Was there this much carnage before the bumpout was insatlled?
https://www.saltwire.com/nova-scotia/new...s-a-contentious-issue-in-halifax-262913/
2018
Saltwire
Safety of curb ‘bump-outs’ a contentious issue in Halifax
An SUV flipped onto its roof when it collided with a van last week at the intersection of Ochterloney and Wentworth streets in Dartmouth. The incident occurred two days after barriers were put in place at the intersection for the curb bump-out pilot.
has been blamed by some for a dangerous two-vehicle crash last week.
“Correlation is not causation,” said Coun. Sam Austin, who represents the Dartmouth area that encompasses the intersection of Ochterloney and Wentworth streets where the collision took place.
“The bump-out we’re doing there is not unsual. They’ve been used all over the world. I talked to the police and I’ve talked to our traffic engineers after that happened because you want to make sure that it is not something that we have caused here. There is no conclusion from either the police nor our traffic engineers that these (cement barriers) have to be taken out. They have one vehicle pulling out when it shouldn’t have.”
A van and a sport utility vehicle collided in the intersection and the SUV ended up on its roof in front of the Two If By Sea cafe on Ochterloney. A few metres northwest along Ochterloney, the van came to rest with its front bumper ripped off. The van was not far from the four cement Jersey barriers that extended onto the streets at the corner of Ochterloney and Wentworth.
“It’s very much the same accident that has occurred several times at King and Ochterloney, just a block down,” Austin said. “Sightlines can be challengiing on that street, very much the sort of things we are looking to address with our projects.”
A Dartmouth woman said the temporary barrier projects are unsafe.
“It’s because it makes it a shorter walk for pedestrians to walk across the street,” she said of a stated objectives for the barriers. “If it is a pedestrian issue, why don’t they put up a (warning) light. All our streets are too narrow to have curb bumps. ... There is so much traffic here. We all think down there that curb bumps are not the answer. We’d like those things removed.”
The woman said she had been walking in the area shortly before Thursday’s collision.
“I don’t know if that caused the accident but they (barriers) are a danger,” she said. “There is no warning sign that those barriers are there. There are no signs. When it gets slippery, and somebody is coming up there, they are going to be hit. I walked on that sidewalk 25 minutes before that accident on that street. Anyone walking on that street, that sidewalk, could have been killed with that car flipping.”
The resident said the municipality seems pretty set on doing things like extending sidewalks at street corners.
“The end goal is to have people slow down but they are going to cause more disaster than not because cars will rush around them anyway.”
Austin, the regional councillor for Dartmouth Centre, said the curb bump-outs serve a couple of purposes.
“The idea of the sidewalk extension is that if the street is narrow, then traffic tends to go slower,” Austin said.
He said the main objective realized by curb bump-outs is to make pedestrians safer.
“It makes them more visible because the place they have to wait (to cross the street) is further out and it shortens the distance that they have to cross. It reduces the time they have to spend exposed to traffic in the streets.”
Austin said the municipality is calling it a pilot but the concept is anything but unusual.
“This isn’t a revolutionary idea. It’s new to us in dowtown Dartmouth on Ochterloney. But it’s a kind of a basic tool of traffic engineers. We are using Jersey barriers. You can test out how a different configuration of the street really works before you actually commit to anything in concrete.”
Austin pointed to similar configurations on Argyle Street where it intersects Sackville and Prince streets, and on Portland Street in Dartmouth, where bricked curb extensions are sporadically adorned with flower boxes. He said there have been no issues on those streets.
Austin said the barriers block off approximately the space of a car on both the Ochterloney and Wentworth sides of the corner.
“It’s an improvement if you consider usually what was sitting in that spot was an illegally parked car,” he said. “Instead of a vehicle sitting there that you can’t see around, you’ve got a shorter Jersey barrier that you can see over top of.”
Austin said the Ochterloney-Wenworth barriers are merely a test. They will probably be extended into the spring because they do not seem to pose much of a snow-removal problem. Similar bump-outs could be added at other Ochterloney intersections, he said.
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