Take The Lane

Kitchener downtown sharrows will remind us all to share the road

It will be a big turnaround for the city that reduced its involvement in Car-Free Sundays back in 2011, if Kitchener councillors agree to a $14,000 plan to add sharrows to the city's main street.

This story on the Record website says that council will consider a plan April 8 to add 44 sharrows, and appropriate signage, to King Street through the city's downtown, reminding motorists and cyclists that they share the road.

The "street diet" that has been applied to King Street has even some GRT bus drivers grumpy about using the street: one parked truck half on and half off the roadway is enough to bottleneck the street. So I can imagine how motorists might feel if a cyclist "takes the lane" as Kitchener's Transportation Demand Management rep, Josh Joseph, says in the Record story.

But if any street is shareable, surely it is King Street, where even a briskly moving pedestrian can often stay even with the motor traffic. I have impatiently waited on my bicycle behind motorists who were stalled by the aforementioned delivery-truck-bottlenecks, so I suspect that King Street through the downtown probably does have an average traffic speed well within bicycling limits.

I hope the cost of the project, minimal as it might seem but not so small that some on council might take issue with it, won't be a deterrent. 

Also of interest in the Record article is the reference to an as-yet fully fleshed-out bicycle festival on Sunday, May 26 in Kitchener's downtown. This would segue nicely into the Complete Streets Forum in Toronto on Monday, May 27 and the Ontario Bike Summit 2013, Tuesday, May 28 and Wednesday, May 29, also in Toronto. Both the Toronto events are part of Toronto Bike Month, which runs May 27 to June 30.

On these grey, cold and wet March days, good to know that so many celebrations of cycling are just a few weeks away.

 

Merging cycling and pedestrian expectations a gimme

In a recent post about next April's Complete Streets Forum in Toronto, I speculated that it wouldn't be long before groups like the Share the Road Cycling Coalition will merge their efforts with Active Transportation groups.

I suppose I can't claim prescience for the obvious. Shortly after the post appeared, Eleanor McMahon of the Share the Road coalition emailed me to say that she and Nancy Smith Lea of the Toronto Centre for Active Transportation are discussing a linked Complete Streets Summit and Ontario Bike Summit, details of which are currently being hammered out. Part of the summit will include a workshop on lobbying your provincial member of the legislature, a skill worth developing in a minority government.

McMahon says there are six regional bike summits on the 2012 calendar in Ontario communities, and there should be a number of new communities that qualify for Bicycle Friendly Community status to be announced at the April Bike Summit.

The louder the voices, the more we will be heard.

 

Why are helmets so hard to accept?

I don't really understand the roots of bicycle helmet enmity. While I suspect it is mostly about the battle between individual freedoms and state control, there appears to a sincere segment of the anti-mandatory helmet crowd who believe that bicycle helmets discourage cycling.

Is this like saying that wearing garden gloves discourages gardening?

Helmets just seem like a gimme, like wearing a life jacket on open water. And based on the reluctance of so many people to wear flotation devices, maybe that's a good comparison. Why do so many private boat operators have to be monitored by water police so that they will wear/carry life jackets? Why do so few people who take ferries or other public watercraft treat life jackets so casually?

Is it because it's uncomfortable? Surely, that is one of the big complaints about bicycle helmets. Too hot? Ditto for bike helmets. I look geeky? Well, if you are in a personal watercraft, like a speedboat or jet-ski, the odds are that you are nearly naked or are wearing a wetsuit, and you've already stepped out of the parameters of "normal," so what difference does a flotation vest make? And if you're a Lycra-clad road warrior, ditto.

Is it because wearing a safety device makes us feel that we are unsafe? This should be counter-intuitive. If I am wearing a safety device, I should feel safer. Jumping out of a place without a parachute: unsafe. With a parachute: safe. Not wearing a helmet in conditions where I could strike my head and do damage: unsafe. Wearing a helmet in conditions where I could strike my head and do damage: safe.

Is it hard to recruit construction workers because they have to wear helmets and steel-toed boots? (Although truly, we have all walked past job sites where workers have ditched their helmets for one reason or another.)

One company that strives mightily to put a positive spin on helmets is Nutcase. Thanks to their selection of bright, goofy and ironic street helmets, at least they are trying to make helmets fun. Their latest press offering is about their flower-power bike helmets, suggesting that while giving flowers to Mom for Mother's Day is nice, giving a floral-themed bicycle helmet is better. At least they are having fun.

At the Ontario Bike Summit in 2010, Phillip Darnton of Cycling England made in passing the point that the image of cyclists can be somewhat rumpled or rather nerdy. Cyclists don't have to wear helmets that look like salad bowls or alien space gear. Maybe making helmets fun would make them more palatable.

Your thoughts on the cabinet shuffle

Your thoughts are welcome on the recent Ontario cabinet shuffle that saw Transport Minister Kathleen Wynne shuffled off to Municipal Affairs and Housing, and Aboriginal Affairs.

Wynne has been a good listener for several years running at such events as the Ontario Bike Summit, although those open ears don't seem to have translated into much in the way of benefits to Ontario's cycling community.

Having said that, Infrastructure Minister Bob Chiarelli gets to add Transport to his already-busy BlackBerry calendar. Where is he going to find the time to talk about roadway user education, alternative transportation and bicycle infrastructure support?

Is this a lose-lose situation for Ontario's cyclists?

Maybe not the first segregated bike lane

I think I fell victim to hype when I posted recently that Ottawa is getting the first segregated bicycle lane in Ontario.

This was announced as part of the Ontario Bike Summit in Ottawa this week, and gave the opportunity for the local media to demonstrate just how "bicycle-friendly" the capital is. (Here's a typical report, this one from CTV.)

I think it would be easy to argue, that what Ottawa is showing off here isn't much different from the segregated bike lane along Blair Road in Cambridge, from the village of Blair until it becomes a multi-use path as it veers off-road, about 2.5 kilometres along: the Blair segregated path is raised, marked and separated from traffic with breakaway bollards.

The big difference is that the Cambridge path is two-way, and I can't speak to how well serviced it is in the winter.

The Ottawa path is inner-city hardcore, and might actually become useful if enough bike lanes, trails and bicycle-friendly streets connect to it.

So, not the first in Ontario. Maybe the first downtown segregated bike lane? Anyone else have an example of one in this province?

Waterloo, Ottawa, Windsor and Ajax are Bicycle Friendly

Good news for four Ontario cities that have received Bicycle Friendly Community designations, announced at the Ontario Bike Summit in Ottawa today.

Waterloo and Ottawa were given Silver designations; Ajax and Windsor earned Bronze designations.

I'm fairly certain this will spark a round of discussion: how can this community be classed as silver when it has fewer bike lanes than that community? And so on.

First, your community has to apply to the Bicycle Friendly Community program. Second, it's about more than the number or quality of bike lanes.

According to the criteria, the five "Es" to be considered are engineering, education, encouragement, enforcement and evaluation. Does your community plan bike parking, adopt the active and safe routes to school program, promote bicycle events or advocacy, train law enforcement to be bicycle-friendly, and does it have a bicycle master plan? Here's the score card, as developed by the League of American Bicyclists, which helped bring the program to Ontario.

If you are on your community's cycling advisory committee, or known someone who is, have a look at the links. Get thinking about how your community stands up against these first Ontario Silver and Bronze communities. And tell your mayor about Bicycle Friendly designations. Politicians are notoriously competitive. You might ask your mayor why Waterloo or Ajax is a BFC, while St. Catharines or London isn't.

On the verge of the Ontario Bike Summit

Disappointed that I won't be at the Ontario Bike Summit in Ottawa next Monday and Tuesday.

This is the first one I've missed, although now that more municipalities (Guelph, Kingston, Waterloo) are holding bicycle-friendly symposia or active transportation conferences, there are more opportunities than ever to hear planners, advocates and end users share ideas about how to build a better cycling future.

Ottawa is great venue for the bike summit, though, especially with the cycling infrastructure work being done by cycling champions such as Marie Lemay, CEO of the National Capital Commission, and one of the summit speakers. Ottawa is getting the first segregated bicycle lane in Ontario, a pilot project that, I am sure, will lead to more such projects around the province.

I'll also be disappointed not to be there on Monday when the list of Ontario's first Bicycle Friendly Communities are announced. I understand that Windsor, Ottawa and Waterloo will get BFC designations, but don't know at what level.

Eleanor McMahon, founder of the Share the Road Cycling Coalition and summit organizer, said the reps from the League of American Bicyclists, whose program this is, said they had never seen such strong first-time applications for BFC designations.

I'll also be disappointed not to be there on Tuesday, when conference participants will be discussing the release of an advocacy toolkit designed to emphasize cycling issues to those running in this fall's provincial election.

Municipalities may administer cycling infrastructure, but the province sets the framework in which such infrastructure can exist. If the Education Ministry smiles on the Active and Safe Routes to School program (and provides incentives to school boards that adopt an active transportation charter), then boards are likely to line up to be pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly. If the Health Ministry commits resources to facilities that combat obesity (such as cycling trails), then municipalities are likely to undertake programs that qualify for funding.

If you are going to this year's Ontario Bike Summit, tweet me, or email, what you hear or see. I'd like to hear your impressions.

 

 

Save the date for the Ontario Bike Summit

The Ontario Bike Summit is coming up surprisingly soon. The summit, usually held in the fall, has been switched to early summer due to the fall provincial election.

If you want to hear from the likes of Ontario Transportation Minister Kathleen Wynne, Cycling England's former chair Phillip Darnton or Dutch ambassador to Canada (and cycling enthusiast) Wim Geerts, you'll have to find some time to travel to Ottawa on Monday, June 27 and Tuesday, June 28.

Details of the Bike Summit are here, on the Share the Road Cycling Coalition website.

Ottawa is a hotbed for cycling. There were more politicians and cycling-associated representatives at the Velo-city Global 2010 in Copenhagen than from any other region of Canada. The Euro experience resulted in a visit to Ottawa by bicycle infrastructure advocate, the Danish architect Jan Gehl, and this year, the announcement of a bike-sharing program for the capital.

It's good to see that Phillip Darnton hasn't given up banging the drum, even after the British government slit his agency's throat this year as a part of broad cost-cutting effort. Here's Darnton's upbeat farewell message on the now-moribund Cycling England website. Darnton is also a keynote speaker at the Asia-Pacific Cycle Congress in Melbourne in September.

His message, about investment in our health and communities, is such a basic one, that I don't understand why it is so hard to sell.

Why is it so difficult to get government to think of preventitive spending as investment? It is cheaper and more effective to keep sick people in their homes than to place them in hospital beds. It is cheaper and more effective to invest in education and support for the economically disadvantaged than to build prisons to house them if they become criminals. It is cheaper and more effective to encourage active transportation than it is to endlessly expand roads for more cars, and hospital wings to treat an increasingly obese and asthmatic population.

Are governments so caught up in building monoliths -- hospitals, jails -- that they have lost sight of the notion that we should be building a society?

Part of the messaging at the Bike Summit will be about the upcoming provincial election. Who to talk to. What to say. As at levery Bike Summit, there will be a panel of representatives from the provincial political parties. This year, you'll really want to hear what they have to say, and you'll really want them to hear what you have to say.

Brits put the knife into Cycling England

Apparently, the Brits are only trendsetters until budget time. In a bid to slash government spending, the  bean-counters have pulled the plug on its innovative agency, Cycling England.

The non-governmental cycling support agency started out promoting cycling among children (for all the obvious health reasons) and expanded to include adult programs, infrastructure advocacy and, in a truly grand experiment, the establishment of cycle-friendly communities. The chair of Cycling England, Phillip Darnton, inspired the Ontario Bike Summit in Waterloo back in 2009, and was made a member of the Order of the British Empire that year for his services to transportation.

Not good enough to survive the axe when a cash-starved British government is looking to rescue a pound or two. According to this article in the Guardian, Bikeability, the youth program, has survived, to be taken over by the oh-so-committed-to-cycling Department of Transport, while Cycling England itself is going to be taken out to the back alley and put out of its misery by March of this year. (On a lighter note, the Guardian article contributes a word that is new to me: quango. Quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization. Add that to your bureaucratic lexicon.)

I suppose you could have seen this coming. This article from the Blackpool Gazette, from last month, smells a lot like what has been coming out of Toronto, and other Canadian cities, as the backlash to cycling infrastructure decisions is being felt. Angry cabbies who want cycling funds spent to fix potholes apparently have more effect on politicians than "egghead" studies that show increased levels of fitness, community connectivity and reduced traffic congestion thanks to cycling. Once Cycling England was given 3 million pounds to promote cycling, you just knew someone would want to reel that money back in.

Sad decision.

 

Bike boxes don't have to be confusing

According to this story in the Toronto Star, bike boxes are just another form of roadway paint clutter.

I posted last month on bike boxes, after they came up at the Ontario Bike Summit. I think the big advantage of a bike box, when incorporating large areas of colour, is that it really stands out from the usual street furniture. The bike box illustrating the Star story is just another white line. Unless it was already full of bicycles, what motorist would stop short of it, and what cyclist would weave in ahead of traffic to fill it?

Clearly, a work in progress.