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Here is another video from Road Guy Rob. This time he observes that crossing the street on your bike should be easy and safe.  There are stop lights to help you, but they also invite cars onto your bike route.  Engineers in Tucson, Arizona solve this dilemma with two special signals just for bicycles: Toucans and BikeHAWKs.

Road Guy Rob is a civil engineer who delights in explaining traffic engineering to the public. Although he is based in California, some of the information contained in his videos applies equally well here in British Columbia. I enjoy watching his enthusiasm and sharing his videos, this one being about how the HAWK beacon makes crossing any highway safer for pedestrians.

Spreading solid salt on the highway to melt ice takes some time as it has to dissolve in water in order to do the job. Applying salt in the form of a brine solution speeds up the process. This video from the Mainroad Group, one of B.C.'s road maintenance contractors explains about the use of brine instead of rock salt.

Intentional collisions staged to commit insurance fraud cost us all. The following five videos from the US National Insurance Crime Bureau web site contain examples of staged collisions to help you avoid being injured or victimized by criminals.

This video demonstrates a system called Safety Insights created by the Ford Motor Company. The system uses data provided by connected vehicles to assist engineers in anticipating collision problems, testing countermeasures and deciding which to apply through cost / benefit analysis. The expected outcome is collision prevention rather than applying corrections after they occur.

According to Charles Marohn, municipal engineer and planner, a stroad is a bad combination of two types of vehicular pathways: part street and part road.  He defines a stroad as a high-speed road with many turnoffs which lacks safety features and says that they are common in the United States and Canada.

Meet Monty, a railroad underpass in Melbourne, Australia that only has 3 m of clearance above the road surface. As you might guess, many vehicles greater than 3m high literally run into trouble at the underpass. This happens so frequently that there is even a website dedicated to keeping track of how many days have passed since the last crash!

This video is shared from the Protected Intersections for Bicyclists website. The author, Nick Falbo, explains that the concepts presented in the video are exploratory and experimental, but judging from the material provided on the site it might be more accurate if the words "in North America" were added. This appears to follow the standard Dutch design in a North American setting.

I enjoy these videos by Road Guy Rob. He explains how the road structures that we use daily function in an easy to understand manner. In this video he takes on the subject of raised medians. On one hand, they prevent crashes, but on the other, they keep us from turning left where we might want to. This video explains how engineers decide how to build raised medians.

When the light changes to green, drivers who intend to turn right or left are often focused on finding a gap in vehicle traffic to take advantage of. Pedestrians in the crosswalk are often not seen and a collision is the result. Leading pedestrian intervals are a simple walk light timing change that can help prevent these incidents.