Random posted it on the previous page and I posted a follow up:
Originally Posted by overpowered
Random posted it on the previous page and I posted a follow up:
Last edited by overpowered; May 1st, 2014 at 06:02 PM.
So a Montreal city official harasses a bicyclist telling him to get on the sidewalk.
http://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/mo...3_article_POS2
The mayor responds that this is unacceptable, siding with the bicyclist.
Montreal > Toronto
Wish I'd gotten the same response from our city officials.
We're headed out to Arizona this weekend for our anniversary. Wife just said "Ya know, we should really bring the bikes - we don't want to get there and think 'it'd be awesome to ride here!' and not have them."
Just bragging about my wife. Carry on.
Yeah, when we are going on holiday, mine usually goes "Camera, bike, child. Choose two."
I tried looking for links, and found a report on the plans, but not really the crap.
So, I was thinking about it, and towns where I have lived, and that's really the principal I have used in constructing my normal routes, except that the streets which had those characteristics weren't explicitly marked as "bicycle boulevards".
I grew up in Fort William, Ontario, and then Thunder Bay, Ontario. The streets were an old grid pattern, and by picking parallel roads, and taking stop signs and lights into consideration, you could get reasonable speed but avoid cars. An old town with lots of single-family dwellings, it at that time (early 1970's) didn't in practice have a lot of on-street parking.
In Waterloo, where I now live, a road not far from our house parallels the main drag, but is less straight, and marked with lower speed limits. It's still most-of-the-time reasonably pleasant for getting from one place to another, starting in the south end of the town. And then, at one point, there's a slow road which crosses the main drag (though with a very slow traffic light), taking you to a similar street, actually wider and straighter, but lightly travelled and rarely parked up, which takes you to the north, where you get to modern suburban developments with roads that tend to take you through them, if you know your way around.
It would seem to me that marking those roads of which I speak as "bicycle boulevards" would do more harm than good. But somehow the city planning(?) has made them effectively such.
The fuss is all the NIMBYS and BANANAS up to their usual tricks, plus the whole car-centric group-think and confirmation bias that always gets thrown around. I can't find this one video that an idiot radio presenter made - clearly he's never looked both ways before crossing the road.
[edit] Aha! Here he is! It's complete nonsense
And, of course, the next mayoral (is that a word?) candidate is promising to tear it all out in November if he is elected.
I've been going out of my way to use it to show some kind of support.
Last edited by G'day Mate; May 2nd, 2014 at 05:23 AM.
Brilliant. Try living in a country where space is not so much a luxury. Even with the 'reduced' width of ^^ that road, that's still plentiful in terms of what I've got it my local town.
We're having a big fight to get the first real cycletrack installed here in LA. There's a big push to build something called "My Figueroa", which is a plan to take a lane away in either direction on Figueroa between USC and downtown (convert from a three-lane-each-way route to two-lane-each-way) and add a separated cycletrack and wider sidewalks. It's been approved by the city, the budget has been allocated, and it was greenlit. The local car dealership, USC, and even the local museums opposed it, which has led the city councilman, Gil Cedillo, to repeatedly try to block it.
Eventually, USC and the museums dropped their objections, but the car dealership kept fighting. To their credit, they said that if there was enough support from the local residents, they would drop their appeal and they did just that a day or two ago. That didn't stop Gil Cedillo from coming back asking that they just put sharrows in rather than do it. Our mayor is pushing to have this turned into one of his first "great streets", and still this city councilman doesn't want it to happen, despite overwhelming support from his constituents and the local businesses dropping their objections.
When I ride with my wife there's one section I ride on Fountain Ave. between Sweetzer and La Brea that's sharrowed. It's one of the worst parts of my commute due to impatient drivers. I sent an email to Gil Cedillo's office inviting him to ride along with us there to see if he considers sharrows to be good enough. I have not gotten a response.
Country where space is a luxury? I win, hands down.
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