Ken Ohrn does something amazing: “An Hour on Point Grey Road – photos of everyone who passed by me, whether on two feet, two wheels, three wheels or four wheels” – all taken on March 23, 2014.
.
.
Now we just need someone to count the number of peds, bikes and cars. When I was there, typically there would be 15 people in sight at any one time.
If automated, this would be an interesting way to report on the use instead of the rubber hoses on the ground.
Ken, this photo-diary of an arbitrary hour on Point Grey Road is awesome! Thanks for your time and effort. Nothing like the visual to confirm the rubber hose data for the trolls who question statistics. Yours and Gordon’s photos paint the true “picture” of the road.
Hi Susan: I’ve done similar “An Hour On … ” series (twice, a year apart) for the Hornby bike lane. As to data quality, these pix are several notches below rubber hose counts, just because the sample duration is low (a single hour). But the pix are a lot more valuable than the baseless assertions that otherwise dominate the conversation. In the realm of persuasion, these pix are incredibly valuable, since one iconic photo trumps acres of words and numbers. I’m quite sure that 245 pix, most with more than one traveler, are cumulatively quite persuasive, and will have to suffice until the rubber hose data comes out.
I have this growing sense that PGR is going to be a very popular transportation corridor for people on 2 feet or 2 wheels, more so than anyone has expected. Sort of like the Canada Line.
Great job Ken. Thank you for this. I have the same sense that PGR is going to be more popular than has been expected, at least for the pedestrian and bicycle users.
I got 20 vehicles in the hour from a scan through Ken’s photos. One car every three minutes on this stretch. That is the increased vehicle traffic that is routed through the neighbourhood immediately south, due to the lack of connectivity directly from PGR. Seems manageable, especially compared to the volume of vehicles that used to use PGR as an arterial.
Jeff, on Saturday, I made a rough count of one car on PGR on average per minute, approximately 2500 per day in the block between Balaclava and Bayswater. The City estimated less than this per day, but much of this car traffic is still lost commuters trying to make their way through based on GPS systems that are not up to date and old habits that die hard. In time, this number of cars today will likely increase. Better signage would help, but we are also finding that drivers do not trust the “No Thru Road” signs and have to be stopped directly by the physical boundaries.
Sorry, “this number of cars today will likely DECREASE,” not INCREASE. My error in my post above.
Put a human being behind a steering wheel and he or she will follow the planned path regardless of signage. Those reliant on GPS are even less likely to budge despite clear indications that they’re going the wrong way.
There’s also the fundamental assumption in the mind of drivers that every street must go somewhere. In curved street suburbia there’s a house everywhere you look, but still the mind assumes that there’s a way out. Unless faced with what is clearly a cul-de-sac one drives on believing that an arterial is around the next bend. On grid streets like those in Kitsilano the belief in streets going somewhere is even stronger and it often takes a large physical barrier to convince otherwise.
I remember being in Surrey a while back, a place where there’s generally an arterial every half mile. I turned on an appropriately even numbered street with a traffic signal, but soon learned that it didn’t fit the pattern. After trying a few parallel streets I was forced to find my way out of the area. I later checked a map and found to my great surprise that the entire neighbourhood has no through streets and that the two arterials bounding the area are fully 2 miles apart!
Decades after the diverters were installed I dare say a significant fraction of the traffic in the West End is people who are trapped there because they foolishly tried to take a short cut or simply got frustrated with the slow pace on Davie or Robson.
For those interested, a pass through with a tally counter app yielded (I think I caught most of the appeared-in-two-photos and hidden-behind-someone-else):
223 people on bikes
210 people on foot
19 cars
Very rough engineering practice would be to add a zero to peak hour numbers to guess at daily – this is quite different from cars at rush hour, but we also don’t know if this was the peak hour. For example, I saw quite a few running groups with more than a dozen members in my briefer stay in the area (which, based on seeing myself in one of the photos, was likely the hour before).
Anyway, if 2230 bikes per day is anywhere near reasonable, this is more than double the number quoted in the council report for a previous August. It’s also pretty competitive with the Burrard Bridge at this time of year.
And, as Gordon noted, this doesn’t connect to anything yet on either end except a string of potholes and a major arterial that also happens to be under construction. The bike route signs aren’t even up. It’s also March. Stay posted, folks.
The number of people on bikes and on foot, if we use the “add a zero” rule of thumb (to get a wild-ass guess), would then be roughly 4300 per day. This compares respectably with the commuter volume, assumed to be mostly single occupancy vehicles.
And it isn’t even finished yet.