density areas with centres of interest, which is what our Region has been like in the past. (Though they also compound the already convoluted nature of our road network!)  This is why you have a lot of different routes covering the same streets – there are only so many streets that can be driven into a given hub, and dedicating particular streets saves on bus shelters and intersection design. With frequent services like the 7 and 200 iXpress, we are building a ’spine’ style transit system, but unfortunately we aren’t finishing the job with ‘ribs’ when we leave this hub-and-spoke system intact. Current cross-corridor transit leaves something to be desired.

Pulses are what transit agencies do to try to improve connections for infrequent services. It’s part of why you see buses idle for several minutes at Charles Street Station and then all leave one after another. They all try to arrive, wait, and then leave around the same time so you can make your transfer. This is great in theory, though less so in practice. If your first bus is delayed a few minutes (as often happens), there are no buses for you to take until the next pulse, which here generally means waiting another 30 minutes (or an hour in the evenings).

The combination of hubs and pulses create this bunching of buses I witness from my window on Queen Street. The good news is, it doesn’t have to stay this way. The Light Rail line will strengthen our spine system, and additional iXpress services will begin to form the ribs. If the Region can accelerate its implementation of more frequent service bus lines, pulsing could either be adapted to match rapid transit stops, or deemed unnecessary as the next train is only a few minutes away. I really hope we don’t retain our old GRT scheduling quirks as this new network emerges. GRT and Waterloo Region are slowly moving beyond the small-town thinking of pulses and hubs towards building a modern high-frequency urban transit network, but they could be doing it faster.

Mike Boos is a member of the Tri-cities Transport Action Group. Visit his website to learn more about how the map in this post was created.

Image of the planned Highway 7 route taken from a presentation made to Regional council in 2011

However, is the construction of a highway at an unknown cost (>400 Million according this presentation) best way to meet travel needs on this corridor? TriTAG’s position is that before a new highway corridor is constructed between Kitchener and Guelph, less invasive approaches to this issue involving transit need to be investigated.

While there is rail service between Guelph and Kitchener, there is plenty of room for improvement. A VIA Rail currently costs $20 one-way ($40 round trip) between the two cities while GO costs $6.65 ($13.30 round trip). However, the majority of these trips however are not timed well for someone who would travel between the two cities.

GO Trains leave for Toronto at 5:52 and 7:00 AM for Toronto and arrive back in Kitchener at 6:42 and 7:42 PM. [link to the timetable] For a person travelling to Guelph for business from Kitchener these early morning departures are not convenient. And while is is possible to get from Guelph to Kitchener or vice-versa on a GO bus for a day trip, the trip will take more than an hour and a half via the 401, and will require a transfer at a park-and-ride lot at Aberfoyle.

Greyhound provides the only direct bus service between Kitchener and Guelph via Highway 7, maintaining a monopoly on this route. With a travel time of 40 minutes does offer a competitive alternative to diving (which takes ~30 minutes). However at the cost of $11.88 (web fare) or $13.20 (on the platform) a round-trip on Greyhound can cost in excess of $25. Additionally, with trips that leave every 2 hours on average (longer on weekends), there is a lot of potential travel demand that is not being served.

Transit Strategies in both the Region of Waterloo and Guelph recommend the implementation of conventional bus service and eventual bi-directional DMU rail service between Kitchener, Guelph and Cambridge, however there are no solid plans to begin this type of service in the near future.

The current highway 7 proposal dates back to 1989 and was originally submitted in 1997. The plan was placed into a review period and finally approved on March 21, 2007. The development if this plan largely predates provincial legislation such as the Places to Grow Plan and local plans like the Regional Growth Management Strategy which put a strong emphasis on solidifying the countryside line an intensifying urban areas

While it is argued that the current highway is unsafe, there is much more that can be done to the existing highway corridor to improve it’s safety such as installing traffic signals, paved shoulders, rumble strips, or a concrete median.

There are also a number of less-costly measures that can be done to increase the existing capacity of the road network, such as expanding the existing 2-lane roadway to 4 lanes, providing left turn refuge at crossroads, and making local road improvements at the existing Highway 7/Conestoga Expressway junction.

If it is deemed that a new highway between Kitchener and Guelph in the manner that is proposed is absolutely necessary, then alternate financing needs to be investigated, in particular the implementation of tolls. Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation is currently in the process of acquiring land to begin construction of an eastward extension of Highway 407 in 2015. This road is planned to be a provincially-owned extension of the existing toll route. Tolls have also been discussed as a source of revenue on Toronto’s municipally-owned highways. Road pricing can be variable to match demand so that the heaviest tolls are collected during peak use and lesser tolls at times where there is less use. Tolling in this manner would allow optimal use of the new highway at all times.

Before a full highway is constructed, meaningful transit service designed with the intention of removing vehicles from Highway 7 needs to exist where none currently does. Additionally, there are number of less expensive alternatives that would improve safety and flow on the two lane roadway without necessitating the construction of a new highway corridor at the hundreds of millions.  While Greyhound, VIA, and GO do run service between to two cities, the expensive, infrequent, slow, and unintegrated nature of their service makes it useless for those who would otherwise consider taking it as an alternative to driving.

It was inevitable. The expert panel even predicted it. The media’s response to the provincial coroner’s Cycling Death Review released in June has been to focus on just one of the fourteen recommendations – namely, that Ontario investigate implementing a mandatory helmet law for cyclists of all ages. This review studied the deaths of 129 people on bicycles in Ontario from 2006-2010, to determine the leading causes of cycling-related fatalities and how they might be prevented.

The helmet law recommendation, and the ensuing media coverage, does disservice to the otherwise excellent report which declares that all cycling-related deaths are preventable. It’s not that wearing a helmet isn’t a good idea (it can be), but requiring one has unintended consequences, as even some members of the coroner’s expert panel point out in the report. Places like Australia that have implemented mandatory helmet laws have subsequently observed dramatic decreases in the number of cyclists, often with a negative impact on safety outcomes. One of the most well-understood factors in cyclist welfare is safety in numbers. This becomes much more difficult to achieve when barriers to cycling have been raised. This also leads to less healthy lifestyles; as Dr. Thomas J. DeMarco writes in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, “helmet laws save a few brains but destroy many hearts.”

(Photo: aiisuki via Flickr)

The Dutch have a cycling fatality rate that is less than half the rate we have here in Canada, despite the fact that almost no one wears helmets there. What’s their secret to safe cycling? An abundance of protected cycling infrastructure can take you anywhere and makes cruising on your bike as convenient as driving your car. Strong laws keep motorists responsible for keeping an eye out for cyclists and giving them adequate space. Safe cycling education is integrated into primary school, which most children travel to via bicycle. All this was part of a deliberate strategy to protect cyclists and make the Netherlands more resilient to fluctuating oil prices. Their success in encouraging 30% of all trips to be made by bicycle comes from actually preventing collisions, not by imagining that collisions have to be inevitable and that the best defence is a piece of foam and plastic.

Provincial action on eleven of the fourteen recommendations from the coroner’s review would nudge us closer to the safer Dutch model. These include a ‘complete streets’ strategy that would require roads to be designed to give pedestrians and cyclists equal consideration as well as development of an Ontario Cycling Plan. Traffic and municipal laws should be clarified to make laws concerning cycling easier to enforce, hopefully to include actual consequences for negligent driving. A long-overdue one-metre passing law is proposed that would obligate motorists to respect the space around cyclists. Education at schools and at all levels about cycling safely and inclusion of road sharing in driver training is also recommended. These steps would put Ontario on the road (or is it perhaps a complete street?) to a safer cycling future.

Let’s not repeat the failed Australian experiment with mandatory helmet laws or allow the helmet debate to sidetrack more effective measures. Instead, let’s help our provincial and municipal leaders implement the recommendations that will actually make a difference in creating safer streets and lead to more healthy and sustainable transportation.

Mike Boos is a member of the Tri-cities Transport Action Group (TriTAG) who still wears a helmet when he rides his bike, mostly because he thinks it makes his hair look better in the morning. His loving wife disagrees. Follow him on Twitter at @mikeboos

With the exception of that one recommendation, the rest need serious consideration by all levels of government; in particular the implementation of a complete streets approach to road design, minimum passing distance for bicycles, and increased focus on educating drivers on how to share road space with people who ride bicycles.

The full report can be found here.

Today, the Ontario Coroner’s Office has released its Cycling Deaths Review (HTML / PDF). I have not read through it yet, but it is supposed to claim that all the cycling deaths it looked at were preventable. It also recommends a mandatory helmet law for everyone, which is deeply problematic if the goal is making cycling a safer and larger part of the transportation system. We’ll have more on this later.

Tomorrow is Committee day for the Region of Waterloo. Agendas are always posted here at around 4pm on the preceding Friday. Typically, most issues and reports go to initially to the appropriate Committee, where motions are made, to be finalized at the full Council meeting on Wednesday of the following week. (See Council agendas.) As the standing committees are currently composed of all the councillors, the decisions are effectively made at the committee level, with rare exceptions.

At Administration & Finance, the Region is poised to begin charging its employees the costs of parking at offices where parking is valuable or within/near the urban growth areas. The fees would be phased in 25% per year, starting a year from now.

The Region is beginning its budget process for 2013 already. Budget Committee will meet, and the initial proposal for the budget includes the annual increase for the Regional Transportation Master Plan (including LRT), cost reductions to bring down the base budget, and the implementation of smart card technology on the GRT fleet.

Planning & Works is where most transportation issues are dealt with. One of the items is the reconstruction of Northfield Drive between Davenport Road and University Avenue. Many alternatives are considered, but the “preliminary preferred” one includes road widening (of course), sidewalks / multi-use paths, and on-road bike lanes. There will be a public consultation centre on Thursday, June 28, from 5pm to 8pm at 550 Chesapeake Drive in Waterloo. There will also be a comment period where you are welcome to suggest alternatives to widening, and better cycling infrastructure than on-road bike lanes.

As an aside, the issue with all these 20-year traffic forecasts that lead to widening recommendations is that they assume traffic will continue to grow as it used to do. Traffic is no longer growing in this way of its own accord. But if we keep building bigger roads, we will induce demand for more driving and make streets less friendly for other uses.

Consulting work is planned to evaluate the market for various potential uses at the King/Victoria transit hub, in advance of a public-private partnership to develop the site. It’s being planned as a high-density mixed-use development, not at all just a train and bus station.

The Region has determined it needs more land for the LRT at Central Fresh Market in midtown Kitchener, and plans to begin expropriation proceedings to make sure it has the land in time. It’s pretty clear that further land takings will involve demolition of the current building.

There is a staff recommendation to add the Region’s LRT vehicle requirement to Metrolinx’s existing order with Bombardier, and to return to Council with a contract. This is in lieu of lumping the vehicle procurement into the rest of the construction and operation contract, and seems to be a prudent way to get vehicles on time and at a reasonable price. One interesting aspect is the proposal for joint pilot testing of vehicles with Metrolinx, on the Waterloo Spur. Waterloo Region’s LRT is planned to be in operation by 2017, which is earlier than any of Metrolinx’s LRT lines for Toronto.

The Region will host the 2014 annual meeting of the Canadian Institute of Transportation Engineers. Hopefully it will use this as an opportunity to develop some better cycling infrastructure and be able to show that off to engineers nationwide.