Episode 3: Fool me once.... More on the Culture of NO.

There is the old saying:  "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me" that summarizes learning. We can forgive ourselves the errors of the uninitiated, or the ignorant, or even a simple honest mistake.  But what we cannot excuse ourselves is to not learn from that mistake, and, perhaps even more importantly, admit to it and fix it.

In this episode's example of government failure, the focus is not really on the initial error, nor it should not be.  The damnation should be directed at those who have not fixed the insult caused by the initial error.  This one will get a bit technical, but I'll try to make it simple.  The overall effect on you ought to be outrage, if I do my job.

This is about a relatively obscure part of the Environment Act.  Under that Act are the Regulations Respecting On-Site Sewage Disposal in the Province (the regs).  One part of these regs deals with how big your lot of land must be in order to have a house on it.  The regs require a minimum area of land for each of four classes of permeable soil depth.  basically, we have a pretty good system that sets residential density based on the land's capacity to suport it by assimilating treated sewage into the ground, while keeping the poop safely distant from people's wells. 

I'll stop you here if you want to protest something technical.  In this one small field, in Nova Scotia, I'm one of the technical experts.  If anything I say here is not quite exactly right, its because I'm simplifying for a broader audience.  Call me to discuss, I might answer.

Anyway, lets use a semi-real example, something that actually happened and which continues to happen in Nova Scotia today.  A young family have a nice house, a three bedroom home, on a lot that is also new, and is just a little big larger than the minimum area required under the Act.  Lets say 55,000 square feet.  The also have a garage, a nice one that, like most garages in Nova Scotia, is not used for a car.  It has a small workshop and a loft the kids sometimes hang out in via a ladder.

The next door neighbours took their garage the previous year and fit it up so the wife's Mom and Dad could move there, staying on the same property, having dinner with them most nights, teaching the kids to knit, and do woodwork.  These people are seeing this, and knowing that his Dad has failing eyesight and will soon need more care than they can easily get on their farm.  So they decide to do the same.  Fix up the garage as a one bedroom semi standalone with water form the well, and connected to their septic system.  

Just like their neighbours, they expect to have to have their septic system inspected, and probably expanded to accommodate not the extra people, but the extra bedroom.  With the sale of the parents property, they can afford that.

But (there's always a but in these episodes) since last year, when their neighbours did their garage over, the Province has jumped into the middle and decided this practice had to be regulated in case...  well, just in case someone tried something bad.  Or whatever, something that there might not be control over by government.  It's not like making sure the septic system was big enough to do the job, or the water was safe to drink,  no we had to have more control over this or someone might benefit, somehow.

So, one experienced engineer was delegated to come up with Cluster System Guidelines.  These are intended to govern cases where more than one home is on a lot, so developers don't go jamming in houses upon houses on one small lot to get around the legislation over lot size and density.  There is some merit in regulating this, although in reality, with clearance regulations and offsets required from wells, it would be rare for anyone to be able to do very much.

This engineer, a very experienced one, came up with an OK set of Guidelines that was reviewed and vetted through the Committee responsible for technical changes to the Guidelines and Regs.  His solution to our little situation with the garage was to simply make people assume the design flow would be 1500 l/d, design a new system for that, and all would be fine on the original small lot.  If someone wanted to add more than one bedroom, they'd need to have a lot 1.5 times the size of the original minimum size.  So the reg states that anything with more than one dwelling, with flows over 1500 l/d has to conform to Schedule A, wherein lot sizes are set to be 1.5 times the normal 3 bedroom home size. Under 1500 l/d, the lot can stay the same size.  This was fine, as it allowed people to bring their parents onto their property and allow them to maintain privacy and independence.  

It was all working out pretty well at this point, until some unnamed bureaucrat, probably someone who's never opened a septic tank in their life, decided, without telling the person who wrote the Cluster Guidelines, to add a 15% factor of safety to the design flow.  And the Regs got published with that in them.   Suddenly the design flow increase to the system on the lot due to the garage was no longer the very conservative 500 l/d (a normal 3 br house is 1000 l/d) it is now 725 l/d, or 1,725 total  This for two people who will be eating and doing laundry in the house.  

The kicker is this - the regional offices realize that now the total flow is greater than the 1500 l/d threshold so they start disallowing building permit applications to convert buildings to residential use, or build new small out buildings, for this purpose, unless the lots are 1.5 times the minimum area.  

In our case, after fighting for a while just to do what their neighbours did the year before, the family put the parents into a Provincially funded seniors care home.  This when they would have greatly preferred to look after them in the context of their greater family unit.  Inhumane, almost. Unfair certainly. Of no value to society at all - especially considering that there was no engineering technical reason why.  Nope, just an average bureaucratic day enforcing a typo to the detriment of the public we're supposed to be serving.  

This is bad. Almost hard to believe, and it has happened more than once. Who knows how many times, as they don't keep track of their successful efforts on harming people in the Department of the Environment.  

It gets worse.  Remember the preamble?  Well, this happened at least three years ago, and they have known about it for almost that long.  No effort to correct this wrong has been made, and people are presumably going into our already overloaded seniors homes when they really don't need to be.  This uncaring, family hating, technically unsupportable practice has been allowed to continue for years.

The inaction is appalling.  Surely it can't get worse!

But it does. 

In my somewhat vitriolic rant of 2011 here I respond to what these bureaucrats have been working on, instead of fixing this painful problem.  They are actually working to remove any obligation they have to the socio-economic well being of Nova Scotians, instead of addressing their own public hating policies.

Yes, when they could have been fixing hurtful practice, they were instead busy changing the rules so they are no longer obligated to give a shit about the people who they purportedly work for, or, laughably, serve.

But in our Culture of No, they are winners, and are probably all promoted or retired with full pensions by now.  I dearly hope they all run into the same problem and have to go into a home early.  And not one of the nice new ones. 

How a Chicken Crosses the Road

The recent debate on crosswalk safety, driver and pedestrian responsibilities and whether more painted crosswalks would be better, highlights some gaps in the general public’s knowledge of the Motor Vehicle Act, specifically the parts that might affect them most.  Those are the parts governing the interactions between vehicles and pedestrians.  It is also incentive to discuss what can work to make our streets safer, and it’s made me wonder if we have some things backward.

Learn the rules before you play

First you need to understand what a crosswalk is.  The Motor Vehicle Act is pretty clear on this:

"crosswalk" means that portion of a roadway ordinarily included within the prolongation or connection of curb lines and property lines at intersections or any other portion of a roadway clearly indicated for pedestrian crossing by lines or other markings on the surface;

A key bit of information there is that a crosswalk includes a lot more than just those places where the traffic authority has decided an area should be demarcated by paint.  I recently stopped for an older gentleman who’d been waiting to cross at an unmarked crosswalk, and the driver behind me, in a military green mud covered Susucky with oversize tires, got so excited at seeing someone actually comply with the law, he repeatedly let me know I was, as I already knew, “Number 1” through the use of a hand signal.  Then, once he got past me, he showed all of Oxford Street how to nearly blow out the sewing machine engine in his small dick syndrome "jeep".  Fun!

You get my point, not only do most people not know the law, they also flagrantly violate it all the time.  I think this stems from a couple things (other than the redneck asshole mental deficiencies of that jerk).  We are inconsistent in marking crosswalks.  When we don’t paint one, many people could logically assume that it was not marked for a reason, and therefore was not a place that they have to yield to a pedestrian.  Indeed, the Motor Vehicle Act states:

“The traffic authority may establish and designate and may maintain, or cause to be maintained, by appropriate devices, marks or lines upon the surface of the highways, crosswalks at intersections where, in his opinion, there is particular danger to pedestrians crossing the highway, and at such other places as he may deem necessary.”

Again, there is a key part to this paragraph.  The traffic authority MAY emphasize a crosswalk if they believe it needs emphasizing.  But that does not mean all the other ones aren’t still crosswalks.

I wonder if perhaps by painting all these crosswalks we have inadvertently made things worse.  We’ve created a bit of a “Chicken Little” situation where thousands of relatively safe, even benign, crossings are emphasized by paint,  such that we are desensitized somewhat when we come to an intersection where the crosswalk has not been painted or otherwise demarcated.

What if we removed all the paint from every intersection crosswalk that is obvious and left the special efforts of paint, lighting, and the overhead button activated flashing lights only in those places where there are safety considerations?

Then crosswalks would be indicated by the mere presence of an intersection, not by paint, as they legally are, and those that were special would become even more special.

It’s just a thought.  I know that people would be more likely to recognize that crosswalks exist where they don’t respect them now.  And the other ones, those dangerous ones, might garner more attention and focus, and probably less trouble.

Look both ways before you cross the street.

If I see one more person walk into a crosswalk without looking in either direction, and with their headphones in their ears (playing bad music, I just know) I may run them over on purpose. 

I once did a colossally stupid thing as a pedestrian.  I walked to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris above ground, which amounts to crossing about six lanes of high speed French drivers going in circles, learning new matador-like moves on the fly.  On getting there, somewhat exhilarated, I was shown the underground tunnel opening by a sweet old lady. Not one of those crazy drivers hit me, and it wasn’t because of the little maple leaf on my lapel.  It was because I was looking, and I assumed that even though they were pretty small cars, I’d still lose if they did hit me, so I got out of their way.

Pedestrians have a responsibility to protect themselves.  I know it sounds stupid, but you never win, cars are big and heavy, and they are driven by humans, who are, in case you haven’t heard, fallible.

Let’s just all do what my dad taught me when I was learning to drive.  Let’s just assume that the person driving the other car, or that car coming up to our crosswalk, is the absolute worst driver on the road, and expect them to do something stupid.  Because sooner or later, they will.

Believe it or not, the following paragraph is part of the Motor Vehicle Act.  It ought to be redundant, but sadly, it isn’t.

“A pedestrian shall not leave a curb or other place of safety and walk or run into the path of a vehicle that is so closely approaching that it is impractical for the driver of the vehicle to stop.” (insert laugh here)

And in case you were wondering about people who walk across a marked crosswalk with a button activated light without pushing the button:

“Where a pedestrian is crossing a roadway at a crosswalk that has a pedestrian-activated beacon, the pedestrian shall not leave a curb or other place of safety unless the pedestrian-activated beacon has been activated.”

You are all criminals. Push the button, or else!

Calming down

In Holland, a planner named Hans Monderman has been advocating the  removal of traffic signs, signals and road markings. The town of Drachten adopted his ideas and removed all their traffic signals.  Accidents, and their severity decreased.  This brings to mind our roundabouts, they really don’t need any signs, they just need to be designed correctly (Armdale is NOT) and be driven by people who know the rules. They have almost no fatal accidents between cars, and when designed correctly, are safe for pedestrians (again, Armdale isn’t).

Drachten implemented other traffic calming measures, even putting a playground in the middle of a street to make drivers slow down. Interestingly, and perhaps counter-intuitively, not just safety increased, but the flow and capacity of the traffic also improved.  People were no longer sitting at red lights and rushing to the next one, they were slowly making their way safely to their destination, making sure not to hit each other, or people on foot or bikes. 

This is sort of how traffic flows on Spring Garden Road, the street that creates our most valuable urban real estate.  Traffic calming, like allowing on-street parking, can improve safety, traffic flow, and the economic value of a street. 

We all know that “slow and steady wins the race", right?  Right?