This ramp modification design on twitter is a far cheaper version that wasn't earlier considered. It has since been re-posted as a Comment in a
recent raisethehammer article about our LRT which (as far as I know) roughly half of the Hamilton city councillors actually regularly read now. Although city makes final decision, citizen influence of current Hamilton changes is quite incredible right now compared to the past.
Twitter advocacy, along with other sources, is part of reason how we finally got Cannon Bike Lanes installed -- yeswecannon.ca -- twitter @YesWeCannon -- and
people like me are dashcamming it to defend the bike lanes (TWITTER) against anti-bike "The Bike Lanes Are Empty" people. The bike:car ratio is currently roughly 1:4 during weekends the last few times, almost close to the road surface allocation ratio 1:3 ratio -- was trying to convince automobile users to think differently on the "success/fail" balance when they only see 1 bike for every 4 cars; and this is still improving -- the protected Cannon barried bike lanes with green paint are less than 1 year old! In concurrent, we've have things like SmartCommuteHam
helping tweet better bike routes through ultra-carhappy Hamilton, and we've got
SoBiHamilton on twitter (who recently corrected an incorrect Globe & Mail article) really active locally on twitter, our mayor
FredEisenberger on twitter who personally tweets and reads twitter -- and replies to some citizens -- instead of a secretary.
Bike infrastructure in Hamilton is very much in its infancy, but with our recent out-bikesharing Toronto, has finally convinced local non-bike-owning population (twitter
example,
example,
example,
example - twitter quotes like "
Took my first @SoBiHamilton ride with @Ciaramilk last night. Fantastic service. Time to build more bike lanes in #HamOnt!") to become more bike-friendly and these recently convinced Hamilton's cycle department to accelerate a further bit of Hamilton bike infrastructure expansion in the coming 3-4 months (RaiseTheHammer
comment thread example). See, our city bike infrastructure is majorly driven by twitter, commenboards, facebook, etc! Before 2014, Lower City had almost no bike lanes, and protected bike lanes was a utopia dream.
Hamilton citizens on twitter, have profile titles like: "
Anglo-Latvian interaction and experience designer; Product manager @WPtouch; Co-founder @EmbraceUX; Public Safety Lead @PrideToronto" (
@mkuplens) and also "
Nuclear engineer. Hamilton resident. Sophomoric thinker. Married to @francescaricci. Mentor for @celtxrobotics. President Hammer City Makers" (
@PopularEthics) .... so these are real tax payers not unemployed artists. At least one Hamilton councillors follow each of them on twitter!! Likewise for me.
Finally, 2014, bike infrastructure green paint and bike barriers arrived for the 1st ever time in Hamilton's history (
pic,
pic).
It may be fairly rough and ugly by Toronto standards, but this is a Hamilton miracle, it's become popular among residents along Cannon and some drivers now actually like Cannon better because it's slightly calmer (not calm enough, but better). And a bunch of us are watching the bike ratio like a hawk, after the city screwed up by placing bike counters at the ends rather than the center (I'll even sharpie a note onto the bike counter casing if they screw THAT up again). It's just ONE measly ugly protected bike lane (with fewer flower boxes than they planned, but still -- real flower boxes, barriers, and knockouts, and green paint -- not just a single painted line -- for ONE crosstown route of many arterials, but it's still a miracle it happened. Yes, it's ugly and empty during weekday bad-weather car peaks. But it's finally getting popular during the summer weekends. And now they've agreed to extend it this year -- a bit sooner than I expected. Thanks to citizens like me who advocated on social networks for it to happen.
Yes, Toronto politics has a twitter culture too, but it's lower per-capita than with Hamilton, and doesn't have as much citizen-lobby ratio / pull-per-project ratio.
Anyway, I don't want to sidetrack discussion, but this also explains part of the reason I'm fairly loud here on UrbanToronto -- people like nfitz may not care much and cannot understand why I love Hamilton so much -- background information for readers here that Hamilton (at least for some elements like bike infrastructure) is a little more social-network driven than the average city. WIN!
My upcoming GO article is not targeted to smallspy who already knew.
My upcoming GO article is targeted to the average citizen, including jaded long-time Hamiltonians and unaware city councillors, too. I know people on GO network (Oakville, Pickering) who want to go to McMaster and would just prefer not to transfer at Aldershot. And there's of course, demand for incoming travel to Hamilton -- not just us travelling outwards. Jaded citizens and Hamiltonians, witnessing light usage of West Harbour at inconvenient 6:15am, do not understand (yet). And as a commuter with sometimes-varying time-of-day commute times, I have seen surge of 200 McMaster students simultaneously disembarking certain Aldershot trains because there's no continuing train, GO trains does not yet accomodate student peak surges, nor counter-commuters and visiting family/friends. And even beyond this, Hamiltonians who don't like the 2 hour bus trip that would love a 1 hour trip to Niagara, and the casino. Or the opposite direction (to Toronto, of course). There is large latent demand for more convenient GO service that cannot be judged by a 6:15am visit to currently quiet prematurely-opened-before-trains-were-available West Harbour GO station. The Niagara GO train is a very low-lying apple that I am attempting to massively raise local awareness for -- we have at least 1 city councillor apparently so skeptical that they think the Niagara train's not stopping till 2019. I am changing that perception.
On another note -- not all Hamilton neighbourhoods are ugly like when driving Skyway/Barton/Burlington to a TiCats game or PanAm game -- our house front yard has won Hamilton Trillium 2015 award as one of the 10 most beautiful residential gardens in the entire city (Thanks so much to my spouse, who is highly active in local ward meetings and often runs into our city councillor Michael Green there, too). Two blocks to the north are shuttered storefronts. 1 block is unexpectedly the B-Line LRT route (did not know, so we got lucky). Two blocks to the south are mansions. Nearby are a few revitalizing businesses here and there. And I'm still Lower City, only a 15-20 minute walk from the International Village of Hamilton downtown, so it's not a suburban area. Most drivers from Toronto miss these beautiful parts of Hamilton, after all and thanks to Toronto indifference to this, there were still bargains on Toronto "Rosedale-beautiful homes" 4-bedroom 2500sqft detached for price of 700sqft Toronto condo as recently as last year...We are currently in Hamilton's equivalent of Cabbagetown, an equally near-downtown neighborhood.