Your city in inaction
 

I have just watched an incredible situation near where I live.

For going on 3 hours and still counting, after an accident that has incapacitated two vehicles partially blocking Bank Street, no police has shown up to deal with the accident and clear away the accident site.

What is incredible, this is a short distance from an Ottawa police station. No police car has traveled on this section of Bank Street in that time in either direction. I started debating with my cousin that police were deliberately routing themselves around the location to avoid dealing with the situation.

Meanwhile, tow trucks have been circulating and an OC Transpo supervisor vehicle has stopped at the accident site without talking to anybody. Buses could somewhat awkwardly still get around the accident.

I am shocked by the shoddy service provided by the city especially when there was a road hazard.

I called 911 and as soon as mentioned the accident and location, they didn't want to deal with it.

This isn't Ottawa-based, but you can appreciate how the mentality reflects on the city.

City of Sudbury hospital (Health Sciences North) uses interlocking stone pathways. They look half-decent, but over time time, the stones break and need to be replaced.

Do they do it right? Nah. Fill it with cold-pack, like they use for potholes on city streets. Now it looks hideous in addition to not being a very good patch.

Half-assed? Nah, quarter-assed at most.

City of Sudbury specific: grind the pavement up to an intersection. Replace 95% of it with nice, fresh pavement. Leave a 15-foot gap between the intersection and the new fresh pavement. Why? Because why not?

Reminds me if this, in Montreal 3 years ago.
https://i.imgur.com/9Ed7qX4.png

This is so Ottawa. They love to use brick pavers for sidewalks and crosswalks, but when one eventually gets dislodged due to weather and wear-and-tear from cars driving over them, instead of replacing the broken and missing bricks they just cover that section in asphalt. So you have an ugly black patch covering a portion of a brick crosswalk... This was the case at Bayswater and Laurel where they eventually decided to just cover the entire crosswalk with asphalt.
Parkdale at Sherwood is another prime example of asphalt patching on pavers.

This is what happens when you have a landscape architect show an idea board of a nice brick sidewalk from some tropical city.

We learned 100+ years ago that concrete and asphalt are the best alternatives we have at the moment in our freezing environment. Now we're back to 5 year road paving solutions, a huge waste of money and time.

The craziest is the relatively short lifespan of the GRANITE pavers in the parliamentary district. You think the NCC is paying to salvage and re-use the granite? Imagine the square-foot cost compared to concrete....

The person you spoke to when you called 911 was correct: the police don't attend the scene of many MVCs. Specifically, police only have to attend when there is injury, damage to infrastructure, criminal activity, government vehicles, dangerous goods, cyclists and pedestrians, or more than 2 vehicles involved. If none of those criteria are met, the vehicles should be moved off the roadway and involved parties should exchange information including license and insurance. The accident should then be self-reported at a Collision Reporting Centre by the involved parties.

The people involved were likely told when they called police that they should self-report, but people expect an officer to arrive for every fender bender and ding, so they don't understand what they're being told.

It was stated that the cars were “incapacitated”. If vehicles can’t be moved out of the way , the police must attend, no?

I totally destroyed my Dad's truck a few years ago in a t-boning incident (not my fault) and two F150's were diagonal across a 5-lane major thoroughfare, blocking all but 1 lane. After confirming there were no injuries, the police advised me to get a tow truck and come on down to the Collision Reporting Centre with the written off vehicles. You go inside, each party has an interview with a sweet old lady wearing a collision reporting vest uniform (not unlike a walmart uniform), sketching the incident and writing down the facts in your own words, and then she comes outside with a measuring tape and a camera to take photos of the destroyed vehicles. All that data gets filed in a national database for the insurance companies to bicker about, and the tow truck drivers get an extra fee for their time.

lol, you'll be lucky to get a same-day callback for a Break and Enter these days, let alone a minor fender bender.

Exactly, neither car could be moved by the owners. This was not a fender bender. They had to wait for police. There was fluid from the vehicles on the road as well.

Surely somebody knows the rules, because tow trucks were arriving and leaving the accident site over and over again.

Somebody told me that tow truck drivers could be charged if they moved the vehicles without an appropriate police report if the accident is serious enough.

Non-driveable vehicles are a job for a tow truck, not a cop.

Fluid on the road is the responsibility of the towing company. The cops usually stand around and stare as the tow guys dump some spill absorbent on and sweep up.

Vehicles shouldn't be moved if there are injuries, so an investigation can take place. Otherwise, if the cops don't have to come, the road should be cleared quickly and safely. Ottawa police lays this out on their website:

https://www.ottawapolice.ca/en/contact-us/report-a-collision.aspx

The 911 dispatcher wanted you off the phone because you were wasting their time with something that wasn't an imminent threat to life or property. They have a non-emergency number for a reason.

If the parties involved wanted to stand there all day waiting for a cop to show up, they can decline the tow trucks, but when the cop shows up they aren't going to do anything more than tell them to move their cars and hand them a card with the collision reporting centres listed on it. I've been in an accident where police did arrive, but when it was determined there were no injuries they stuck around to issue a ticket and then bailed out of there as fast as they could. The vehicles still had to go to the CRC the next day.

This discussion is about properly funding police resources. The CRC system was implemented so we can better use our highly trained police officers for public safety purposes, rather than filling out insurance paperwork. The system moves that responsibility to a clerk at the CRC, which is much more economical. Since the insurance companies are the ones who pushed for this, they clearly weren't using the cop's reports to determine fault to any significant extent.

OK, pardon my ignorance. I will go and hide in the future and not concern myself about what is happening on the streets in my neighbourhood.

That is not the point of my comment. People wasting three hours of their time bickering in the roadway is not a symptom of a city cutting corners like the asphalt patch jobs shown in this thread. It is people being dumb.

This discussion also touches on the current discussion around the role of police in general; why are they the ones we call to direct traffic around collisions and white tickets for poor driving? I'm not exactly here to support the defund the police movement, but this one has bothered me for a while.

Like getting people in and out of Costco Parking lots safely??.. and sitting around all day making sure nobody crashes into a construction site??

Yup. A lot of that work could easily be done by bylaw.

Speaking of which, Aecon is doing work to install Bell Fibe in our neighborhood (I thought we already had it considering we've been paying for Fibe TV for the last 3 years).

Anyway, they put in their little flags and to identify gas and hydro lines 3-4 months ago, so the flags are rusted, some are gone. A few neighbours removed them completely. It's a pain in the ass to cut the grass around those without moving or touching them.

Then one day, I had a bad experience at a medical imaging place (pay for parking, complete another medical test, get to imaging half an hour before closing and get told they don't accept anymore patients 15 minute later, have to go back and pay for parking the next day). I get home and Aecon's blocking my driveway. All week, they had been blocking people's driveways. Our street is all townhomes, so it's impossible to park on the street without blocking a driveway. The main street 50 meters away, where Aecon's actually working, has plenty of space to park on the side of the road. So I call 311. The guy says that, to get the truck towed, I need proof of ownership or lease, but bylaw can ticket Aecon without my involvement. I go with option 2 and he sends bylaw. Bylaw shows up 15 minutes later and it starts pouring rain, so bylaw's parked next to the Aecon truck, blocking the entire street, and waits for an Aecon employee to show up (because I guess he doesn't want to get rained on). They talk for a few minutes, and bylaw gets the Aecon guy to move his truck 2 doors down to block someone else's driveway. Bylaw leaves and a few minutes later, the guy who lives two doors down shows up and can't get into his driveway. I call 311 again, and this new person says you need proof of ownership of a house for bylaw to ticket someone for blocking a driveway, which is BS. If I block a driveway downtown, bylaw will ticket me. They won't try to contact the owner of the house of building for permission to ticket me.

Anyway, just to say that some bylaw officers are useless. Not only did the bylaw instruct the Aecon guy to go ahead and block someone else's driveway, but he violated my anonymity (yes Aecon would suspect that I called, but this confirms it). The second 311 person was also miss-informed about some basic bylaws.

Also excellent examples. The change to the CRC system was easier as it wasn't enshrined in law.

As I understand it, you are free to remove those little flags 30 days after they are put in.

Really? Is that a city rule? The letter from Bell instructed us to leave them alone until work was complete.

If the work hasn't been done within 30 days, a new locate needs to be performed. Source: I was briefly a locator.

Thanks for that.