Bloody Typical

An area of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside has an unusually high number of pedestrian fatalities. So, in it's latest stupid decision,Vancouver city council has voted to reduce the speed limit along six Downton Eastside blocks of East Hastings Street from 50km/h to 30 km/h.  The new slow zone (between the two red marks on the map, left) is a major artery into and out of the downtown core, heavily travelled by buses, cars, taxis and delivery vehicles.

The new slow zone's halfway point is Hastings and Main which, not coincidentally, is also the location of the city's largest open drug market, where narcotics are bought, sold, and consumed openly approximately one block from a large police station and a courthouse.  As anyone who has ever driven along Hastings Street between Cambie Street and Glen Drive will tell you, the issue along the stretch is not speeding drivers, and surveys have confirmed this.  Rather, the problem is the high proportion of junkies, alcoholics and mentally ill people who live and congregate in the area, and who regularly run out into the street without warning or--whether because they're too high or too sick to care about their own safety or anyone else's--simply wander into the road without looking.

Instead of doing something useful, sensible, and effective, such as installing barriers that prevent people from crossing the street except at controlled crosswalks like they do on dangerous streets in other major cities, in its latest idiotic decision, city councilors have decided to punish drivers who are already obeying the law.  Even worse, they have ignored studies going back as far as 1998 which show that changing speed limits on low and moderate speed roads has no significant effect on traffic speed or the number of crashes. 

Of course, new road rules require education and enforcement, and both cost money, but there has been no word on where the money will come from.