Small stuff #5 that I am grateful for today: my GPS.

Bonus: Not getting hit by the oncoming cars from my left that apparently did not have a stop sign. Gotta love New Orleans.

Do you ever feel like Napa is a one way kind of town? Tourists in,  tourists out? Growing up here can have its frustrations, driving here can have its frustrations, but the most aggravating thing is the fact that on those one way streets, there isn’t a lot else to look at than vacant buildings and parking garages.

There is one lone mural on Main St. that gets pedestrian traffic. I’d like to see a lot more of those vacant windows filled with creative energy as I drove down First St. At least then it would send a message to visitors and residents a like that there is life in a viticulture community that supersedes its cash cow.

Or so says my local Toronto city councillor, Adam Vaughan. Dude’s not a bad guy – his knowledge of civic politics is certainly unquestioned, and that and his name is why he got elected.

But his platform to turn Richmond and Adelaide into two-way streets is for the most part nonsensical and lesser part pandering to the cyclists. I don’t drive too often, but when I do, it’s nice to get across downtown in under 30 minutes. These streets are the only avenues in the centre of the largest city in Canada that allow you to do that.

I understand the car is the enemy here in these people’s minds. But the problem is, many lobbyists (some tree-huggers, some uber-wealthy developers) have no clue how to run a city. It’s bad enough Toronto is one of the poorest-engineered cities on earth, but when these guys are pulling strings, things only get worse.

More two-way? The fact is downtown doesn’t have enough one-way, like most other major cities on the planet. And they say it negatively affects street life? Right, and New York and Montreal certainly have none of that despite a plethora of one-way streets.

GeoSmart now has a solution available for people wanting to know which order to visit their clients in, so that they can keep time and travel costs to a minimum. This is a form of Route Optimisation known as the Travelling Salesman Problem. GeoSmart also offers complex Route Optimisation under the banner of Route2GO, but that is another story.

With the price of petrol now permanently above NZ$2 a litre and time at a premium, this tool can easily assist people in making the most of their travel.  It could be a delivery truck working out the order of their deliveries and in reverse order how to load the truck. It could be a sales person working out the best way to make their sales calls.

In the illustration you can see that we set the first and last addresses as fixed. In other words we are defining where we start and finish for the day, they don’t have to be the same, the last one could be a motel yo are staying at for the night and the first one might be your home or office. You could just fix the start point and be flexible on the end point and then go to the AA Maps website to decide where to stay for the night and even make the booking before you leave.

In the illustration, the sales person guessed an order in which to do the calls, but the optimised route cut 34km from the route and at the (adjustable) per km rate resulted in savings of $10 on the trip.

This tool doesn’t just have to be used for a set of destinations. It could also be used as a trip/price calculator. For example one of our new clients is putting this tool (slightly modified so that you can’t edit the price per km which only he can do on his site) so that people can get their own quote on a delivery job without having to ring the company.

Many companies pay staff or contractors on the basis of an agreed distance, it could be for commuting, or for visiting clients, patients etc. This tool can calculate the ‘fastest’ route between clients and will deliver a consistent result that can reduce arguments and deliver an equitable result.

There are other standard features to this tool, for example click on any of the letters denoting locations and the map will instantly zoom to that location so you can see it better. The maps are dynamic and do of course have full pan and zoom functionality.

This optimisation is possible because GeoSmart has a full turn restriction database for New Zealand so when it calculates these directions it knows all about one-way streets, dual carriageways, no right turn, no left turn etc. This is in fact the same database used by te leading car navigation brands including TomTom, Navman, Siemens VDO, BMW, Ford, Honda,Horizon and Nav N Go.

If you have a route optimisation problem, please send us an email to info@geosmart .co.nz or follow the directions on our Contact Page.

(Jon) The citizens of Richmond, Va., last year had a vigorous discussion about converting downtown one-way streets into two-way streets.

The Urban Richmond blog took some time to break down some of the arguments for and against such a conversion. The arguments are nowhere near cut-and-dried either way.

The blog divides up the arguments like this:

Reasons for converting to 2-way streets:

• Slower traffic speeds.
• Decrease “Vehicle Miles Traveled” by eliminating indirect routes (driving around the block to get to your destination).
• Increased access to businesses.
• Possibly: safer for pedestrians.

Reasons for maintaining 1-way streets:

• Conversion is very costly.
• 1-way streets allow for more cars, thereby decreasing congestion.
• Easier than 2-way streets to time stoplights (timed lights improve traffic flow and decrease idling (& therefore pollution)).
• Fewer turn prohibitions.
• More on-street parking.
• Possibly: safer for pedestrians.

The author of the blog lamented that so much of the information for or against conversion to two-way streets was highly partisan. But he did link to some studies he thought were more balanced:

“Downtown Streets: Are We Strangling Ourselves on One-Way Networks?”

Published by the Transportation Research Board, the article … argues that 1-way street networks provide many more possible types of street intersections. … 1-way street networks increase the variety and kind of conflict points creating more confusion for pedestrians and motorists.

“A MICROSCOPIC SIMULATION STUDY OF TWO-WAY STREET NETWORK VERSUS ONE-WAY STREET NETWORK”

This article says, “The additional turning movements for a one-way street network increase the occurrences of vehicular-pedestrian conflicts at any given intersection, and also result in a system-wide increase in vehicle mile of travel (VMT) as compared to a two-way street network.” In other words, you have to turn more on a 1-way street network, and therefore have more chances of running over people.

“No Two Ways About It: One-Way Streets are better than Two-Way.”

The most convincing evidence produced in this paper by The Center for the American Dream of Mobility and Homeownership is that pedestrians were hit more frequently after streets were converted to 2-way in several downtowns in the U.S.

Urban Richmond would like to see more empirical data for the conversion of one-way streets to two-way, and so would I. Are there any more studies that any can point out that can help a citizen think rationally about the topic of pedestrian safety? And what do you think?

– Photo by z6p6tist6 on Flickr