Parking for disabled

At my work I try to do my best to help disabled people find a parking space that suits them in different parts of the city. Their problems are very well presented in this awarded short film from Greece :

My congratulations to the director Stamos Tsamis.

No parking odd sign.

While discussing parking restriction signs and regulations with my colleagues I realised that European parking signs are a lot different than those in Australia.

Take a look at some of the most common parking signs in Australia:

 

Here, parking signs are more like the USA signs:

In both countries you will find some differences between the different states (and territories).
But in Europe, parking signs are a lot different,. This is how the no parking and no standing sign look like.

Also there are some odd signs. Because of the mixed land uses in city centres and the narrow width road network there are the no parking on odd months and even months signs in Greece that look like this:

Crosstown traffic

You jump in front of my car when you,
you know all the time
Ninty miles an hour, girl, is the speed I drive
You tell me it's alright, you don't mind a little pain
You say you just want me to take you for a drive

You're just like crosstown traffic
So hard to get through to you
Crosstown traffic
I don't need to run over you
Crosstown traffic
All you do is slow me down
And I'm tryin' to get on the other side of town

I'm not the only soul who's accused of hit and run
Tire tracks all across your back
I can, I can see you had your fun
But, darlin' can't you see my signals turn from green to red
And with you I can see a traffic jam straight up ahead

You're just like crosstown traffic
So hard to get through to you
Crosstown traffic
I don't need to run over you
Crosstown traffic
All you do is slow me down
And I got better things on the other side of town

Jimmy Hendrix, November 21, 1968

One sign I haven't found in Australia

The above sign is quite common in Europe. Most of the European countries have it and in Greece the official name translates to “Start of residential area marked as traffic calm”. 

In Netherlands is called “woonerf” which is the most used international term from the Dutch words wonen 'reside' + erf 'premises, ground'.

Historically this scheme originates from Holland. The Dutch government developed traffic regulations for woonerfs in 1976, though the first woonerf was built in the city of Delft a decade earlier.

In the UK they have the “Home Zone” sign which is much similar. 

In Australia we have the 10 Km Shared Zone which is a quite different in colours. 

 Maybe we need to rethink about not only the sign design but the sign usage as well.

Road safety: A tale with a dragon with big teeth.

The other day I was discussing some road safety issues and a treatment with the name of “Dragon’s teeth” was mentioned. To tell you the truth it was the first time that I heard of the term so I asked myself “What are Dragon’s teeth?”

By the term Dragon’s teeth in traffic management we mean one of the following three things:

1. Triangular road markings that have been installed at the entry points to all 10,000 school zones across New South Wales up to 32.5 metres at the start of each school zone, to improve road safety for students. The Dragon’s Teeth markings further increase the visibility of school zones for motorists and provide a constant reinforcement to keep to the 40 km/h speed limit around schools.

 

2. Calibrated edge and centre line markings used as a secondary method to check vehicle's speed manually by calculating its speed between them when using a road side speed camera.

3. Road surface mechanical devices used to enforce one way traffic. They are mostly used on private road.

Diverging diamond interchange- Traffic engineering innovation

For this week I will take a break from my commuter thoughts and comments and present a small video that I found with some help from Institute of Transportation Engineers newsletter about Diverging Diamond Interchange (DDI)
Wikipedia defines  diverging diamond interchange as a rare form of diamond interchange in which the two directions of traffic on the non-freeway road cross to the opposite side on both sides of the bridge at the freeway. It is unusual in that it requires traffic on the freeway overpass (or underpass) to briefly drive on the opposite side of the road from what they are accustomed.

For many years traffic engineers were only concerned on how to find ways to reduce congestion and provide better traffic flow. Network capacity was in the heart of their research and providing more lanes and better intersections was a priority. But as years past by, everyone realised that providing more road resulted on ending up with more traffic. So over the last decade the research shifted to network efficiency. One of the latest attempts is this new type of  interchange that was was listed by Popular Science magazine as one of the best innovations in 2009 (engineering category) in "Best of What's New 2009".

A picture is worth a thousand words so this 5.15 minute video is worth almost 7.5 million words (or almost 19 million words depending on video quality). :-)

Commuting from Gold Coast to Brisbane - Part 2. What people do?

My last post was about my impressions of commuting by train from Gold Coast to Brisbane. It is indeed very slow and uncomfortable and that is why the majority of people do not use it. But there is a big number of people living in the Gold Coast and working in Brisbane and a not so big but still significant number of people commuting the other way. So what all these people do every day?

Well I suppose for the people living in Brisbane and working in Gold Coast is fairly easy. They drive each day through the M1 Motorway and find a relatively easy and cheap parking spot in Gold Coast.

But how about people from Gold Coast working in Brisbane? Here is what they do:

First option: They drive to Brisbane but not to the CBD because of the very expensive parking. Instead they drive just outside the limits of the traffic control areas and try to find a free on street parking space.

The most popular areas for this are: Lower West End and Highgate Hill, Buranda, Stones Corner, Norman Park, Coorparoo.

Second option: They drive to one of the many park and ride spaces that Citytrain provides in the suburbs and then take the train. Popular Southeast stations for park’n’ride:

Fairfeild, Yeronga, Yeerongpilly, Moorooka and some Northeast stations like Buranda, Coorparoo and Norman Park.

Third option: They drive to different inner suburbs and then park illegally wherever they think they have better chances of not getting fined.

Of course there are quite a few other options that people follow in order to move from their place of living to the place of work.

But of course all these options are not viable sustainable transportation. They create lots of troubles to people on those Brisbane suburbs and at the end of the day they don’t save that much time and money for commuters.