Discussion on BRT proposal by City of Saskatoon

Sections from "Next Door", I was the person that added the following comments:

1) Simulation of our proposed BRT system. I would like our City Council and/or City Managers to do a simulation of traffic flow that will result from the BRT system. Just use Red pylons and Concrete barriers to block off the lane along 8th street or the 25th street bridge and College Ave to simulate lanes reserved for buses only. I predict that we will have complete chaos, but again, it may work just fine. At least by using the simulation we, the tax payers of Canada, have not been drained to find out that what is proposed, will not work but would if it was modified. Sure we may suffer a little while the simulated traffic restrictions are in place but all that is need is to remove the concrete barriers and pylons and we are back to where we are now and millions have not been wasted. Don't jump on me for suggesting this, take your comments to your City Councillor or the Mayor as he seems to be the one pushing this. I can hear his comments right now. But if we don't do it, we will not get the Federal money that will be available. My prediction is that the Federal money will just get us started with a system that doesn't work and to get one that does, there will be no Federal money and the local taxpayers will be responsible for the upgrades that could cost ten times as much as the original. We are not a city like Toronto, Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc. with 5-10 million people and our population cannot support the traffic systems like these large cities.

2) You cannot close all lanes to vehicles and have only BRT lanes as how is the garbage removed and the material and equipment required to build new facilities going to be moved from the industrial area to the work site. You must have transportation routes to allow goods and services to flow both ways into and out of any area. If you have only one lane devoted to vehicle traffic then what happens when a vehicle stalls or breaks down and all traffic is stopped until a tow-truck arrives by backing up the one-way lane to the stalled vehicle. Not a viable solution as more than one lane is required which means at least two lanes each way and that is all that we have at the resent time. This is the first proof that what is proposed will not work unless new lanes are added which means that all property on both sides of any street will be expropriated or purchased for at least 1/2 block on each side of the street. For Example on College Ave you cannot take any land from the University side from the top of the 25th St. Bridge to Cumberland Ave. This means that the complete traffic route must be moved south and all buildings on the south side of College Ave for one block be removed and replaced by a roadway. Since this wide roadway is now the barrier for a pedestrian traffic you have created a worse problem than what we have now. I guess all pedestrian walkways would have to be replaced by overhead walkways like the one that goes from the Campus to Griffith Stadium. At least three additional walkways would be required. Building something at a great expense only to find that it is a failure is not good Engineering and Design it is pure foolishness.

3) I can see that this is the wrong platform for a discussion. I will be taking my comments to a webpage where I can show what the CoS is proposing and also what Calgary has with the LRT/ctrain system. Webpage will be at "https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~aek740/genealogy/Shaw-Arnie/" I created the fire storm and now I will try to copy what I have stated here and the last two that I tried to add but they got lost in the shuffle or whatever. I don't say what Calgary has is correct but here we are planning a BRT route through the center of Preston Crossing shopping Center and the width of the roadway needs to be twice as wide as Circle Drive. This is not feasible.

4) This comment was added but appears to have gotten lost. A single lane associated with either BRT or traffic is not feasible as a minimum of two lanes are required. If a vehicle/Bus is stalled in a lane then there must be a passing lane or the complete system comes to a total grid lock. This means that the present 4 lane(two lanes each way) road now becomes 8 lanes or twice as wide as the present. This may sound like it is possible but there has to be BRT stations along the route not bus stops like we have now.

5) New: Look at the LRT stations in Calgary and the size of the station plus associated parking lot take at least .5-1 city blocks. Where is a city block of this area for BRT station and parking lot available at 8th Street and Arlington or any other proposed station? See associated maps and information for:  CoS Routes, Calgary Routes, Average Distance between LRT Stations Calgary. Two Google map images are provided that show both Calgary and Saskatoon from the air. Both images are taken at approximately the same distance above the ground so you can get a feeling of scale. Calgary is at 37.43 and Saskatoon at 37.57. Both of these values can be seen in the images in the lower right corner. City of Calgary,  City of Saskatoon. These two images clearly show that Saskatoon is much smaller than Calgary and there are residential areas in Calgary that are the size of Saskatoon and they don't even have a LRT route in their area. When looking at the image for Saskatoon picture the area of Calgary superimposed on it by taking the top boundary of Calgary at Warman and the south boundary straight west of Clavet at the bottom of the image.
If you look at the proposed routes for Saskatoon, you will notice that a route goes through the Preston Crossing Shopping Center. What is not shown on the CoS routes is the additional bridge that is proposed for 33rd Street crossing the river and that roadway must connect somewhere and I suspect it will be via an interchange with additional traffic through the Preston Crossing Mall which would require at least two additional lanes or maybe four to give a total of 12 lanes that has only four at the present time and they get very congested at times, There is not even enough space available to build a roadway so they must be planning on using a skyway to allow the traffic. Three layers rather than three times the width.

I could keep adding to this but I think that I have made my point that there needs to be more planning and even with a plan then a simulated tryout might show that the plan is not as good as some people would like you to believe. An example of this is the proposed bridge at 33rd Street. This will not help as the 25th Street bridge must be a total of 8-lanes equivalent, 4 going up the bridge and 4 coming down. The present bridge has 2 up and 2 down so either a second bridge at that location must be built to carry the BRT traffic only or maybe a skyway with one deck above the other; one for vehicles, the other for BRT. The problem keeps compounding as you look deeper and deeper into it.

The items shown below are the contents of emails that were sent to Councillor Cynthia Block, or to any group at City Hall:

6) Reply to Cynthia Block, Councillor, Ward #6:

Thanks for the report. However, it appears that nobody bothered to read my webpage but from what I see now that is not really important as the city has missed what the real problem is. The real problem is not cars or busses but the timing of the traffic lights. The timing is not designed to move traffic but to allow a pedestrian to walk across the street and not have to wait at the corner to cross the street that runs parallel to the walkway they just crossed. Many times when I would go down to the main Library on 23^rd St, I would walk down the sidewalk on the east side of 4^th Ave past where the old Post Office was located, wait for the walk signal to cross 23^rd St. , when I was only half way across 23^rd St., the signal would change to Don’t Walk and when I reached the curb on the south side of 23^rd St. the signal to cross 4^th Ave would just be turning to Walk. I didn’t have to miss a step or slow down. Elderly people found it very difficult to cross the street as they would only get about 2/3 of the way across 23^rd St. and now they were crossing on a red light and preventing cars from entering the intersection going east on 23^rd St. That shows that one of the problems is that the timing for the green light should be longer.

The timing for the green light should be based on the following: If cars are stopped at an intersection and the queue of cars goes from that street where they are stopped all the way back to the next set of lights. In the case just mentioned, that would be 24^th St. When the light turns green for this queue to start moving the starting length is the distance between 23^rd and 24^th St. as the cars accelerate to the speed limit the queue will lengthen out to about 3 times the starting length or 3 city blocks. This group of cars, lets call it a pack, is moving at the speed limit and when the first car(s) in the pack reach the intersection three blocks away from 23^rd St. that traffic signal has turned green as the pack approached so they didn’t even slow down in anticipation that the signal lights were going to turn amber until the last car in the pack had safely entered that intersection on an amber light and not a red light as they would be breaking the law if they proceeded through or entered the intersection when the light was red.

This is a complex problem and needs very careful study to arrive at a solution. I can remember on time that I drove through the city of Hamilton, Ontario and never stopped at a single red light. I was in a pack and the lights were synchronized for movement of cars rather than people. Another time, I was in the city of Winnipeg, MB, and as a pedestrian myself and my family were half a block away from an intersection that had a green light for cars for the street beside us. I thought we will never get to cross the street ahead but will have to wait for the next green light. Well, we kept walking, got to the intersection, crossed the street and the walk signal was still on when we reached the other side. This shows that other cities can do proper timing that works for both cars and pedestrians, why can’t Saskatoon?

I’m not a Civil Engineer but I am a retired Electrical Engineer who taught one of the Engineers that used to be in the Traffic Division at City Hall, he told me once that synchronization was very hard as you could only synchronize in one direction only not in both directions. This may be true, but I can’t believe that large cities only have their light synchronized in the morning for movement into the city Centre and then in the afternoon or end of worktime, the synchronization is changed for outflow.

If I were still teaching at the UofS, as a 4^th year Design project, I would try to have 5-7 students to work on this synchronization study and produce a design report. If a standard report by one student is 50-100 pages then I would expect the report from the group to be 5-7 times as large or 250-700 pages or about one package of paper if printed. Cost to the City for this free Engineering study would be zero and then when the students had completed their design project and done their presentation with people from the Traffic Dept. at City hall in attendance to hear the results and recommendations, the City might possibly say, we want to hire at least one or more of the group to work for the city. This group of students would have at least ½ to one year of traffic experience that they had gained by working on this project for the half-class which is 3 month at 3 hrs/week with additional 3-6 hrs/week of homework for a total of 6-9 hrs/week/student. This sounds like less than ¼ time for a full time employee but there are 6 students so the cumulative work is 6/4 or 1.5 full time employees. There is one difference and that is this is productive working time not clock time. In many cases, I have seen students working on a project like this spent 12-15 hrs on a weekend which is 60-90 cumulative hours or 1.5-2.25 month for a regular employee.

I hope that I have not bored you or over powered you with technical details but we/(the city) has a problem that needs to be identified and solved.

Please feel free to send this email to the  group that answered the previous problem and also all the rest of Council and the Mayor.

I could place the contents of this email on my webpage but I don’t really think that would help very much as most of the comments on the other parts were not responded to by anyone responding to the question but they saw the problem in a completely different light or direction. I looked at it as an Engineering problem and they looked at it as a pollution problem and anything that reduced pollution was good even if the city was left with a system that did not allow the waste/garbage to be removed from the city centre. As a result the city centre would become our new garbage dump as it would drown or be buried under the garbage produced.

7) Reply to Brittany, Customer Service Manager:

Will the number of lanes available for cars remain the same after BRT is active as it is now with only normal Bus transportation? My understanding then is that only 1^st Ave from 20^th St. to 25St. and College Drive from the top of the 25^th St. Bridge to Preston Ave will be the only streets in the city with an additional two lanes of dedicated BRT traffic. One lane in one direction and the second lane in the opposite direction. These two lanes will be in the middle of the street. If This is true, then a BRT bus going west on College that must turn into the campus at the Engineering access point will be in the right hand lane(center of the road) and turn right in front of two lanes of normal vehicles? For the BRT buses going to the campus and going east on College Drive will still enter the campus at the entry by STM. If this is true, then what the dedicated BRT lanes have really done is to make the queue storage length at STM from two buses to the number that can be in the dedicated lane all the way back to the top of the University Bridge. A rather expensive solution to a problem that is caused by not having the sufficient time for buses to turn into the campus. The problem is traffic light timing and not a roadway problem.

In many ways this is very similar to the problem the city had a number of years ago when Circle Drive Bridge was widened by an additional lane in both direction and the roadway going west from the Bridge and turning onto Wanuskewin Road. The problem was a queue storage problem that was causing one lane of vehicle traffic to be reduced to only one lane going west. The real problem again was a traffic light problem that did not allow the flow of traffic but caused it to build up and required a larger and larger queue.

I could go on and on with examples but this is enough. I have written an email to Councillor Block about this and she may have shared that email with you.

8) For those who are interested in more detail of what the CoS is proposing, the following links are provided: https://www.saskatoon.ca/engage/transit-plan

Detailed drawing of the changes to College Drive. Look at this very closely as students will be crossing this to gain entrance to the UofS: https://www.saskatoon.ca/sites/default/files/documents/community-services/planning-development/integrated-growth-plan/growing-fwd/draft_college_drive_runningway_drawing.pdf

Please excuse any typing or grammatical errors as they creep in and get over looked when in haste and more so when developing what should be a paper but doing it online at the same time. The last one that I did like this was the Covid-19 discussion.

Last updated: 17 July, 2021 06:02:40 AM