Promenade - Megathread

[manxman34]

48 minutes ago, Bandits said:

No. I’m just sick of reading the awful BS they pump out on social media deriding the taxpayers who pay their wages.

Stop reading it, then.

[Bandits]

55 minutes ago, manxman34 said:

Stop reading it, then.

Another troll. How thoroughly amusing.

[Bandits]

1 minute ago, Roxanne said:

Not at all. He’s right. It’s up to you whether you choose to get upset about it or not by choosing whether to read about it or not. 

Not really as if I need to find out what’s going on with road closures etc I have no opportunity not to read the appalling drivel. 

[Bandits]

12 minutes ago, Roxanne said:

I smell bullshit

I don’t really care what you smell. The fact remains official government sites like Tweetbeat or any of the others exist solely to inform the public about things that affect the service being provided by that department. Not to try to turn a bunch of highly paid smug twats into media stars or social commentators. They should perhaps stick to just informing the public which is what people follow them for and not lecturing the public or offering any other form of unneeded comment.

Edited June 5, 2022 by Bandits
Text

[emesde]

15 hours ago, Happier diner said:

It's a good question. Education, campaigns, enforcement,stricter penalties, good policing. Would be a start I guess. 

Would you make regular training compulsory?  Re~tests., the problem is unless you make it compulsory very few people would pay for extra tuition. The general attitude seems to be "everybody else" needs to be better. 

Campaigns can give a strong message but have to be followed up with effective enforcement and can take generations to change attitudes. Drink drive, wearing seat belts etc. Good for individual objectives, but do little for general driving stds. Good effective policing helps but is very expensive. 

It's a real problem but not helped but  by the sort of decisions that were made in reshaping the prom.

It is a main road and looks as if the requirements of the people using it were of secondary importance. 

People at the summer Hill end of the prom struggle to find a safe crossing point. Yet when you get into Douglas there are more crossing points than required to cross safely. 

The junctions are awful for vision when emerging etc etc. The whole project was the opportunity to improve. £30 Million or so could have made things much better. We have had 4 years of disruption for something that has created more problems than answers. 

 

[NoTail]

Obviously TT is the big test. Have pedestrians been mown down or killed so far?

[forestboy]

1 hour ago, emesde said:

Would you make regular training compulsory?  Re~tests., the problem is unless you make it compulsory very few people would pay for extra tuition. The general attitude seems to be "everybody else" needs to be better. 

Campaigns can give a strong message but have to be followed up with effective enforcement and can take generations to change attitudes. Drink drive, wearing seat belts etc. Good for individual objectives, but do little for general driving stds. Good effective policing helps but is very expensive. 

It's a real problem but not helped but  by the sort of decisions that were made in reshaping the prom.

It is a main road and looks as if the requirements of the people using it were of secondary importance. 

People at the summer Hill end of the prom struggle to find a safe crossing point. Yet when you get into Douglas there are more crossing points than required to cross safely. 

The junctions are awful for vision when emerging etc etc. The whole project was the opportunity to improve. £30 Million or so could have made things much better. We have had 4 years of disruption for something that has created more problems than answers. 

 

Heads should roll  

 

 

[0bserver]

1 hour ago, NoTail said:

Obviously TT is the big test. Have pedestrians been mown down or killed so far?

Does someone have to be killed before we do anything? St. Johns?

[doc.fixit]

2 minutes ago, 0bserver said:

Does someone have to be killed before we do anything? St. Johns?

Totally agree. Is everything based on new, modern, different, cost or does no-one nowadays check on feel good factor, quality of finish, practicality, maintenance, drainage, need, safety  or maintenance and longevity?,

[0bserver]

30 minutes ago, doc.fixit said:

Totally agree. Is everything based on new, modern, different, cost or does no-one nowadays check on feel good factor, quality of finish, practicality, maintenance, drainage, need, safety  or maintenance and longevity?,

I don't know why we can't have just a basic set of minimum design standards for all island roads. 

[Andy Onchan]

For the life of me I don't see why zebra or any other pedestrian crossings aren't made idiot proof. Why, as a designer, would you leave anything to chance?

[emesde]

2 minutes ago, Andy Onchan said:

For the life of me I don't see why zebra or any other pedestrian crossings aren't made idiot proof. Why, as a designer, would you leave anything to chance?

Couldn't agree more. Crossings have evolved over generations to offer a safe way for pedestrians to cross roads . They need to be very obvious to both pedestrians and vehicle drivers/riders. 

Then along comes someone who thinks they should become works of art and blend in till they are unrecognisable as safe crossing  places. This is really playing with peoples lives. 

[Two-lane]

14 minutes ago, 0bserver said:

I don't know why we can't have just a basic set of minimum design standards for all island roads.

There are several UK gov. documents relating to the design of Shared Space roads. Here are a couple of quotes from one of them:

"The advocates of Shared Space suggest that it slows traffic and provides a safer environment. However, the evidence provided to the WEC and referred to in Lord Holmes’ report seems to be to the contrary. There seem to be over optimistic expectations of the behaviour of drivers and a lack of understanding of disability on the part of shared space’s supporters."

"A classic example of where shared space and disability collide is so-called ‘courtesy crossings’. The expectation appears to be that drivers will establish eye contact with pedestrians. Clearly, this is a non-starter with blind people, but the fact that many people with neuro-diverse and mental health conditions, and those with a learning disability have difficulties with eye contact, seems to have been overlooked"

There is much more, all dating back several years.

[Ghost Ship]

1 hour ago, Andy Onchan said:

For the life of me I don't see why zebra or any other pedestrian crossings aren't made idiot proof. Why, as a designer, would you leave anything to chance?

Yes.  If I were responsible for designing a road layout the last thing I would be doing is reckelssly taking risks with other peoples' lives by using a design that I hoped might encourage people to take greater individual reponsibility rather than using one that worked.  everybody understood.   [Edited for clarity]

Better to keep it safe, simple and idiot proof.

Edited June 6, 2022 by Ghost Ship
replaced "worked" with "everybody understood"

[Ghost Ship]

49 minutes ago, Two-lane said:

There are several UK gov. documents relating to the design of Shared Space roads. Here are a couple of quotes from one of them:

"The advocates of Shared Space suggest that it slows traffic and provides a safer environment. However, the evidence provided to the WEC and referred to in Lord Holmes’ report seems to be to the contrary. There seem to be over optimistic expectations of the behaviour of drivers and a lack of understanding of disability on the part of shared space’s supporters."

"A classic example of where shared space and disability collide is so-called ‘courtesy crossings’. The expectation appears to be that drivers will establish eye contact with pedestrians. Clearly, this is a non-starter with blind people, but the fact that many people with neuro-diverse and mental health conditions, and those with a learning disability have difficulties with eye contact, seems to have been overlooked"

There is much more, all dating back several years.

There's a sort of high street full of shops just round the corner from where I live.  It's not pedestrianised but it's had various traffic calming features installed over the last few years.  A couple of the features include areas where the road surface has been raised to the same level as the pavement, but there's no tactile paving at the (non-existent) kerb.

A few months ago I was driving along that road at around 7am on a Sunday morning.  Fortunately there was no other motor traffic that early on a Sunday.  I watched a blind pedestrian - I assume he was blind, he was using a white stick - wander off the pavement and into the road because he couldn't tell from his stick where the pavement ended and the road began.

Fortunately for him a nearby pedestrian realised what was happening and guided him back to the pavement before he ended up in the middle of the road.

A lot of these "clever" ideas are fine in theory or in a perfect world, but we don't live in a perfect world and you have to assume that if anything can possibly go wrong it will go wrong.  So the sensible thing to do is to minimise the things that can go wrong from the outset.

Edited June 6, 2022 by Ghost Ship