commuting

GO Transit Bike shelter
Photo was taken on Christmas Day at Guildwood GO station. Looks like the staff at GO Transit decided to give cyclists a much appreciated present.

Winnipeg

Lay down a sewer pipe and there are myriad standards dictating dimension, clearance and placement. Lay down a bike lane and sound design precepts are optional, more often recognized in the breach than in the application. How is it that conduits for sh_t are typically subjected to greater planning rigor than conduits for human beings on bicycles?

If you're apt to such musings whenever...oh...pedalling through an officially designated door zone painted up as a bike lane, you're not alone. A few of us were pondering just how that mystery related to the Bloor Viaduct bikeway, a pillar of Toronto's bike network and, conveniently, right in our backyard.

A generation has been conceived, miseducated, and is now tormenting parents with grating music and delinquency since the inception of the Viaduct bike lanes. Yet the bikeway remains stillborn, its hazards, all too familiar to regular cyclists, unresolved.

It can be better. It should be. Why not try to make it so? That was the motivation behind the The Bloor Viaduct Report. I'll skip the specifics, download the report (attached 2.4 MB PDF) and in about the same time it took to read this article you will be familiar with the details.

There are a lot of ways to calculate the benefit of bike-sharing programs. For Paris' Velib bike-sharing program one could look at the number of Parisians using it, improvements to traffic congestion, improvements to the air quality, health benefits of the users, and so on. Adam Stein of TerraPass, a carbon offsetting company, crunched some numbers based on these stats from a NYC article on the Paris Velib program and came up with an estimate of the amount of greenhouse gases avoided. With that he concludes that Velib is an expensive way to offset carbon.

• Riders took 27.5 million trips in the first year.
• The current pace is about 120,000 trips per day.
• The program includes 20,600 bikes.
• The 1,450 self-service rental stations are available every 300 yards.
• The bikes are heavy and expensive — $3,460 and 50 lbs — built to withstand theft, mistreatment, and heavy riding.
• Nevertheless, 3,000 bikes have gone missing, about 15% of the total.

An update on the Bloor Street court challenge from lawyer Albert Koehl, on behalf of the Safe Cycling Coalition

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blockquote>A loss in the courts – but nonetheless a step forward for cyclists

On October 29, 2008 the Ontario Superior Court of Justice rejected an
application for judicial review brought by William Ashley China Ltd. to declare that the City of Toronto’s decision to proceed with the Bloor St. Transformation Project was illegal. The ruling was a defeat for cycling advocates --- who intervened in the case --- but not a loss for the movement to make Toronto safe for cyclists.

Bike is smarter!The project is a $25 million redevelopment of Bloor between Avenue Rd. and Church St. undertaken jointly by the City and the local Business Improvement Area. The project will widen sidewalks, add trees, and remove 43 parking spaces -- but it squanders an important opportunity to reduce motor vehicle traffic (in fact volume and speed may actually increase) and to provide for bike lanes, even though this is one of the busiest --- and most dangerous --- cycling routes in Toronto.