People speed on Scott and Savoline, that’s no news to residents living on these streets. What we, residents, cannot figure out is why traffic calming devices were not built on these roads.  Afterall, if you design a wide road like Scott (or Savoline) then (some) people will drive on them like they’re on Autobahn. 

These ideas are strictly for residential streets (like Scott and Savoline).  I don’t know which ones of these I support, but here are some ideas I have seen in cities I’ve lived in (I lived in 8 different cities in a 7 year period after my wife & I first got married):

• Bends that are safe at speed limit  (image from Seattle)
  
  
• Median with trees. Southern MD and Washington, DC (affluent areas) does this really well. I lived in a community of small townhomes in Gaithersburg, MD and even there the median had three rows of trees. This also prevents people from passing from beyond the solid yellow line.
  This shot is from Maryland (this was done on an old road, so the trees in the median aren’t grown yet):
  

• Create a physical barrier after a few parking spots. For Scott & Savoline that means people won’t be able to pass from the right.  Yet another from MD:
   
• Traffic circle (again, I am told by people that it works. I hated them in DC and Maryland and VA did not have them. Seattle neighbourhoods do have these though and there they were okay. This picture is from Seattle:
   
  
• Lonnnngg speed bumps (not conventional ones). Here’s a picture from Bellevue, WA of a speed bump that does nothing at reasonable speed but does hurt at a higher speed:
  

• Raised intersection that work as the bullet above. This is a raised intersection from Gaithersburg, MD. It also works fine at normal speed (costs < $15K to build):
  

• Finally, do not create long parallel neighbourhood roads that become bypasses for real streets (eg. people taking Scott Blvd to avoid driving on Bronte / Tremaine and Derry). These streets should be for people living in the community, not for people going from one major street to another.

These are some ideas.  Not all will work here. But they should be considered and implemented so builders like Mattamy or Fieldgate builds them when they first construct residential roads (so the Town doesn’t have to build them later). 

I recently watched a documentary on ancient civilizations.  One conclusion I walked away with is this: take a community’s people away, and its buildings and infrastructure will turn into ruins.  Leave its people and they will build another town, often better. 

Municipalities spend a lot of time talking about infrastructure.  But what about its people?  Economic growth (and resulting property values) is directly tied with a community`s ability to retain its residents.

Are people paying a premium to move into your community or are they there because they cannot afford a home anywhere else?

One of my main goal is to make Ward 8 (West Milton) the most desirable part of Milton.  People should not move here for cheap houses, they should be willing to a premium to be here.

Am I the only one who is annoyed at the lack of right-turn-lanes in Milton?

I often have to go south towards Derry.  It doesn’t matter whether I take Thompson or Ontario, neither have a dedicated right-turn lane. 

The image above shows that there is more than enough clearance for a right turn lane.  Why, oh planners, do you insist on not putting them in?  I often find myself stuck on red lights behind just one car waiting to turn right.

Annise Parker, the newly elected Mayor of Houston, said the local office was the highest office.  She is right.  The paradox is that people vote in federal and provincial elections but they ignore local offices. But if your shower doesn’t have water in the morning and you are stuck in a traffic jam because the traffic light isn’t working then who the heck cares about anything federal and provincial politicians do. 

Look around, most things you are impacted by is decided by your municipality (from the transit service to the roads you drive on to local of sidewalks, traffic lights and stop signs to police & fire service to … well, you got the idea). 

Organizations without vision lose focus and fail.  Vision is more important than strategy.  If you have a clear vision then you will eventually attract the right strategy.

Milton’s vision is “Engaging, Balance, Connected”.  What does that mean?  What does ‘connected’ mean?  Connected via roads?  Trails? Broadband?  Connected as a community?

It has five goals.  Lets analyze some of them:

Click here to expand the rest of this article

When you ask for my opinion, you are asking for my opinion.  You are not asking for right answers.  I may not have them.  I do have views on things.  I am wrong from time to time.  Some of my blog posts state facts (Category:Information) while others are my opinions (Category:Opinion). 

There would be fewer disagreements in this world if people could differentiate between facts and opinions.  A person can be wrong about a fact, but not about his or her opinion. You can disagree with opinions, but not with facts. 

You already saw my post about the Big Belly, here’s another innovative concept: turbine powered street lights. And dang, they look good too!

Municipalities need to figure out how to reduce the operating cost of street lights.  1% of Milton’s property taxes go towards it.

How is it that a town that created the beautiful downtown Main Street let other parts of Main Street (and all of Steeles Ave) turn into such an eyesore?

Milton just went through an intensification study.  The final report will be available online here.  If executed well, this can do wonders for Milton.  But Milton has gone through other ambitious exercises (Eco Village) with no results.  The key is to make sure that this does not turn into one of those exercises.

My view is that turning Main Street from Bronte to James Snow into the following is potentially a good thing :-

However, I don’t want to see any more of these in Milton:

The study proposes respecting surrounding low-density neighbourhoods by staging heights :-

Another trick is to make sure that zoning is handled well and respected.  Only then can we create walk-able neighbourhoods:

You can see the core urban area map here:

I would personally continue intensification all the way to James Snow, if not further East.  There is a second GO station planned at Trafalgar.  Maintaining a higher population density along Main Street between these stations will help greatly with transit. 

The Thompson / Main GO station is one reason why I don’t think the central library should have gone at the Thompson / Derry intersection. That was an ideal spot for a residential area from where residents could walk to the GO station. 

Now that you have my thoughts on this, what do you think?

I got ready to go to the 7:30pm Council meeting today. At 7:10pm the babysitting deal fell through.  It’s the third Council meeting I had to miss because I could not find babysitters (my wife has classes on Monday nights this semester). 

How hard can it be to stream these meetings online?  Put a $500 camera connected to a computer and stream the video.  Heck I will go set it up for the town. 

It’s 2010!  I was video chatting with family ten years ago.  Talk about being antiquated!

Two pillars of accountability are answerability and enforcement. 

Answerability requires public officials to provide information about their actions and justify them to the public.  This requires both accessibility and transparency.  Some public officials tend to be inaccessible.  Very few ever state their values in writing.  If they are not both accessible and transparent, then they do not wish to be answerable. 

Enforcement implies that an institution responsible for accountability can sanction the offending party or individual.  Often this is absent as well. Except in extreme cases, voters have to wait until the next election.

Democracy cannot function without true accountability.  Even if there is a democratic process, without accountability it’s not a real democracy.  

I am committed to completely accountability.

A web feed (news feed, RSS feed, syndicated feed) allows users to subscribe to frequently updated content. All blogs, all news sites and most personal websites have feeds readers can subscribe to.  It takes the need to frequently check the site away.  You get notified when there’s new content.

Why does milton.ca not have feeds for every subsection (it does for the main page.  Even if you are in a sub-section, you only get RSS for the main page)?  I want to see the list of all registered candidates for the 2010 municipal election. I do not want to have to check the document every day. Instead, I want to be able to subscribe to the feed, so I get notified in my RSS reader (I use Internet Explorer for it) whenever they change that page. 

[Shameless plug: you can subscribe to my RSS feeds by either clicking the feed icon in your browser or by clicking this link, if you use an external application.]

A comment was posted in response to my post: What makes a good councillor.  The main question was:

…what do you think a councillor should do when a group of his/her constituents asks for support for something that is in opposition to his/her principles?

You can read the comment and my response here.

It’s not their views on policies as much as their principles (see here for the difference).  More importantly, a councillor needs to listen to his or her constituents and represent their interests in the Council.  An inaccessible councillor cannot possibly be a good representative. Unfortunately, we have a couple of these in Milton. 

Here is a depressing news related to my previous post on retirement saving.  An RBC survey found that only 35% of Canadians will contribute to RRSP in 2009.  Worse, 45% of those above 55 are not doing any retirement planning whatsoever.  Worse yet, 32% of Canadians have not even started saving for retirement yet.

It’s the realm of Federal (or at least Provincial) government but I am a big fan of some forced savings in this case (CPP and Old Age won’t cut it).