Category — Cycling

It was to be the biggest traffic catastrophe since the creation of bike lanes on the Burrard Bridge: a weekend closure of LA’s crucial 405 freeway that would paralyze Los Angeles.

But like so many traffic congestion nightmares, “Carmageddon” didn’t materialize. People walked, took a bus, cycled, drove other routes or just stayed home.

Suddenly, nothing happened. It’s possible, just possible, LA could do better with fewer cars.

Craziest outcome of the day? An airline offering stranded drivers discount flights from Burbank to Long Beach found itself in a head-to-head race with a team of cyclists. A passenger leaving a Hollywood intersection at the same time the Wolfpack Hustle team put their pedals down but just leaving taking off when they arrived at Long Beach.

Of course, the airplane passenger didn’t have to shower.

Don’t be fooled: any change to Vancouver’s Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts could be devastating. Or not.

Most of us are familiar with the term “peak oil,” the point at which most of the world’s oil reserves have been consumed and production starts an inexorable decline. But have we already seen “peak car,” the steady decline of car-miles travelled?

That’s the startling claim made by Australians Peter Newman and Jeff Kenworthy in the latest issue of World Transport Policy and Practice (see this link at page 31.)

Their analysis suggests that a combination of rising fuel prices, aging cities, increasing urbanism and the growth of public transit may be turning the tide of cars, spelling the end of designing cities around automobiles, at least in the developed world.

The paper was a key point in a provocative presentation yesterday to the Ontario Bike Summit, in Ottawa, where Rodney Tolley, of Walk21, made an impassioned appeal to the cycling world to embrace “active transportation,” especially walking, as the way to build sustainable cities.

Tolley is in the final stages of planning a major conference on walking and active transportation here in Vancouver in October, a fitting counterpart to next year’s Velo-city2012, a global cycling conference.

The BC Cycling Coalition has just released a proposed provincial cycling safety strategy which focuses, sensibly enough, on collision prevention. The only element likely to attract criticism: “choice” on helmet use, meaning repeal of the helmet law.

Now that the sun is coming out, cycle traffic on the Hornby bike lane is surging, heading above 1,100 trips per day or about double what it was a month ago.

That’s great news, particularly given the very limited traffic and parking impacts measured by the city’s engineering department.

Here, reprinted with permission, is an e-mail I received May 18 from a commuter cyclist whose decision to begin riding closely mirrors my own experience: if we build it, the trips will come. [Read more →]