Montreal City Weblog

Kate 21:31 on 2024-05-27 Permalink Reply  

• Nicholas 23:22 on 2024-05-27 Permalink

  The most cycling tickets are given along the corridors with the most cyclists, surprise! But what’s actually surprising, again, is that the TVA article (rather than the headline) is pretty good: the complaints given are that the lights are synchronized for cars not bikes, and the light cycles are really long. If you made the light cycles just long enough for pedestrians to cross the street, you could shorten the overall cycle time and you’d get much shorter reds. But we make the cycles long to process many cars through the intersection, as they take up more space so take more time to clear. Note that they do synchronize the lights on Boyer in Rosemont/Villeray for cyclists in the rush hour direction, so it can be done.

  Another thing you can do is to put the lights for cars and bikes before the intersection (at the stop line), rather than after. It causes people to actually wait at the stop line rather than inch forward into the crosswalk during the red, because if you move forward you can’t see the light. Second, it means you can’t see the lights for others (from other directions and from other modes), so it’s harder to run a red because you don’t know as well who has the green. This is especially true for bikes, and both are helpful for keeping pedestrians safe.

• MarcG 06:39 on 2024-05-28 Permalink

  Nicholas: Do you have a visual representation of what’s described in the 2nd paragraph?

• Ian 08:08 on 2024-05-28 Permalink

  They havs that configuration in “downtown” TMR. IT seems pretty effective.

• Meezly 10:01 on 2024-05-28 Permalink

  I don’t drive and I’ve had to take taxis recently. During non-rush hour with not that much traffic, it still takes a long time to get across town because the timing of the lights was just awful. We kept hitting reds at every intersection! It didn’t seem synchronized very well at all! Maybe it was timed better for rush hour traffic?

• Bert 10:23 on 2024-05-28 Permalink

  The TMR solution is FANTASTIC! Not only are they synced, not only is it actually posted, but it is actually configured and operates as posted. When I go through there I can confidently set my cruise control to 40 and figuratively close my eyes. I have also seen a posted “synced to 50 (or 60)” on Pierrefonds Blvd, (between Charles and Jean, IIR) but the timing was not right and I would pick up reds all the time.

  The other solution is to dynamically evaluate traffic and have dynamic control of the lights. I recently heard a report saying that a city would only need to sample about 6% of cars (i.e. live speed / position data), pump it through some AI and have the AI change lights as required.

• Ian 11:45 on 2024-05-28 Permalink

  Yeha it’s actually really pleasing to go 39 along Rockland and watch all the beemers and audis race each other to the next stoplight haha

• Ephraim 13:56 on 2024-05-28 Permalink

  The lights in Montreal can’t be synced because we are the world’s largest repository of mechanical lights, when everyone else has gone electronic. When the world was going electronic, Montreal was buying up their used mechanical lights

  The REV goes through several protected cross walks. Cars have finally learnt to stop to let pedestrians cross…. but cyclists can’t be bothered for the most part.

• Ian 14:05 on 2024-05-28 Permalink

  Even regular crosswalks, to be fair. Day after that kid got plowed on Jeanne Mance I was on my way driving to work on Van Horne and saw a bicyclist almost run over a Hassidic guy crossing the street at a light, I honked at him and he just gave me the finger & yelled kesk’t’VEUT Like, didn’t even slow down or dodge the pedestrian. Crazy.

• CE 15:13 on 2024-05-28 Permalink

  Bogotá, Colombia has the lights Nicholas is describing. I kind of hated them, if you were at the front of the line, you were always looking up at the lights, I never got used to them. Here’s an example of an intersection with traffic lights.

• Joey 15:47 on 2024-05-28 Permalink

  The Rockland approach makes sense in large part because there aren’t any significant cross streets on that stretch (between Cote de Lisse and Jeant-Talon). Kudos, I suppose, to TMR for figuring out how to move lots of traffic through a residential area that doesn’t create major bottlenecks or traffic jams, but cross-traffic is minimal. Compare with the traffic on the other side of the train tracks, where all those cars wind up in Outremont – things can get very slow there, largely because Van Horne is a major street with lots of vehicular and pedestrian traffic.

  Anyway, at some point we decided we’ll never upgrade our old and out-of-production traffic light system in favour of a proper grid that doesn’t require police officers to intervene the moment a construction project causes a traffic jam. A more cynical person would argue that the way our construction projects are managed provides great benefit first and foremost to the mob and, just behind, the police.

• DeWolf 17:38 on 2024-05-28 Permalink

  I posted a couple of comments here with links to what Nicholas was describing but I think they got caught in the auto-moderation.

  The Bogotá example isn’t ideal because the lights are on the far side of the crosswalk, even if they’re on the near side of the street. Go look at Google Street View in almost any European city to see what Nicholas is talking about. The lights are on the stop line, which is well before the crosswalk.

• MarcG 06:13 on 2024-05-29 Permalink

  Thanks, DeWolf, the Bogotá example didn’t make sense to me. This certainly seems like a smarter way to do it.

• Nicholas 13:07 on 2024-05-29 Permalink

  Sorry, I had posted a link too but it got eaten. You csn find these at essentially every intersection in the Netherlands. Since it’ll eat a comment with a link, just pick any and you’ll see the bike and car lights at the stop line. You often see lights on vertical poles about 10 feet off the ground, and little mini lights 4 feet high for the first cyclist so they don’t have to arch their head. Pedestrian lights are on the far side usually because because there are often two stage crossings (with an island in the middle) so you want it to be clear which light is for which leg.

  Another option, of course, is roundabouts. No lights at all! I just discovered the first I’ve ever seen on-island: at the Technopark at Marie Curie and Alfred Nobel. Been there since at least 2007.