Almost a year ago on December 18th, 2008, I wrote
an article on traffic lights and how they should flash amber late at night.
Here's a summary:
Every night at midnight, why don't we have the lights setup to flash red, much like they do in other cities like Halifax or even our neighboring town of Cornwall? As there is a major decrease in traffic at this time, its not going to affect many Islanders and there isn't enough people on the road at that time for it to effect many people.
I think Charlottetown should have the lights setup so that going North-South most of the lights should be blinking orange. The exception would be any streets that cross Belvedere Avenue or Grafton St. For Belvedere Avenue and Grafton St, have all the lights going east-west flash orange and all other lights on this street flash red.
This would provide a continuous flow of traffic within the city at and reduce the useless stop and go traffic at night.
I found out through the helpfulness of Paul Johnston, Charlottetown's Public Works Manager, that on a day later after I wrote my post, an RFP was closing at noon.
He was happy to inform me that they were going to hire a "local engineering consulting firm" to look into all the traffic lights. He also informed me in the email, that they were hoping to have this implemented by Summer 2009.
The Guardian wrote up a story on the RFP closing and we were off to the races.
Fives months pass by and I sent an email to Terry Bernard, the councilor responsible for public works. He said to expect a report by the end of June.
July comes along and I asked if they got anything and nothing from the consulting firm yet.
CBCL has nothing to report yet and the update is it's been delayed but we've trained someone to do the field work. And by-the-way it's on the backburner as we've gotten other RFP's that are a priority.
Now, we're almost going on a years anniversary of the RFP being issued. The plan was for things to be implemented in the Summer which tells me the city must have had some sort of deadline in place for this report.
I understand things get delayed, but we're almost a year later and the consultants have not yet gotten back to the city with the report. If the city didn't care about the issue, why bother issuing an RFP for someone to look into it instead of letting it slip through the cracks.
My previous post on the issue gave the city some good ideas on things to do without the cost of a consultant and it's pretty cut & dry to me.
