I'm on the Wet Coast for a while, partly to visit some family members, partly to participate in Velo-city Global 2012 in Vancouver.
It's pretty clear that one overworked blogger is never going to do justice to this event. The sessions start Tuesday at 8 a.m. (8 a.m.! Are they crazy?) and continue on every day until 5 p.m. or 5:30 p.m. Then there's an evening event of some kind. While some of the daily sessions are intended for all to attend (usually, the keynote address for the day), the rest of the day is packed with concurrent events.
Just to give you an idea, on Monday, the 11 a.m. sessions include: the rise of cycle tourism (lecture); public bike sharing, the benefits (lecture); mobility policies in cities (lecture); cycling policies on campus (lecture); understanding cyclists (lecture); safe interactions between road users (lecture); multi-use pathways (lecture); planning cycling networks (lecture); cycling safety (symposium); growth of cargo bikes (symposium); and building bicycle advocacy capacity (workshop). That's right, 11 concurrent sessions and you have to pick one -- or bounce from one to another and see if you can accumulate copies of the addresses and contact info for later discussions. With session leaders coming from Australia, Germany, Belgium, U.S.A., Canada, Chile and the U.K., among other nations, there's a lot of cycling experience here to draw on.
Velo-city is also an opportunity for planners and designers to strut their stuff, and not finding enough room in the program to showcase their successes, they have spilled outside the conference calendar.
Among them is Alpine Bike Parks, a bike trail and park design company based in Whistler, B.C. and Boulder, Colo. They incorporate active cycling facilities into urban recreational trailways, to give variety to the standard multi-use path, sometimes with minimal budget allocations ($12,000 for one pump track in the U.S.) They'll be showing their stuff on the Monday before the conference.
I won't be able to make their Monday session, but based on their website, there are some projects here that could develop some of the trails in Waterloo Region. There's no reason why the Henry Sturm Greenway in Kitchener has to be such a dead-straight pathway in a flat park. Jazz it up with a pump track. It we could put in that kind of facility for $15,000, it would be a worthwhile investment in recreational bike use.
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