Wednesday night, the city held a public information meeting public input meeting Ideas Expo “shape your city” exercise, to do something or another about the proposal to put two roundabouts on North Park Street.
Does that sound cynical? Well, it is. I’m not sure what the point of these things are. Used to be, we could just stick an open microphone in the middle of a room, and a bunch of old cranky dudes would get up and rant like Abe Simpson, and city officials would dutifully take copious notes, assure the crowd their input was valued and would be considered, and then ignore it all and do what they were going to do anyway.
Nowadays, however, they still go and do what they were going to do anyway, but first they go through this elaborate routine of paying some dude to play woo-woo music (think: something along the lines of what a massage therapist plays, light ethereal guitar music, Celtic lilts or anything with fiddles), breaking the crowd into little groups where they draw pictures on post-it notes, pay a bunch of hippies to be “coordinators” and make rhyming couplets to hip hop music that clashes with the dude playing woo-woo music and, above all, don’t let any cranky old dude get anywhere near a microphone, all in the name of “taking you seriously,” or whatever the buzz phrase is this week.
The woo-woo express is epitomized by Tim Merry, who billed a hefty $400,000 for the convention centre consultations, and sure enough, the city hired Merry’s assistant Rachel Dera to woo-woo us into roundabout complacency.
Understand that we’re now eight or nine steps beyond the 2009-era “World Cafe” woo-woo-y-ness. It’s hard to keep up with the lingo, and even potential woo-wooers are getting lost in the verbal inanity as they try to out-woo-woo each other. None other than former city planner Andy Filmore recently coined the phrase “Ideas Expo” because “world cafe” is so last decade, and “public input meeting” is like wearing running shoes with your knee-length skirt.
I can’t witness these things anymore without thinking there’s a gigantic gravy train, with connected insiders getting the big consulting bucks. It’s all a big joke on the taxpayer: we and ours will rake it in, all while pretending to give a shit what the public thinks, then we’ll run over to the Shoe and run up the expense account.
The exercise around roundabouts is ridiculous on all fronts, Sure, the insiders are laughing at the public while simultaneously ignoring the public. But the public is ridiculous, too, split between those who are orgasmically in love with roundabouts because roundabouts are the 2010s woo-woo dernier cri, and those who absolutely hate roundabouts because roundabouts are an attack on the freedom of stopping at a traffic light, or some such.
Let’s be clear: the roundabout plan for North Park is completely sane, and the most logical solution to the disaster that are the two intersections—Agricola/Cunard to the north, and Rainnie/Cogswell to the south. Those intersections are bad for drivers, and they’re doubly bad for pedestrians. It’s hard to see how they could be made any worse than they are now, and even a badly implemented roundabout plan would be an improvement. The trick is to get the best design.
I hope that city officials do ignore all the public input, and just build what they think best. I fear they’ll listen to some of the input and screw it all up.
City officials’ presentations Wednesday were overly long and full of touchy-feely buzzwords and such (you can watch them here), but they seem to be designing a sensible set of intersections. In all probability we’ll end up with single-lane roundabouts, with pedestrian crossings that are 10,000 times safer than what we have now. Bike lanes might be built into them, but probably shouldn’t be, as the wider widths to accommodate the bike lanes will cause cars to go too fast through the roundabouts. North Park will be reduced to one lane in each direction, and the intersection with Cornwallis Street will be simplified, especially for pedestrians, who will have an island in between the two traffic lanes. With the reduced street width, a lot of land will revert back to the Common.
It’s all a very sensible plan. I just wish we could get it straight up without the woo-woo crap piled on. Roundabouts are a regular, normal feature of European life. Being from Europe doesn’t make them better, necessarily, and it’s annoying that anything European gets instant buy-in from the woo-woo crowd, but you really can’t ignore 300 million people navigating through roundabouts with a whole lot fewer problems than we have here in North America, without the roundabouts.
What explains the woo-woo? Mostly, it’s just the normal bureaucratic obsession with the latest buzzwords and processes creeping into public meetings. But this roundabout case may be an extreme version of woo-woo in reaction to the unhinged anti-roundabout crowd. Maybe if we play enough calming woo-woo music, batter about a bunch of nonsense about “consultation” and otherwise befuddle the Abe Simpsons with post-it notes, they’ll be confused enough to not mount a realistic challenge to our plans.
That unhinged opposition to roundabouts, incidentally, comes from the reality that the Halifax area has a horrific history with two supposed roundabouts. These weren’t actual roundabouts, but really just poorly designed gigantic traffic circles that confused everyone, and were probably more dangerous than simply hanging a bunch of traffic lights.
We all know about the Armdale Rotary, recently renamed the Armdale Roundabout. The problem with the Rotary iteration was that it was far, far too big, with too big of a diameter of the circle. A tighter circle forces drivers to slow down, nearly, but not completely, to a stop; the wider the circle, then, the more dangerous. The Roundabout iteration is an improvement, but even that is still too big. I’m told that when the engineers were re-designing the thing, they wanted to make it a much tighter circle, but realized the political opposition was too great for that. So the Armdale Roundabout is a compromise, the halfway point between a really shitty Rotary and a well-designed roundabout. So not great, but not horrible either.
The other “roundabout” that long-time locals are familiar with is this monstrosity:
That’s the Mic Mac Rotary, which was an engineering, traffic, social and aesthetic disaster. It too was far too large in diameter, and stupidly put in the middle of a freeway, filling in a lake. People were right to hate the thing. Thankfully, in the early 1990s it was pulled out and replaced with the so-called Parclo we have now, which is still confusing to people coming upon it for the first time, but a vast improvement all the same.
But the roundabouts planned for North Park are not anything like those two historic disasters. I’m confident they’ll be properly designed, and once built a big improvement over the horror show intersections we have now.
I beg and implore the unhinged anti-roundabout crowd to trust me on this, if for no other reason than so the woo-wooers will move on to their next project, and so public officials can get back to ignoring the public and doing their jobs.
Assuming the unhinged crowd doesn’t derail the proposal, the two North Park Street roundabouts will be approved by council, probably later this year. The idea is to replace the existing intersections in the next three to five years.
Related Stories
Video debate: Is Halifax’s crush on roundabouts good news?
This article appears in Feb 28 – Mar 6, 2013.
The fact that roundabouts are the flavor of the month right now tells me all I need to know. I do not want them, because they don’t work and we’ll be stuck with them for the next 50 years.
They work wonderfully, actually. They’ve been using them in many parts of the world for decades—hardly flavour of the month. (They’re better than standard intersections: If you miss your exit you just go around and there it comes again.)
The Mic Mac Rotary is awful, however, but that’s due, as Bousquet says, to terrible design.
good commentary
Only concern with North American roundabouts is the length of our trucks … but that is only a slight scale change.
Umm … about being unhinged, there’s clearly something wrong with me ’cause I never had a problem with the old Armdale and Mic Mac Rotaries. Liked both, especially the Armdale one. It was superior to the present version.
Brilliant, funniest column I have read anywhere in the past month.
The Merry clowns should be run out of town. We have a low income housing crisis and my taxes are pissed away on this ‘Merry’ nonsense.
Tim is usually right but I think he is wrong in this case. I’m extremely familiar with the Armdale roundabout and it sucks for bikes and pedestrians as well as for cars at certain times. The Larry Uteck roundabouts are just totally ridiculous and unnecessary. North Park and Cunard is just a regular 4 way intersection and there is no need for this. North Park and Cogswell is a five way so might be appropriate but unequal volumes of traffic makes it a bad candidate and there really isn’t much room either. I wish the traffic people would just look at the accident data and come up with a cheap solution to the major problems at an intersection instead of just wanting to change everything.
I love reading about that haiku spouting ferry, i mean merry. 400k? not bad, dude.
As for the roundary, I’ve been biking and driving through it (mostly biking) for nigh on 20 years now and the recent changes have been a massive improvement on its efficiency and safety (from a cyclists point of view). Take the lane, dude.
I like roundabouts, though I can’t really see the huge problem with what’s there.
But the post sounds to me as if Tim is ranting at the biggest microphone he can find, and would much rather be ranting than having a real conversation with anyone, woo-woo or otherwise.
Those roundabouts make a lot of sense from an automobile POV (especially the Cogswell one). I do worry about pedestrians and cyclists though. Roundabouts tend to be really pad for pedestrians because drivers are focused on finding a gap in the traffic rather than looking at the crosswalk in front of them. The solution to that is to have the crosswalks far before the roundabout, but then that greatly increases the distance pedestrians have to go to get around the roundabout.
As for cyclists, I’m not sure there’s a good way to get them through a roundabout (especially pertinent in light of discussions to make Agricola a bike corridor). Perhaps a physically separated bike lane?
Perhaps I’ll come back and chime in on the public consultation part in a little while…
“Cynical” isn’t really the word. Cynical implies a measure of clarity and intelligence. “Silly” is more like it…Mr. Bousquet’s rant here is so full of contradictions I don’t know where to start. You don’t like the old fashioned “complain into the mic” approach…but we should go back to it? You found the process unpalatable… but it was fully effective and convinced most everyone, even you, that the course of action being taken is sane and sensible? Public officials should go back to “ignoring the public”? Really? That’s pretty dark. We live in a time of democratic crisis where the public feels utterly disengaged by civic process and smothered by so called professionals doing their jobs from on high. Tim Merry and his crew are revolutionizing, or more like restoring, democracy. A process like the roundabout one was immensely effective in delivering public education on the facts and realities of the issue without just info-dumping. The convention centre consultations made a significant impact on the final designs of the centre. Would you feel better if the crew wore suits and ties and played musak during the breaks rather than hiring local talent?
World Cafe and its cadre of methods represent a profound shift in the way we interact as a society. They emphasize process at least as much as result, listening as much as speaking. When it comes to society, if we’re going to take steps toward an interested public, we need to examine the actual experience and process of being a society, not just stand on the sidelines and bitch.
I keep wondering why we don’t just let the urban planners, engineers and architects decide what the city requires w.r.t civil engineering… Everything else seems like a waste of funds to me.
This “woo-woo” story has single-handedly convinced me to never attend a city meeting. Yeesh, sounds awful.
Link to the urbantoronto site gets me malware warnings, fyi.
Anything has to be better than those two clusterfuck intersections, especially the one next to the Citadel.
If collaboration, public engagement, and participatory democracy are not Mr Bousquet’s thing, that’s OK. He is entitled to his particular bias. However, for him to slander others and use blatant untruths to try to validate his aggression just seems small-minded and unkind, not to mention dishonest. His abusive attitude and condescending language will not help to create a decent society. To do that we need more kind, insightful and courageous people like Tim Merry.
No surprise, government and city employs have been drinking the Tim Merry kool-aid for a few years. Same shit, no results, always something about ‘engagement’ while ringing wind chimes. If you think anything he’s doing is new or revolutionary you’ve been in one too many drum circles and you’re wasting everyone’s time. Can they please find someone who does actual work?!
This would be an improvement to what is there. I know it’s completely against the culture of NOva Scotia to improve things (as it results in less complaining); but sometimes you have to move forward.
Now, don’t you worry Tim… there will be plenty of other things to be a down-trodden victims of in the future!
“I hope that city officials do ignore all the public input, and just build what they think best. I fear they’ll listen to some of the input and screw it all up.”
This does not sound like you, Tim. Really? This is basically the Father-Knows-Best attitude that has kept Halifax a provincial backwater and helped build things like a new convention centre 10 years before we needed it. Geez.
in hindsight, a decade later, and thee two roundabouts are amazing.. the traffic flow up north park and onto agricola is seamless!!