Tag Archives: traffic

Traffic flow

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I’ve had a couple days of long highway drives in Los Angeles and despite significantly more traffic than in Vancouver or Toronto, I have to say that traffic here flows very well. Two things make the flow here unique compared to what I see in Canada. First of all, highway speed limits here are more of a suggestion than a limit. When the traffic opens up the speed goes up. Tonight, at one point I was going in excess of the speed limit and for about 10 minutes and many cars passed me, while I didn’t catch up or pass any. Even when traffic is heavy it seems every lane will travel at speeds seldom seen on highways I’m used to driving on back home.

Another thing that works far better here are lane changes. There seems to be an acceptance of lane changes here that is far more polite and efficient compared to anywhere else I’ve driven. I’ve seen, and in one case actually been, a car needing to cross 2 lanes to get to an exit in heavy traffic, and with indicators on, cars make way for the move.

In Vancouver, that would be responded to in two very different ways. First of all, there would be an angry horn blast and/or the person in the lanes you are trying to get into would speed up to squeeze you out of the lane change. Here, I have seen countless lane changes with neither horn beep nor accelerated blocking.

After hearing about the driving here, and stories of road rage in LA, I’d say, ‘Don’t believe the hype’! The reality is that I’d rather drive here than on any busy highway in Canada. Maybe I’m just in the honeymoon stage and living here would be different, but my sister has been here for 20 years and she’s often told me this is the case. Sounds a bit weird to say, but Vancouver and Toronto drivers could learn a thing or two from spending a little time in LA traffic.

Densification and congestion

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Snuck away to Whistler for a couple nights. It’s funny how different parts of the drive can feel longer or shorter depending on if you are heading to a destination or coming home. What’s not funny is how much longer drives like this take these days.

What used to be an under 2 hour drive is now at least 2.5 hours, and longer if you hit bad traffic, like we did coming home. Vancouver roadways were not designed for the current population, and as more people move to the lower mainland, with high rises going up everywhere, it’s only going to get a lot worse.

I’m not sure what the solution is? The public transportation routes are not ideal to go car-less and every time I get on the road I feel like traffic is heavier. It makes me appreciate how lucky I am to have a seven minute commute that only involves three traffic lights. I wouldn’t want to be a regular commuter in the suburbs of Vancouver.

Infrastructure as Afterthought

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I sent this in an email to my MLA:

I want to express my concerns over infrastructure in Coquitlam. Specifically, we are seeing considerable growth in already busy corridors: North Road and Como Lake, Ioco Road, Austin Avenue and soon Rocky Point. What used to be single family homes are now multiplex townhouses and highrises. These are already some of the busiest roads in Coquitlam and now we are significantly increasing the density and thus adding a lot more traffic. It seems that supporting this added traffic is an afterthought. 

For example, just east of North Road on Como Lake are two streets, Tyndall and Clearmont, that have added a large number of people going to those streets, and they both lack left turn lanes. This is already a traffic slow down and it will only intensify as projects complete and new residences are added. These are just two examples of how traffic flow in our cities is going to drastically worsen as density increases. I can only imagine how bad traffic will get in the coming years if there isn’t a plan to deal with this sooner rather than later. 

I understand the need for increased density. I just wonder why it always seems that road infrastructure is an afterthought? Sure, you can add bike lanes, and promote public transit, but when you add hundreds or thousand people to a community, roads and infrastructure need to be proactively considered rather than trying to fix this issue as an afterthought.

Stuck in traffic

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I soooo love my 7 minute commute to work! Today I had to drive into town and back, and the 40 minute drive took me almost an hour both ways. Sure I’m only talking about a mere 20 minute addition each way, but that’s 2 hours of driving in traffic.

I was alone and listening to a podcast one way and had company the other way, so it was my boring… but I am spoiled with the fact that I rarely have to drive in heavy traffic and I hated it.

Send me on a 3 hour drive with minimal traffic, no problem. But put me in heavy traffic for an hour and I’m questioning my life choices. I don’t know how people can do this five days a week.

Did I mention how much I like my work commute? I feel so lucky to have it!

Standstill

The snow came later than expected. The temperature drop was expected, but the timing was perfect to create chaos in a city with limited snow removal capability.

I live on a hill, and last night my wife and I couldn’t get home. She spent hours stuck in traffic. I was at work quite late and when I left I made 3 attempts to get up the hill. The first and third attempts were blocked by firefighters, redirecting traffic away from the hill. The second attempt involved watching cars slide down two different hills that I was forced to avoid, finally finding my way back down to the main road my school is on.

I did a u-turn at the last attempt and ended up going to a Pho restaurant a block from my school for a warm, slow dinner. Then the main hill that I use going directly up from my school was open and I had an uneventful drive home. That’s not nearly as bad an experience as my wife being in the car for over 3 hours, mostly standing still and waiting, and finally having to go several kilometres out of her way to approach our house from the opposite end.

Still, we were more lucky than the cars that slid uncontrollably into each other on some of the hills we couldn’t get up. (That’s the hill that would have been my 4th attempt to go up, had I not u-turned and headed back to my school).

Our neighbourhood is very hilly, and we end up having events like this once or twice a year. What brings our city to a standstill though is not snow, it’s ice. It’s conditions where the snow comes, it gets compacted by cars, and then the temperature fluctuates above then below zero to liquify and then refreeze the compacted snow into sheets of ice. Hills, ice, and traffic don’t play well together.

This morning I won’t be trying to drive down the hill I came up last night. I’ll drive over to the main road that I know will be cleared since it is a major artery for traffic… (even though that’s the hill that had the most havoc last night). I’ll get to work earlier than usual and make sure the parking lot is safe. But I’m lucky that my school is on the bottom of the hill, closer to the river, and likely not as icy and snow-covered as some of our schools that get much more snow than us. Hopefully the chaos of last night is over.

Major congestion

Yesterday I shared how malls are empty and said, “... all malls won’t die just the stand-alone ones. The newest form of densification in cities is to build a mall or commercial level shopping below high rises…”

Today I’m stuck in Traffic on the 401, the busiest highway in North America, and I wonder how more densification will affect this? Will these new vertical communities encourage less commuting or will the sheer volume of people overwhelm our transportation infrastructure?

It will depend on developers. Will they develop so that the pulse of our cities is pedestrian? Or will we continue to live inside smaller and smaller condos and use our car as the majority of our outside our apartment experiences. I hope to see more outdoor spaces designed for pedestrians to travel and congregate, but real estate is money and most developers care more about profit than liveability, even though liveability is a huge selling point.

Other countries are building communities that don’t require commuting, how much longer will we be focused on cars and congestion instead of cafés and places for pedestrians to shop, eat, and congregate?

Been there, done that…

via sports.yahoo.com

Well, not on a highway, but we’ve had some interesting adventures while here in China. The weird thing about events like this is the lack of horn-blowing from oncoming traffic. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of horns going off here, but not for things like this, or for a left-turn into oncoming traffic.

Instead a horn comes from:

1) A driver passing on the left in the lane of oncoming traffic, to let the car on their right know to squeeze over as it is being passed.

2) A driver passing a slower car that’s on the right and then making a right-hand turn in front of the car just passed.

3) A driver passing two cars, on a two lane road, down the middle white line of the two lanes between the cars.

Which one of these has happened to me?

All of the above!