Raise the Hammer

Another nicer. Thank you Ryan, for that great analysis.

What.. main west from Osler to Mac isn't on that list? It's been pothole and bump-ridden for years now. Terrible for cars, terrible for bikes.

Looks like a great plan! Don't fix any inner city roads, making them impassable for trucks, hence the trucks take newly fixed Burlington to get out of the city. Cunning!

Nobody is saying we shouldn't maintain our roads, it's that we need to keep in mind how much we're spending on cars when we're obsessing about how much we spend on other forms of transportation.

Also, that we should be looking at places we could save money by reducing this maintenance burden... not by abandoning maintenance altogether, but by identifying roads that are overbuilt and thus can be reduced in some way. The Burlington Street overpasses are a good example - bridges represent a terribly high maintenance expense and this city loves building them willy-nilly even when they're completely unnecessary. Sometimes I think there's some bridge-building contractor who has the ear of somebody important at City Hall, because Hamilton has never seen a gap it didn't want to spend millions building a bridge over (and further millions maintaining it). Many cases where a level crossing would be perfectly fine, we still build a bridge.

Like the pearl st bridge?

Would a level crossing be perfectly fine in place of the Pearl Street Bridge?

"Hamilton has never seen a gap it didn't want to spend millions building a bridge over"

The train tracks run in an embankment under the level of the streets in the area. To create a level crossing you'd have to expropriate many century old homes and drop the street down to meet the train tracks. The train tracks were built in that fashion so that they wouldn't interfere with the roads in the area.

edit: think I just committed a captain obvious... oh well.

Comment edited by MattM on 2014-04-24 13:11:03

Is there any way of determining what the Priority Road Reconstruction costs on a square meter basis, discounting water main work?

To be fair, of those projects listed, the City's cycling website plans to include new cycling facilities along both West 5th projects, Garth, King and Burlington. From my understanding, those costs would be included in the rebuild costs (though I may be wrong on that)

Sad that the easiest way to get cycling infrastructure is to slip it in the design of exponentially more expensive road projects.

What's more sad is that when they redo roads they don't include cycling infrastructure!

sorry but putting a bike lane on the raised section of burlington would really remove all the fun out of it. ( and yes you CAN ride your bike up there legally).

Wow, I never even considered the possibility of cycling on that road, perhaps because I don't have a death wish. But if you could find a time to do it when it is relatively safe (early Sunday morning?) it would probably be a rush.

Yeah - if you have a death wish.

There's also the fact that Hamilton is the ONLY city in Ontario to spend 90% of its federal gas tax revenue on roads, instead of public transit as it should, due to a dodgy computer programme used by the Association of the Municipalities of Ontario. These monies should be invested in public transit, in the purchasing of new buses, in the maintenance and installation of new shelters.

As I understand it, they don't really consider cars when planning road lifespans. A city bus is ~800 cars, and trucks ~200-1000 cars worth of road wear depending on the weight per axle. That's why Burlington Street is so bad. This year weather killed the cement/asphalt with rapid freezing and thawing which is why many side streets are in such bad shape. We should probably expect this to be normal in coming years.

So, it doesn't matter very much if there are many, or few cars on the road when it comes maintaining the roads. Bicycle lanes won't really change the cost unless we plan on tearing lanes up and planting grass. I'm all for bike lanes for many other reasons, but I don't think we should expect it to reduce road maintenance very much. Perhaps we need to ensure industrial taxation will pay for the increased road wear along focused and efficient truck routes. We should use good materials to fix our current roads to reduce costs long term (a lot of cheap asphalt is cut with "recycled" motor oil). And yes, we should build better pedestrian and bicycle access into any appropriate major road repairs.

A city bus is ~800 cars, and trucks ~200-1000 cars worth of road wear depending on the weight per axle.

Bicycle lanes won't really change the cost unless we plan on tearing lanes up and planting grass.

These statements are incongruous, unless you are suggesting that trucks and buses would be allowed in bike lanes?

This year weather killed the cement/asphalt with rapid freezing and thawing which is why many side streets are in such bad shape. We should probably expect this to be normal in coming years.

So, it doesn't matter very much if there are many, or few cars on the road when it comes maintaining the roads. Bicycle lanes won't really change the cost unless we plan on tearing lanes up and planting grass.

We don't have much asphalt in this city which is free of vehicle traffic - but we do have some, and I think that they are illustrative. The waterfront trail between Cootes and Pier 4 and the path from McMaster to Dundas have pavement which is several winters old and see only bike and foot traffic - and both are in great condition.

Comment edited by moylek on 2014-04-24 07:26:18

Exactly this. People are blaming the cold winter for our rough roads, but potholes are caused specifically by the intersection cold weather and heavy vehicles. Heavy traffic compacts the roadbed and stresses the asphalt, which allows water to seep under it and erode the roadbed. Cold weather causes the water to freeze and expand, cracking and heaving up the asphalt, which has become brittle from the cold. When the ice thaws, the asphalt collapses into the hole.

According to the Pothole Primer. A Public Administrator's Guide to Understanding and Managing the Pothole Problem by the US Army Corps of Engineers:

A pothole develops when two factors are present at the same time - water and traffic. This could almost be called the cardinal rule of pothole development, because without water and traffic present at the same time, potholing simply won't develop. Exceptions to this rule do not exist!

Since water and traffic must be present together, it can easily be seen that the most common location for pothole development is in the wheel paths of traffic.

Kindly note also that the impact of a vehicle on the road increases exponentially with the vehicle's axle weight. A vehicle that is twice as heavy causes four times as much damage, and a vehicle that is four times as heavy causes 16 times as much damage.

The less wear a vehicle causes, the more vulnerable it is to those that do.

The family sedan gets beat up much more badly than the trucks that created the largest holes in the road. Thus could it be said that unnecessary truck routes add costs for folks driving their sedan or coupe.

And the lowest footprint, bicycles, take the brunt; many streets are bone jarring. The only wear a bike adds to the roads is flinging the occasional pebble. In return we get flats, broken spokes, even broken bones. Imagine how lovely it is to hear comments about how cyclists are freeloading and should pay extra!

Industrial taxation, where is that coming from? While those entities are deemed under that category are far and few between, I ask where is your so called knowledge. It is so apparent that most people comment with no knowledge of what the terminology actually means, tax wise

Not sure what you mean. IT, IU, IX, LT, LU, JT, JU, JX, KT, KU, PT and perhaps ST, SU, XT, XU. They're the ones who cause truck traffic.

So screencarp, I ask what do you mean? You did not answer my query
Can you not write in long form all your acroynms?
No gasp of our language?

I see you don't know what those acronyms are. They're Hamilton's industrial and commercial tax designations. The one's who cause truck traffic on our streets and are mostly responsible for increased road wear.

"It takes about 1000 bicycles to produce the same wear-and-tear as one subcompact car, and 8000 bicycles to produce the same wear-and-tear as one suv. To produce the same wear-and-tear as a single transport truck, you would need millions of bicycles!" - Ryan

A truck weighing forty tons does as much damage to a road, as do 100,000 cars. Doing the math:
1,000 x 100,000 = 100,000,000 8,000 x 100,000 = 800,000,000

So there y'go, Ryan, you would need hundreds of millions!

I look forward to hearing about all the public consultations that are conducted about this scheduled roadwork. I expect that everyone who lives along or near those roads will be notified and invited to numerous public hearings where they can voice their opposition to the plans; and if there is enough community opposition, I'm sure that these plans will be cancelled or scaled down. After all, that's democracy at work.

How long until we get the right five councillors elected to the Public Works Committee?

As has been correctly pointed out, heavy trucks do damage to our roads out of all proportion to their numbers. It is not necessary to be a professional Accountant (which I am) to realize that if shippers were required to pay their true costs suddenly a lot more freight would be moving by railway.

Railways, of course, have exactly the same mathematics of maintenance that dictate heavy loads cause the most damage. But they charge accordingly. Which is why shippers are irresponsible and freeload off the hard-working taxpayer by using heavy trucks instead being responsible and paying their own way with railways.

But if we transported more goods by rail, then the existing constrained corridors we already have in the GTHA would not be as accessible to GO Transit. Fortunately, GO has been able to buy a significant portion of rail they use, but most of that is on lines that see/saw little freight traffic (Richmond Hill, Stouffville). If we start pushing more freight onto rail, then the number of trains operating on the major lines (Milton, Georgetown, Aldershot-Hamilton) will increase and limit GO's expansion into cities along these corridors.

While it's true that shifting to rail would decrease the taxpayer subsidy, we will start to limit our mobility expansion options in the future.

So lots of road work is slated to be done and council decided that all road projects will address pedestrian interests. Good thing, right?