Slowing down Aberdeen seems like a good idea, but I am confused by the plan advocated by Councilor Wilson.

In particular, there is almost no discussion of turning. Left turns could make a huge difference in how much traffic backup is caused by a conversion. Streets that are compared to Aberdeen in the report either have left-turn lanes (Mohawk) or don’t have left turns (Beckett). It is implied that a center-turn lane may be coming later and that the current plan is a “pilot”. Why would it make sense to convert Aberdeen twice?

I also hoped for a more balanced treatment from a page that refers to making policy choices “based on the best evidence.” The page reads as advocacy, and the evidence seems incomplete.

The plan is twice referred to as a compromise, but this is never explained.

The page says that 559th place out of 2740 streets puts Aberdeen in the “top one-fifth” of surveyed streets. This sort of statistical cherry-picking is always misleading, but in this case it’s also factually incorrect! 559th puts Aberdeen in the second fifth – but that’s also a misleading way to put it, since it’s near the boundary. More informative would be to not even try to pick a formulation that favors one side. We can instead simply report to a sensible degree of accuracy: Aberdeen ranks in the 80th percentile among the surveyed streets.

The page also criticizes the ranking for “extremely” heavy weighting against the consideration of “life-changing” injuries. Injuries are not to be ignored, but there is no evidence provided about what effect including injuries would have on Aberdeen’s ranking: maybe it has more injuries than other surveyed streets with similar numbers of deaths, or maybe it has less. The same can be said about the “experience” paragraph: these concerns are important but that doesn’t change the fact that our best available information is that Aberdeen is probably around the 80th danger percentile.

The page also argues that “Aberdeen also carries less traffic than Beckett, since some car trips continue north on Queen and east on Herkimer.” Aberdeen may well carry less traffic than Beckett, but this sentence provides no evidence of that. We might as well say Beckett carries less traffic than Aberdeen, since some Aberdeen trips continue past Beckett, or end at Dundurn, or go north on Queen.

I would like to see a plan that addresses left turns directly, requires only one conversion, and discusses possible impacts not just on rat-running in our wealthy neighborhood, but also on neighborhoods that might be indirectly affected if the Aberdeen changes change drivers’ routes.