Jim Kenzie's The Driver's Seat

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign...

This sign is wrong:

This sign is right:

Both signs are a few hundred meters apart, on southbound 427, just south of the 401.

What’s the difference?

Apart from the colour and the number of street names on each?

Hint: It has to do with the yellow band at the bottom.

Give up?

The international convention for yellow bands on highway signs is that the options listed on such a sign are the ONLY ones available to you.

Where they are used properly on Ontario highways is when they identify a lane that is about to become an exit ramp.

If you’re in this lane, you’re exiting.

If you don’t want to exit, you shouldn’t be in this lane, and you better move over as quickly as you can safely do so.

Simple.

Consistent.

And therefore, inherently safe.

That’s what the second (blue) sign indicates. If you’re in this lane, you MUST exit onto Holiday Drive.

Fair enough.

But the top (green) sign suggests that if you follow either of the two lanes marked with the black arrows, you MUST exit on one of Holiday Drive, Burnhamthorpe Road or Eva Road.

Again, the yellow band signifies the MUST component.

But that’s not the case at all.

All the top sign means is that you’re entering the collectors lanes. You CAN choose one of the three exits listed, but you don’t HAVE to. You can keep going southbound in the 427 collectors.

Why this matters was pointed out to me vividly some years back, where the westbound Gardiner expands from three (or four) lanes into Express and Collector sets of lanes, just west of Park Lawn Road.

I saw a BIG out-of-province commercial bus approaching this split. All of a sudden, he lunged left, crossing about three lanes of traffic to wrench the rig back into the Express lanes.

He - and the rest of us on the road at the time - were damned lucky there wasn’t a major collision.

I couldn’t read the bus driver’s mind, nor did I chase him down for an interview.

But I think my speculation about what went on is pretty close to the reality - I’m thinking he saw a sign similar to the green one on top here which reads “Islington Avenue / Kipling Avenu", he realised he didn’t want any of those, and because the yellow band implied he HAD to take one of those options, he swerved to avoid getting onto an undesired off-ramp.

(Wasn’t that the plot, such as it was, for 'Bonfire of the Vanities'? Ranks right up there with the worst books and worst movies ever made. But I digress…)

If the sign also included “Thru Collector Lanes" or some such, the yellow band wouldn’t be so misleading.

Now, anyone who has driven the 401 more than two or three times soon figures this out.

But one of the essential points of good engineering and design is that it be instantly intuitive.

Put another way, you shouldn’t have to rely on ‘local knowledge’ to be safe on our roads. We should welcome visitors, not put them through mazes.

Or darn-near cause their busses to mow down a bunch of us.

That’s also why we have standardized signage systems, so people understand what they mean without having to think unduly hard to decipher them.

So, why don’t we follow standards?

Beats me.

I’ve got other beefs about our highway signage too. Stay tuned.

And send me your pet peeves as well.

Oh - the green and blue colours on the above signs? Most of you probably know already that the green signs are for the express lanes, the blue signs for the collectors.

That’s one standard Ontario does seem to maintain.

Oh, another thing - I took those pictures with my car well and truly stopped off the shoulder of the highway.

Different Tune, or Same Old Song? Part II of - well, many...

Fritz Henderson, President and CEO of the new General Motors, and his new slim-trim nine-man Executive Committee will have a disproportionate number of Canadians helping them implement their strategic vision.

Three of the four remaining GM brands - Chevrolet, Buick, Cadillac and GMC truck - are in the hands of Canadian-born talent.

Brent Dewar from Vancouver is global chief for Chevrolet. Despite looking more like a student intern than a 30-year GM veteran, Dewar is tipped by many to be on the fast track to the very top of the corporation.

Susan Docherty is vice president in charge of the Buick-Pontiac-GMC channel (soon to become the Buick-GMC channel as soon as she unloads the last 18,000-odd Pontiacs in inventory). She started her GM career as a summer student on the midnight shift in a transmission factory in her Windsor home town.

The fourth brand boss, looking after the flagship Cadillac brand, is Bryan Nesbitt, a name you might recall. He's an interesting story in his own right, even if he isn't Canadian. Come back tomorrow for more on him.

The only Canadian on the Executive Committee is Chief Financial Officer Ray Young, who spent much of his youth in my own home town of Milton Ontario.

Two Canadian GM veterans won't be around to help - at least not for much longer. Toronto native Maureen Kempston-Darkes, the hugely respected former president of GM of Canada and currently President of GM for Latin America, Africa and the Middle East (the highest-rank ever achieved by a woman within GM) retires at the end of 2009.

And McMaster grad Jim Taylor, whose tenure as head of Cadillac played a significant role in that brand's resurgence over the past decade or so and who went from there to head up the Hummer Division, was part of the package the Chinese purchaser of that brand acquired.

Better learn feng shui, Jim.

Different Tune, or Same Old Song? Part I of - well, many...

Earlier this week, Fritz Henderson, President and CEO of the ‘new’ General Motors (meaning the one of which you and I own 11.8 percent) hosted a media event to introduce his new Executive Committee, and give us a sneak preview into some product and technology developments that are just around the corner for GM.

The print edition of Wheels is all over this session this coming weekend. But there was so much going on at the meeting, both formally and in little scrums between the presentations, that I’ll be doling out additional little bloggish tidbits over the next few days.

Henderson started by saying that the new mantra for General Motors will be “Customers, Cars and Culture” – and in that order.

Hence, Henderson said it was more than symbolic that a similar session had taken place the day before, with a select group of consumers who got a look at GM's plans for the future before the media did.

Humph. Don't they know who we are?!

That uber-focus group didn't consist of a bunch of sycophantic GM lifers either. Most were selected after having communicated with Henderson or other GM executives, some via various new Internet-based communications channels, and most of them critically.

Most were not current GM customers either, although many had previously been.

How better in Henderson's mind to determine what prospective customers want than to ask former customers why they left?

Can’t argue with the strategy; pardon us for being a trifle skeptical, because we have heard promises of this sort before. As in after just about every one of GM's seemingly annual reorganizations.

Time will tell if GM is clever enough this time to implement tactics which will fulfill the objective.

Tomorrow I’ll outline some of the Canadian Content he’ll have to help him in this struggle.

If the Universe is expanding...

...shouldn't the traffic be getting lighter?

(Thanks to Stephen Wright for this Thought for Today)

Round and round - we DON'T go.

When we first moved out here to rural Milton, there was one stoplight between our house and the bottom of the off-ramp from the Gardiner Expressway to Yonge Street.

Now, there are six.

And the only one of them that makes a lick of sense is the one that was already here, because the intersection had (and has) a lot of traffic, the intersection had already been built, and there wasn’t enough room to do anything else.

The other five?

Completely stupid.

What is wrong with urban planners these days? At least, the ones working for Halton Region?

Do stoplight manufacturers have photos of these people in compromising situations?

I mean, stoplights are the least efficient, most dangerous form of traffic control ever invented, as anyone who has ever been Tee-boned or rear-ended at one will testify (and there are increasing numbers of those in the GTA, as we all know).

The most egregiously stupid stoplight of a very stupid lot is the one at the intersection of our sideroad and (the former) Highway 25. You’ve got a rural highway, with reasonably but not insanely heavy traffic, and a sideroad which, while designated a “regional” road and hence is intended to carry more traffic than municipally-maintained roads, is still not all that busy.

At least it wouldn’t be all that busy if the cops would keep the gravel trucks off it, as they are supposed to do.

But traffic on that rural highway has to come to a complete stop for a couple of minutes, just to let one lousy car cross that highway?

Even if you just turn right on Highway 25, as I typically do several times daily, you may trigger the sensors which initiate a light change.

For no reason whatsoever.

And while that traffic is stopped, it is exposed to the risk of those self-same gravel trucks or other vehicles barreling into them. I mean, who the heck expects a traffic light in the middle of nowhere?

Needless to say, there is an alternative, one you’ve heard from me before.

The roundabout.

Now, my intersection might not have room for one, but again, there is just no reason for any traffic control device in that spot at all.

But the other four additional stoplights?

They are all the result of the recently widened Highway, which was expanded to handle the expected additional traffic from the industrial developments just north of town; or from the expansion of the interchange with Highway 401 (which is also badly designed, but that’s a story for another time).

Absolutely no reason why roundabouts wouldn’t have been perfect in all those cases.

Roundabouts are so perfect for a number of reasons:

1. They are safe - can’t tee-bone anyone at a roundabout; about the worst that can happen is a side-swipe, which by comparison is very minor.

2. They help traffic move efficiently - you may have to slow down, but you (almost) never have to stop entirely. True, with a stoplight you may be lucky enough to catch the green, but if you do, someone else has caught the red.

3. They are environmentally friendly - stopping and idling your vehicle is by far the worst thing you can do for pollution. And of course, you don’t need electricity to run the stoplights.

4. They surely can't even be that expensive to build, given that in these cases, they were re-building the highway anyway. And properly designed, they don't take up any more room than a conventional intersection, not when you consider the right-turn-only and left-turn-only lanes you typically have in a modern stoplight-controlled intersection.

The craziest thing about the utter lack of roundabouts in Halton Region is that their (our!) highway designers don’t have to go all the way to England to understand the brilliance of the concept. They can (ahem) read my columns, or just drive west about 20 minutes, where the Waterloo Region has been installing roundabouts at a great rate in recent years.

One of their traffic planners told me recently that the results are as positive as they were predictable - crashes are down by large double-digit percentages, and the types of crashes they do have are much less severe.

True, roundabouts do take some getting used to. I did an interview with a Kitchener TV station a few months ago on the subject of these new roundabouts; they had video footage of some drivers driving straight across the roundabout.

Man, they must have thought what was some kinda speed bump.

But seriously; with proper signage and a bit of an education campaign, how hard is it to figure out a Yield sign?

And after that acclimatization period, you can join most of the civilized world in utilizing the most brilliant traffic control device ever invented.

Just not in Halton Region.

Pity.

Truths my Father told me

Among the many pieces of advice my Father gave me, one that I (almost) never heeded was: "Always live east of your work."

Why?

Because, assuming you have a Day Job and you drive to it, the sun will always be at your back, and not in your eyes.

So, how do you explain yesterday?

There were at least four crashes on the 401 that I was aware of, and all four were eastbound, in the afternoon.

Can't blame it on the sun being in your eyes.

Unless maybe that it was just about the first sunny day we've had all summer and people were wondering what that bright yellow thing in the sky was...

I was also driving eastbound on the 401 yesterday in the afternoon - well, it would have been faster walking. Darryl Dahmer of 680 News said it was backed up from Kennedy Road to south of the airport. He added, "If you're heading east on the 401, I feel for you."

Thanks, Double D.

And maybe I stumbled upon an answer.

Depending on the exact position of the sun, your rear-view mirror can become worse than useless as the sun shines into it, eradicating the view to the rear. You can't see anyone coming from behind, and therefore you assume there isn't.

You change lanes, and:

WHAM!

Could be.

Anyone else got any suggestions?

Has someone finally figured out iDrive?

At the International media launch of the then-new BMW 7 Series at which iDrive was first introduced, they had an engineer sit in the car with each journalist for half an hour explaining how this system worked.

OK, so any new technology needs some explanation.

But this might have been our first clue that it wasn't the most intuitive thing ever devised.

The objective was fine - to enable all the functions that modern electronics can add to the driving experience, but combine the controls needed to operate them into a single system, thereby saving valuable dash and centre console space.

But the execution was, shall we say, somewhat lacking.

Various other companies have tried the same idea. Mercedes-Benz's COMAND system was, if anything, even harder to comprehend. Audi's MMI - Multi-Media Interface, I think it was called - appeared to take advantage of its competitors' mistakes, and was considerably easier to manipulate.

Jaguar and others went with a touch screen, which is maybe the easiest to operate. But there is a built-in conflict in this concept, between ease of reach and ease of viewing - the farther away the screen, the closer to the operator's (driver's or passenger's) line of sight, but the harder it is to access.

Nissan's Infiniti division probably did it best; same concept - a mouse-like knob with point-and-click actions to select the various systems and values you wanted, but for some reason, it just made more sense - to me, at least.

BMW came up with a simplified iDrive which worked better, and on their newest 7, an entirely new design which again is a huge improvement on the original.

Most such systems have voice activation too. I must not be the only person who never bothers to learn how to use this function, because car companies keep trying to come up with ways to manipulate such systems by hand.

And I drove a Lexus RX450h hybrid the other day, and it may have the best yet, with a system they call Remote Touch.

A trapezoidal knob in the palm-rest housing on the centre console moves a cursor on the dash-mounted screen. Built-in electronic resistance (it's called 'haptic feedback') means that unlike a computer mouse/arrow, it wants to stop only in places where you have an option to select something. And, it will automatically centre itself on one of those options if you get close enough.

In the screen shown here (the Main Menu) you can select one of those five options, then press one of the Enter buttons, which, like some of the more complex computer mice, are elongated buttons on either side of the housing.

That brings up a sub-menu, move the cursor, hit Enter, and on it goes.

What really helps are the dedicated buttons just ahead of the controller knob. One touch of your index finger takes you back to the Main Menu, so if you do get lost in the maze, there's an easy way out.

And on the assumption that the most common use of this system will be navigation, the right-most button instantly displays the map.

Maybe Remote Touch only feels more intuitive to those who spend most of their waking hours on a computer, which surely encompasses most who would be attracted to a vehicle like the Lexus 450h Hybrid in the first place. The same system is expected to work its way onto other Lexus and, probably, higher-end Toyotas over time.

Ain't progress wonderful?

Some highways take more than their toll...

I'm too cheap to use the 407 often enough to be bothered to get a transponder.

But a couple of the car companies' press fleets have them permanently fitted, and on occasion when my schedule is even more jammed up than usual, I succumb to the temptation.

Wow - that thing is the poster child for lousy highway lane markings.

Lanes are added and subtracted willy-nilly, turning into off-ramps or just disappearing with not a shred of apparent logic.

You might think this would somehow be in response to traffic patterns; my limited experience on the road renders me unqualified to pass judgment thereon.

But people I know who use (or used to use) the road regularly tell me that in rush hours it still comes to a complete stop, seat backs and tray tables in the locked and upright position.

Man, there's nothing like paying extra for the privilege of being in a traffic jam.

What I can report on with some certainty is that lane discipline (which I consider critical to safe, efficient and 'genial' motoring) on this road is even worse, hard as that may be to believe, than on our regular highways.

Which reinforces my belief that poor lane discipline is caused or, at the very least enabled, by improper lane design.

If people don't know what's going to happen to the right lane, they avoid it.

Give them three or four options like the 407 does in spots, and they'll get into any old lane and just stay there regardless of other traffic until they run out of highway or dive off to their exit.

I repeat: The right lane is the driving lane; how can it ever disappear?

If you need an extra lane, 'grow' it to the left.

If you need to drop a lane, cut it from the left.

If you need an exit ramp, grow it to the right.

An on-ramp should merge into the driving lane without fail, but with plenty of length so as to allow safe merges.

How tough can it be?

True, most 407 users know the road and somehow get used to this idiotic illogicality.

But safe driving should not depend on 'local knowledge'.

Following consistent, accepted principles is a key factor in engineering anything.

Why are our highway designers allowed to get away with this?

Baby the Rain must Fall

Was driving home from Windsor yesterday (Friday).

About half an hour west of London on the 401, I ran into the Mother, Father, Sister and Brother of thunderstorms.

I could see the cell as I approached - a massive, ominous, black, angry-looking cloud formation obscuring what was otherwise a nice, sunny sky.

The first clue I had that it was going to be bad took the shape of a few motorcyclists parked under a couple of successive bridges, donning their rain gear. They must either have had built-in weather radar, or CB radios.

Ever driven right into a rainstorm? Where it's dry on one side of the street and raining on the other?

There were a few big SPLATS of raindrops, then almost immediately, the worst rain I think I have ever driven in. The animals were walking two-by-two.

To everyone's credit, we all slowed down, crawling along at maybe 40 km/h. I'd venture to say maybe a quarter of the cars pulled off on the shoulder to wait it out.

I've often questioned the wisdom of this strategy; I know of at least one case where a car sitting on the shoulder was rear-ended with tragic results because the following car saw taillights and assumed that that car was driving in the correct lane.

Maybe if you can pull far enough off the road, or take a handy exit, you'd be OK. But I figured my best chance was to continue to go with the flow of traffic. Then if I did get hit by someone, at least I'd be moving and the closing speed wouldn't be as great.

Many of the cars around me also had their four-way flashers on, which obviously was the right thing to do.

Do you feel a 'but' coming on?

Oh yeah...

BUT - what was up with the people who didn't have their headlights on?

I mean, folks, come on...

Every second car has their four-ways on; you obviously can't see a car ahead of you if it's more than three car lengths away.

And you don't think to switch your headlights on?

Don't you think maybe the cars following you are having the same problem seeing YOUR car as you are seeing the car ahead of you?

As noted here previously, in some jurisdictions - New York State being one of them - the law says you must have your headlights on if your wipers are on.

Great idea.

Except of course, New York State doesn't have a Daytime Running Lights law.

And as much as I supported DRL when it was introduced, I'm now realizing it does more harm than good.

I remember specifically one white Buick Rendezvous, going really slowly - dangerously slowly, even for the conditions. I was too busy to catch the licence plate. I honked as I inched past him, and flicked my lights off and on.

No clue.

And here's where the Daytime Running Lights issue came in: GM cars, like all too many cars, only turn on reduced-intensity high beams, but no taillights, because that is all that is mandatory according to Transport Canada.

But they also turn on the dash lights, so drivers think they do have lights on, and don't know they are essentially invisible to cars approaching from behind.

People, people. people - read your Owners' Manual. Or walk around your car in your driveway when the lights are not on; find out what your car's DRL does.

Or, better still, don't bother - just turn your headlights, on all the time.

Why take unnecessary chances?

The rain stopped almost as quickly as it had started, as the thunderstorm moved off to the south-east.

And seconds later, the white Rendezvous went rocketing past my red Porsche Cayman S like I was nailed to the pavement, completely oblivious to the danger he had been in, and had exposed others to.