Double Blind

The only time I’ve posted comments on Jordan Bateman‘s (councillor in Langley) weblog was about Zero avenue. I’ve linked above to a post where I made a comment. There is an “anonymous” poster that tries to make a straw man argument and an appeal to authority, but I must admit his comment has great emotional appeal (but the argument was garbage). It’s too bad the anonymous poster can’t back up what they have to say with their name. Cold logic mixed in with RCMP press releases of traffic accidents unfortunately does not mix well together – which would put me at a disadvantage – people just like to brush it aside by saying that anybody driving a car that desires to go faster than a snail’s pace must go to the Mission Speedway.

For those that don’t know, zero avenue (or legally known as 0 Ave) goes from South Surrey (just east of the truck crossing that gets you into the US border) to 312 Street (Townline Road) in Abbotsford with just a minor diversion around the 264 Street border crossing. It is 27km long. Its key feature is that it hugs the US-Canada border and thus there is no cross traffic that heads northbound. There are also no traffic lights or stop signs (other than at 264 St) and traffic has right-of-way.

If you desire to get from Richmond to Abbotsford (or vice versa) between the hours of 6:00am to 8:00pm, it is quicker to take zero avenue simply because you avoid the Port Mann bridge and the traffic hell that is inside New Westminster. This can only happen if you can traverse the road at an average speed faster than what you could otherwise do by taking Highway 1 and the Port Mann/Queensborough Bridges. This requires going faster than the posted speed limit on zero avenue. Observe that the distances involved are very similar.

One impediment to this is that Langley has targeted zero avenue for traffic calming. On every “T” intersection, the city has put up a smooth speed bump in an attempt to slow drivers down. Fortunately the bumps are small enough such that, hypothetically speaking, you can take them at about 80km/h without killing the suspension on your vehicle, but they are a pain in the ass to cross at any speed. Also, the speed limit of 50km/h is unreasonable considering that visibility is excellent and that you will have no pedestrians unless if they’re trying to illegally smuggle themselves into the USA or Canada.

With the recent news of an automobile accident on zero avenue, both the RCMP and speed fanatics like to blame speed. Apparently he was going westbound and took one of these speed bumps at a high speed and lost control (and ran into a telephone pole) – in order to lose control he must have been going faster than 100km/h which is insanely fast for the area, faster than what a reasonable driver would do. This is not an isolated case – there are other cases of people getting crashed into. The practical solution is not to enforce low speeds on the road, but rather to get rid of the bumps and raise the speed limit.

The worst condition for any road is to have a bunch of drivers at one speed and another batch at a significantly different speed. It is the differential in speed with respect to other drivers, not the absolute speed, that cause accidents.

Idealists would like to point out that if you enforced a 50km/h speed limit that you would not get as many catastrophic crashes. I will completely agree. In fact, you can completely eliminate crashes by putting concrete barriers so nobody can access the roads. The practical reality that idealists can’t wrap their heads around is that most reasonable people will take their vehicles and drive at a speed they think is safe for the conditions they are in. An important concept in traffic is the 85th percentile speed – having 10 cars going at 80km/h is much safer than having 5 at 40km/h and 5 at 60km/h. It is impossible to stop hot-heads like the ones that decide they can take a speed bump at 120km/h, so they will crash either at Zero ave or if not there, somewhere else.

I will distinguish between correlation and causation. Speed is correlated with accidents – there is no doubt of this. However, what most people get wrong is that speed is not the cause of accidents. The cause of most driving accidents are poor driving decisions, of which speed is one factor. These people will make poor driving decisions regardless of the speed limit.

It reminds me of a story about a tribe that associated having worms in their feces with being healthy. The people that were sick or dying did not have worms. So the obvious conclusion here is that having worms meant that you were healthy. People in the tribe went through the rather disgusting exercise of extracting these worms and trying to infect themselves with it, thinking that if they got the worms they too would be healthy. Because having worms in your feces was correlated with being healthy, it must have caused it as well. Little did the tribes people know that the worms died in sick and dying people because their bodies were too frail to sustain the worms. Likewise for accidents and speeding.

Speed is an easy target simply because it can be measured and the argument made by police and politicians is easy. The Vancouver police department has a traffic division with a budget five times per capita larger than the one in Richmond and they can spend all day generating revenue and press for themselves catching people on Knight Street and not make any impact on traffic statistics. Still, they go on camera and claim they are saving you from everybody else by catching speeders – they are simply raising revenue for themselves. If you’re somebody that has the audacity of saying on camera something similar to what I have written here, you will get hundreds of letters from angry people that were victims of crashes that were correlated with speed.

What should be targeted are bad drivers. Because bad driving is difficult to define in objective terms, this will never be done. However, this is the root cause of most traffic accidents and until we try to address enforcement of proper driving habits, rather than the sole metric of speed, I doubt things will change.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 4th, 2007 and is filed under Best Of, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.