Edmonton Headlines: Thursday, August 3, 2017

I didn’t think I’d be leading off today’s Headlines with a rant about a tweet, but here we are.

Somehow, Edmonton’s plan to reduce deaths and serious injuries on our roads now includes telling people where they can speed without worrying about photo radar tickets. Probably not a contradiction?

To enhance accessibility, we have posted photo radar locations on our Open Data portal #yegtraffic #VisionZero https://t.co/UlKi4KG4WQ

— Vision Zero Edmonton (@VisionZeroYEG) August 2, 2017

I’ll go one better than this accessible list of photo radar locations for you: pretty much every road you drive on in Edmonton has a speed limit of 50 km/h. So don’t drive faster than that and you won’t get a ticket.

While the City should dig into the traffic collision data from photo radar locations (or, hopefully the reductions that result), telling people – in actual or near real-time – where photo radar may be active is more of a political action. People who speed like to complain about photo radar, even though it reduces people’s speeds and, likely, crashes and deaths. It’s one of many tools a city like Edmonton can use to keep speeding drivers from killing people. As our 2016 traffic stats show, road safety is improving.

Yeah it does. Image: City of Edmonton

And, I’m not sure that the City’s “Vision Zero” voice is the best one to be telling people where they can and can’t speed. It should should just be telling people driving to slow the hell down. Or maybe it could tweet about the year City staff actually think Edmonton will achieve the vision zero target of zero deaths and serious injuries on our streets. And if it wants to tweet about political topics, how about support to reduce the speed limit to 30 km/h on all of our residential and neighbourhood roads?

Oh no. I just became one of those local media ranters who goes on and on about photo radar.

Around the city

According to new data from Statistics Canada about how many people are living where, Edmontonians don’t tend to live alone. We’re also having more babies than people in other parts of Canada. So, can we stop building towers full of one-bedroom apartments now? And we definitely need to stop banning children from condos.

The CEO of Northlands is confident about the future. I’m sure K-Days was a blast but I’d be a little more iffy about things if I were him. While the Expo Centre is probably going to link up with the Shaw Conference Centre to try and land more conferences in Edmonton, we really don’t know what’s going to happen to the site that’s lost its major arena tenant, losing its racetrack, and can’t remain as a giant parking lot most of the time with our city’s needs to build residential infill. I really don’t think we know what the future of Northlands is at all.

Here are a couple of interesting local business stories that have to do with malls. It actually feels a bit weird to talk about local business and malls at the same time, doesn’t it?

A post shared by Poppy Barley (@poppybarley) on Jul 26, 2017 at 5:34pm PDT

Well, Londonderry is launching a new “retail incubator” with eight new stores that are from Alberta, most of which will be opening their first location IRL. And Edmonton shoe phenomenon Poppy Barley is opening its new location in Southgate Centre today.

Want to learn how to use all those tools in your kitchen drawer? Want to check out a farm? You can totally do those things!