Category — Cycling

In this morning’s Sun, my reply to a recent correspondent with City Council who proposes bike lane tolls to stop road freeloading by cyclists. The Dunsmuir St. bike lane opens this morning, by the way.

Montreal cyclists wait to cross Stanley on the De Maisonneuve bike route earlier this month. The bike lane accomodates two-way cycle traffic in one lane of the busy one-way thoroughfare.

City workers were putting the final touches today on the new Dunsmuir St. bike lanes, set to open June 15 as the next phase of the city’s crosstown cycle lane installations. Cyclists were already using the new route as crews hosed down the final sections near Burrard.

Similar lanes have been in place in Montreal for two years, providing a vital safe route through the busiest part of the downtown core on De Maisonneuve. Good thing, too: tangling with Montreal drivers is not for the faint of heart.

Bike to Work Week seems to be setting off a competition among Canadian cities to improve cycling infrastructure.

In Toronto, the Star reports that cycling advocates in that city are shifting gears, moving away from a goal of 1,000 kilometres of bike routes to focus on a safe, connected route system that grows ridership. Toronto’s current system of about 400 kilometres is about the size of Vancouver’s. Given the size of the city, the change in emphasis is significant.

That approach dovetails nicely with Vancouver’s recent decision to emphasize ridership and safety, with an emphasis on separate lanes, rather than simple extension of painted lanes, in our next 10-year plan. (Nonetheless, the current council’s investments are bringing significant expansion.)

The latest analysis of the safety risks confronted by cyclists in the two cities was reported today in the Globe. Not surprisingly, Toronto riders face a special hazard from the city’s streetcar tracks, and a political challenge in the coming election, where at least one mayoral candidate is promising a moratorium on new bike infrastructure.

Montreal’s popular Bixi rental bike program, by contrast, is adding in a strong transit discount package that makes the bike share effort as much a transit initiative as a cycling one. (Vancouver is studying the Bixi program but must reconcile the helmet law with bike rental aspect.)

In this morning’s mail, this intriguing find from Lynn Kisilenko: a plastic bridge, capable of supporting a battle tank, made almost entirely of recycled plastic bags.

Could it, she wonders, be converted to peaceful uses as a pedestrian bike bridge across False Creek, an idea that just won’t go away?

For this project, the US Army used ”94 percent recycled materials including glass, vehicle bumpers and about 85,000 pounds of high-density polyethylene plastic. That’s equivalent to about 550,000 one-gallon plastic milk jugs which, laid end-to-end, would extend nearly 82 miles.”

Why not a bridge with recycled tanks?