Cycling infrastructure (Separated bike lanes)

[allengeorge]

^ Too progressive. Would never fly. Here, it would have to be incremental, marketed as temporary, and would require a ritualistic fight in council before the bare minimum would be implemented.

I'm only half joking :/

 

[W. K. Lis]

This would have been a better bicycle lane if it were raised with a slopping curb (with the sewer grate).

From link.

 

[mickael]

With all the money spent on planters and replacement planters and their regular maintenance (yearly plants, watering and maintenance crew, etc.), one would wonder how much more it would cost to simply build permanent and durable infrastructure in the first place - aka get it right from the get go, like these raised and separated lanes being built at the moment on St. Denis and Peel streets in Montreal:

Le REV: réseau express vélo

Oh man those bus stops! An island for people to board and alight from without directly entering the bike lane. Revolutionary...or Dutch.

 

[SFO-YYZ]

Oh man those bus stops! An island for people to board and alight from without directly entering the bike lane. Revolutionary...or Dutch.

Oh interesting. I didn't even notice that. Yes very revolutionary indeed.

 

[salsa]

^ Too progressive. Would never fly. Here, it would have to be incremental, marketed as temporary, and would require a ritualistic fight in council before the bare minimum would be implemented.

I'm only half joking :/

The promise land would arrive so much sooner if the city would just hand over the keys to a few Dutch transportation professionals, instead of continuing down this excruciating incrementalist approach of slowly reinventing and tweaking all the little things that other cities figured out long time ago.

 

[Admiral Beez]

The promise land would arrive so much sooner if the city would just hand over the keys to a few Dutch transportation professionals, instead of continuing down this excruciating incrementalist approach of slowly reinventing and tweaking all the little things that other cities figured out long time ago.

This isn’t Holland. Let‘s see how all these new separated paths fare this winter. They’ll be the last to get plowed, if at all, and the non-separated ones become buried by the plows.

 

[MisterF]

This isn’t Holland. Let‘s see how all these new separated paths fare this winter. They’ll be the last to get plowed, if at all, and the non-separated ones become buried by the plows.

Winter is no excuse. If Montreal can figure it out so can Toronto.

 

[kali]

Drove along Brimley today - flexiposts in place. Also has a nice effect of narrowing the road and slowing traffic a bit.

 

[Admiral Beez]

If Montreal can figure it out so can Toronto.

When it comes to snow removal, has that ever demonstrably been the case?

 

[W. K. Lis]

 

[WislaHD]

I thought this was an interesting video in light of the current trail of discussion:

He's made some disparaging comments about Copenhagen, but at the end of the day he is right. Copenhagen is a model that is "achievable" for cities with lethargic and unimaginative councils and electorates. But it's not Holland.

That image of St. Denis and Peel streets in Montreal look more like Holland, though I wonder how they handle intersections (I am sure that is where Montreal ends up falling short).

 

[Northern Light]

Big Federal infra $$$ announced for Covid-related investments.

These specifically include Bike Lanes, Bike Paths, Walking Trails, along with upgrades to schools and LTCs.

Total sum is 3.3B, (nationally), not clear what Toronto's share will be but likely at or above our population level so, 260M+ ; funding covers 80% of project costs.

Could fund a great many things; Loop Trail announced by Mayor, portions of Eglinton Connects, Finch Hydro Corridor Trail, maybe a Bike Share expansion?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/infrastructure-mckenna-covid19-pandemic-communities-1.5674929

* work is to be complete by end of 2021

 

[smably]

Deadline is probably too tight to be able to use it for the railpath extension -- too bad, that's a big item that's still unfunded.

 

[WislaHD]

Would be neat if some of it could be directed to a later-summer expansion wave of Bike Share stations but I don't know if they have the internal capacity to plan and deliver that on such short notice.

Eglinton Connects would be a great thing to just get dedicated funding, especially if it means the project can be jumpstarted to coincide with the opening of the Crosstown, but I also see that as too distant of a project timeline to interest current politicians (why is it that we plan based on electoral cycles anyway?).

 

[W. K. Lis]

"Roads were not built for cars": how cyclists, not drivers, first fought to pave US roads

From link. Dated Mar 19, 2015.

Nowadays, it's common to view city streets as largely a place for cars. Bikes, if anything, are seen as a very recent intrusion on them.

But the surprising truth is that back in the 1890s and early 1900s, it was mainly cyclists who first advocated for cities in the US and Europe to pave their streets and build new roads. Then as cars became practical, wealthy, privileged people adopted the car as their leisure toy of choice, and the bicycle's central place in what's now called the Good Roads Movement was largely forgotten.

"The people who were making and promoting bicycles were the same people who later made and promoted cars," says Carlton Reid, who uncovered this history in his fascinating, meticulously researched book Roads Were Not Built for Cars.

In fact, Reid argues, the car's eventual domination was not as inevitable as it might seem today — and the bicycle itself may have been necessary to pave the way for it.

Bicyclists started the push to build and pave roads

In the 1880s, the invention of the "safety bicycle" — a new design that incorporated most of the features seen in modern bikes today — made cycling safer and easier than before, and led to a surge of interest in cycling. But there was a problem: in both American cities and in the countryside, most roads were a muddy, rutted mess, suitable for slow-moving horses and carriages but not bicycles.

In these very early days, cycling mainly was a leisure activity for the rich. "It was basically a small number of rich, leisured white guys," Reid says. "Bicycles were expensive, and working-class people didn't have the cash or leisure time for them."

This small group included several wealthy bicycle manufacturers — most notably, a Boston businessman named Alfred Pope — and they quickly organized to solve the problem of poor roads, forming an organization called the League of American Wheelmen (LAW).

"Even though they were quite selfish — they wanted good roads for themselves — they knew that to get it funded, they had to say the roads would be for everybody," Reid says. So with pamphlets, magazines, rallies, and advertising campaigns, these cyclists worked to convince farmers, working-class city residents, politicians, and other groups of the many benefits of good roads.

With money from Pope, asphalt manufacturers, and other special interest groups, these cyclist advocates were remarkably successful. Initially, they persuaded legislatures in New Jersey and New York to spend state money on widening and paving roads for the first time. Horatio Earle, a president of the LAW and a bicycle part manufacturer, got elected to the Michigan state Senate, created the State Highway Commission, and pushed for the state to pour the country's first mile of concrete road — leading to him being nicknamed the "Father of Good Roads."

Cyclists ride in a victory parade celebrating the 1898 paving of Market Street in San Francisco.

Eventually, lobbying by Pope, Earle, and other cyclists at the federal level led to the passage of the 1916 Federal Aid Road Act, in which Congress promised to match state funds for road building for the first time. By then, though, these cyclists had stopped riding bicycles.

Early bicyclists became enthusiastic motorists

"Looking back, you'd think that someone who was a keen cyclist in the 1890s would have wanted to stay a cyclist," Reid says. "But that wasn't the case at all."

These early cyclists loved the independence and speed afforded by bicycles. Their bikes allowed them to explore the countryside on their own schedule — not a railroad's — and show off the fact that they could buy a very expensive gadget. That cycling might be considered a virtuous form of exercise would have probably seemed utterly bizarre to them.

"When they discovered there was another form of transport that had the benefits of cycling and didn't make you expend any energy, that was like manna from heaven," Reid says. "In fact, if one of these guys could see us today, he'd probably be totally blown away by the fact that cycling still exists at all when we have cars." Most of them ultimately viewed bikes as an intermediate, obsolete step in the evolution from carriages to cars.

As a consequence, by 1910, the LAW had largely died out — but many of its members filled the rolls of motorist clubs that quickly formed, especially AAA. And most of the people selling cars were former cyclists themselves: Henry Ford, the Dodge brothers, Louis Chevrolet, and the Duryea brothers (founders of the Duryea Motor Wagon Company, the first US company to sell gasoline-powered cars), among others, had all been avid cyclists, bike mechanics, or bicycle manufacturers.

Cars might never have made it if it weren't for bikes

From our vantage point in 2015, it seems like the dominance of cars was the natural, inevitable way transportation would evolve. But there are some good reasons to believe that may not be the case, Reid says.

One is that private, powered road vehicles came along and failed several times before they finally took off in the early 20th century. In the 1830s and 1860s, in particular, inventors in Britain, the US, and Canada came out with steam-powered carriages, based largely off the technology developed for railroads, as well as electric vehicles.

But these early cars failed for a few different reasons. There were few roads that were smooth or hard enough for them. But more important, Reid says, "There was no push for them. There was no group of people interested in popularizing them."

Without allies, there was no funding for road paving (as would later be won by cyclists). But there was also a bigger problem: legislatures passed laws against powered vehicles on the roads, such as Britain's 1865 Locomotive Act, which restricted all powered road vehicles to a top speed of four miles per hour, and required that a person with a red flag walk 60 yards in front of each car. Most futurists, Reid says, assumed transportation would remain on rails.

When gasoline-powered cars came along in the early 1900s, one big thing was different: "There was a large group of people who saw that independent travel was there for the taking," Reid says. "Very quickly, they latched on to motoring." These cyclists-turned-motorists pushed for the creation of good roads, and they also fought back against laws restricting bicycles and cars from using them.

Finally, a number of technologies that weren't around for the early steam-powered carriages — but had been perfected by use on bicycles — made 20th-century cars a hit

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