Reducing Gridlock and Saving . . . WHO. . . Time?

Doug Ford hates bikes. Same as his brother did. It's apparently just an unreasoning, gut-based loathing. It's got the same vibes-based feel as the comment section of the Post whenever there's a story that involves cycling. Problem is, the people in the comment section aren't the premier of the country's most populous and urbanized province. 

Next week, the Ontario government is tabling the childishly named Reducing Gridlock and Saving You Time Act in the legislature. (Seriously, these people can't even name their laws as if they were grownups.) This staggeringly dumb law will require municipalities to seek the provincial government's approval to build new bike facilities if they might have "a negative impact on vehicle traffic." 

(don't mind me, just adding a screenshot from the ontario.ca website)

Based on gut feeling, they have decided (according to Minister of Transportation Prabmeet Sarkaria), that bike lanes installed during the pandemic, when "fewer vehicles were on the road and their impacts on traffic were unclear," are causing gridlock. Because of course they must be. Do they have data? Of course not. Would they listen to data? Continue dreaming. Sakaria's making this announcement in fucking Etobicoke. People in the godforsaken suburbs of Toronto will clap like seals for this. 

I keep having to stop while writing this to take a breath and calm down. It's not particularly helpful just to rage at stupidity. 

But the whole pausing-for-a-breath thing doesn't really work, if I'm being honest. Not when the next thing Sarkaria said was "This is why our government is bringing informed decision-making and oversight to bike lanes as well as taking steps to increase speed limits safely [you bet those italics are mine]."

Oh, and they're also requesting a review of every bike lane built in the last five years, to see if they can maybe strip those out as well. The "built during the pandemic when there were fewer cars" thing is window dressing. You know what dropped during the pandemic and never recovered? Public transit ridership. You know what had bounced back to 2016 levels by May of 2022? Car commuting. So unless we bolted off to design, approve, implement and construct thousands of kilometres of bike infrastructure between March of 2020 and about a year to a year and a half later, your argument is invalid. Your gridlock - inasmuch as it has increased since 2020 - is being caused by people not taking transit.

Source - Statistics Canada

Yet we're going to ban most new bike lanes, rip out some existing ones maybe, maintain road widths, and increase speed limits, all to save drivers time. And people are going to die. And no driver's time will actually be saved.

If you're reading this you probably don't need me re-litigating the data on induced demand, actual causes of gridlock, correlation of increased speed limits and pedestrian deaths, actual impact of bike lanes on traffic speeds, etc., etc. I just want us to sit for a moment with the sheer carbrained, knee-jerk hatefulness of this. 

You can't fix gridlock by making it easier to drive. The data are in on that. Every time you disincentivise transit and cycling (and scooters, and walking) you push another person into a single-occupancy car choking out fumes on a bumper-to-bumper commute to Barrie or Scarborough. All you can do with this bullshit law - and all they want to do, really - is get more votes from their SUV-driving suburban base, which is ironic, given the Conservatives are supposed to be all about small government and now every municipality in Ontario is going to have to come to Queen's Park with their proposals for bike lanes for approval. The paperwork will pile up. The bureaucracy will pile up. Projects will stall out. Car traffic will continue to clog the roads. And - again - people on bikes and on foot will die. 

But they said this law would Save You Time (where "You" is understood to mean "drivers/Conservative voters/suburban Torontonians," not, you know, all the rest of us). And to a whole lot of people that'll sound real truthy. And the facts do not matter as long as they're sticking it to those bike riding pinkos.

Do you know the rules at a four way stop?

 I thought I did. 

Every so often it comes up in bike conversations online: people share their exasperation with how drivers behave when there's a bike in the mix at an all-way stop. They'll tell stories about drivers who try to wave them through when the driver has the right of way, or drivers who assume the cyclist is required to yield so they roll right through, or drivers who slow down to let you go ahead when they have the right of way, messing up the timing of the whole interaction and confusing other drivers: in general, drivers being unpredictable.

When people say, "what's wrong with drivers waving you through, they're being polite," I tend to reply that I would much rather people be consistent than polite. I'd like to be able to predict what they'll do.

Generally, the assumption among Online Bike People seems to be that people don't know or remember what the rules are at an all-way stop. We learned it for the written test whenever we took it, then forgot, and our behaviour at stops became more or less vibes-based. In the most recent discussion about this, I suggested that cyclists (particularly cycling advocates) probably know the rules more often than people who only drive, because we are invested in this shit.

And I went off to look at the Highway Traffic Act for Ontario to confirm the rules. And I found out I was wrong. We all were. 

At a stop, most bikers I know (that is, the ones who talk to each other about it online and attend city consultations) apply the rules for drivers. It's, like, the only time most of them become sticklers for vehicular cycling principles.

1. If the intersection is empty, stop, look, and proceed (yeah yeah yeah I know, Idaho stops, I do them.) 
2. If two or more vehicles arrive at the stop at the same time, the one to the right goes first. 
3. If the vehicles are facing each other, the one going straight goes first. 

Turns out, according to the Act, cyclists and pedestrians have the right of way first, before all motor traffic. Cyclists, who are in the street with the motor traffic, and who are usually told they have to obey all the rules that drivers do, get ROW at a stop sign. Every time I've stopped because a driver got to the intersection at the same time as me, and I've shouted, "you've got the right of way!" at them while they waved for me to go, I was technically wrong. 

But I ask you. On a bike, am I going to think, "okay, I have the right of way so I'm just going to proceed through the intersection first"? HELL no, Again, I'd rather things be predictable. And I know that no one remembers - probably very few were taught - that bikes have the right of way first. Am I going to put my safety on the line because in this one case, the rules are different for me? Nope. 

Since we can't re-educate an entire population, I'd argue this rule should go. Don't make the calculations at all-way stops any more complicated than they need to be. Pedestrians should absolutely have the right of way first, yes. They're on sidewalks. They're not using the street. Cyclists should, in this case, just follow the same turn-taking as everyone else. That way there's just one set of rules to follow. There's one less opportunity for a misunderstanding that could result in someone getting hurt. Just this once - this once - I actually agree with John Forester. 

Ugh. But it's true.

Even more flex posts on Kilborn. Joy.

 As I was heading to the office yesterday, I spotted a bunch of new mounting points for flex posts on Kilborn west of Alta Vista. (There are already a bunch of these things east of Alta Vista, occasionally getting whacked by delivery vans and lying across the bike lane.)

Look, I get it. People speed and the cheapest thing the city can do about it (because they won't do the math on speed camera revenue) is put up hundreds and hundreds of these flexible wickets, so that the drivers will slow up a bit: not because they're afraid they'll hit a person, but because they're afraid something will hit their car. 

But as a bike rider I really dislike these things. This latest set, I discovered as I almost hit one of the mount points while going upwards of 40 km/h down the hill at the bottom of the road. Those bolts aren't really noticeable to a car tire: I definitely don't want to hit one at speed on a bike though.

And once the posts go up, they'll be one more thing I have to navigate and calculate for. Do I have room to pass that post on the right? Or do I have to take the lane for a second to pass it on the left, so that a driver doesn't try to go through the (usually about 3.5-m) space alongside me? Are there also parked cars to weave around and work into the equation? (There aren't any bike lanes on this part of Kilborn: the painted lines delineate a parking zone.) And in the winter, when they take them down, I'll need to watch for the little plates, which are permanent.

At least here, they don't appear to be putting in centre posts. The centre posts just create artificial pinch points where drivers unconsciously squeeze further over toward me because they don't want to hit the poles - all the while having their attention pulled to the pole they're passing, not the person on a bike. And on Pleasant Park, another street near me, there are centre posts flanked by side posts, where the side posts aren't far enough from the curb for a bike to get through. So about twice a block I have to shoulder check and move out to take the lane through the gap, or slam on the brakes to let cars past me because there's no room. 

Is speeding a problem? Sure. Are these things more hazardous than speeding? I don't know. Do these things slow people down? Sure - by, apparently, as much as 5 km/h! (Wow! Such much?) But it sure feels like trading one set of cycling hazards for another, without much of an upside for the cyclists.

Oh what a difference a little link makes

Last weekend they finally opened the new ped/bike bridge over the Rideau River at Carleton University, linking the campus to Vincent Massey Park. It's about time: this bridge has been in place for two freaking years. It opened for a single solitary day this spring, apparently by accident when the contractor took down a barricade, and was then thoroughly barricaded and bolted shut for months. Apparently some smoothbrain thought we should all wait to use the bridge until the LRT line next to it was complete, which is infuriatingly on brand for this city. 

Whatever: it's open now. Sound the trumpets! 

I'd been watching for it to open because, ever since last summer, I'd wanted to use it to get to Carleton on Saturdays for a martial arts class. It would allow me to skip having to cross Billings Bridge, ever the bane of my existence (see many, many posts on here for why) and ride through Old Ottawa South (another bane) to get to campus. Now, I can take my usual quiet neighbourhood streets to the Rideau River Path, ride along that to the park, cut across the bridge, and know that it's likely that the only violence I have to deal with that morning will be consensual.

But I hadn't realized, until yesterday, that it has also cut the amount of on-road riding I have to do to get to work down to practically nothing. I headed out of the office yesterday evening  and decided to see how little on-road riding I could manage. If I stay on the Rideau River path till I get to the connection to the Hospital ring road, which has a separated path, I can literally travel 13 km and spend only 1 km total on a shared road or street. (Assuming you don't consider the Experimental Farm roads "roads," which I don't: they have virtually no cars, are slowed to 30km, have no lane lines, and are pedestrian- and farm-equipment priority.) And even then, none of the "streets" I'm on are in any way busy. They're the sorts of streets people walk and play road hockey in.

Even if I get off the river path at Pleasant Park, which shortens my trip by 3 km, I only spend 2.25 km more on streets. And again, really quiet and pleasant streets. 

Contrast with how things were before this bridge existed. I had three main (non-winter) routes: the first two took either the Rideau River path through Vincent Massey Park or the Brookfield underpass, both of which link up to Hog's Back Falls, where I crossed the river and connected with Prince of Wales Drive. I would then have to merge onto this thing. 

I would also have to cut through the Worst Parking Lot In Nepean as the last step of my trip to work: a grim and lawless hellscape with a wide area where there are no lanes, no rules, and drivers crisscrossing from one side to the next to get to the right or left turn lanes. It sucks. 

I need to get from, more or less, lower right to upper left here.
It's . . . an adventure.

OR: I could cut onto Bank Street at Riverside, go over Billings Bridge and through Old Ottawa South to Cameron, then through Brewer Park and Carleton campus to the Experimental Farm roads, and through the farm to the office. This, however, involves the part of the city (the bridge and OOS) where I have probably had the greatest number of adverse interactions with drivers, from punishment passing to tailgating to bullying, shouting, honking, and, at least once, me crying on the sidewalk for a minute. 

Now, though, I don't have to decide of a morning whether I'd rather face Prince of Wales or Billings Bridge. They've both been cleared off my list of problems: at least until there's too much snow down to use the river path, which isn't winter maintained. 

This tiny little link - one 60m long bridge! - is an absolute game changer.

Greek streets: the kingdom of the motorcycle

This fall I went on a climbing trip to a village in Greece for a week and a half or so, and as usually happens when I travel, I found myself adapting to a new attitude around roads and streets. This time, I found myself thinking differently about motorcycles. 

The first thing I noticed after landing in Athens was that the highways were full of motorcycles going much faster than the car traffic and weaving through it at speeds that were kind of scary to us at first. There were bikes on the highway - dirtbike-looking things - that wouldn't be legal on that class of road in Canada, and as we drove three hours down to the Peloponnese and got further and further from the big cities, the motorcycles started to make more and more sense. The roads are narrow. They're steep. They wind and switch back and dive down precipitous cliffsides. 

And then you get into the towns, and you really understand why there are so many motorcycles. It's a bit of a shock at first as you wind your way up the hill through Leonidio (the small town we were staying in, with a population of about 6,000) and the streets just keep getting narrower. There's a slightly unnerving sense that you might encounter a narrowing spot that you just can't fit through, or you might wind up in a street you can't get back out of. 

This is a pinchpoint just 
down the hill from where 
we were staying.

There are cars in Leonidio. For one thing, it's an area that attracts climbers from all over Europe, who often bring cars, and it's an agricultural town (its main crop being eggplants) that has light trucks coming in and out of the flat farmland below the town, which lies tucked in between steep hills and ends at the Aegean Sea.

But in the village itself, drivers have to navigate very narrow streets with strange hairpin turns at times and steep grades - and people walking in them, and motorcycles and bicycles everywhere. You just navigate around them, and take intersections very carefully in case there might be another car (although there were very few cars moving around the town at any point).

So people generally get around on foot or (because the side streets are steep) dirtbikes, ebikes, scooters and light motorcycles. They zip up and down the streets, making me, as a pedestrian, jump - for the first day or so. Then I got used to it, because they all know what they're doing. 

Everyone rides these. Maybe (I don't know for sure) it's like snowmobiles in a far northern town. I watched moms and dads taking their kids to school on dirtbikes. We were passed one afternoon by a man steering with one hand and carrying a chainsaw in the other. Older ladies in black took scooters to church. There were some (generally teenaged) people who rode bicycles, but watching them pedal in the lowest gear possible past us up the steep hill I didn't think I'd want to deal with that every day, and definitely most of the older, working folks used bikes with motors, of whatever kind. Some of the side streets, especially on the steep side of the village, were at impressive grades that I couldn't imagine trying to pedal a bike up. 

Streets were asphalt or paved in flat limestone cobbles. They weren't a consistent width and there was no sidewalk. There were no lane markers on the road: no parking spaces, no zebra stripes. Almost no signage meant for cars, within the village itself. There simply weren't enough cars moving around inside the town to require street markings. If you were coming uphill and encountered another driver coming downhill, one of you found a way to skootch over so you could get by each other - or one of you threw it into reverse until you could. 

If you must block a door
because there's nowhere
else to put a car, at least
make it your OWN door

If you were going to park somewhere it was a matter of figuring out whether it was polite to park there - are you blocking anyone's door? Are you making the street too narrow? Does it seem like you should? Outside our AirBnB there was a slightly wider stretch of street, next to a restaurant patio, where we could usually park. When we were out climbing, sometimes the staff at the taberna on the ground floor would park three scooters in the spot where we usually kept the car at night. When we returned, they'd jump up and walk the scooters across the street to clear the spot for us. 

This is a two-way street used by cars, bikes, and pedestrians.

It wasn't that you couldn't get a big vehicle through this town. There were beat-up old Ford pickups and cargo vans and at least once a couple driving a camper van through Leonidio. But the streets were not made for them and definitely did not go out of their way to accommodate them. Once, I saw a sign that warned of a narrow passage ahead that a car might not fit through, but that was about it for indications to drivers as to what they should do: because cars were absolutely the minority transportation. This town was here long before them and, I felt, will still be here after them. 

And it all works. I stopped jumping at the sound of engines behind me after a day or so. I gained a whole new appreciation for the agility and versatility and surefootedness of motorcycles and scooters. And it was, as always, a bit of a culture shock returning home to the supremacy of the car. 

Bikes and scooters parked in a plaza off the main street.
Nary a car.

Unexpected recovery (and more questions than answers)

Status update: About a month after my Trek got stolen from the bike room in my building, I got an email and a voicemail from a sergeant with the Ottawa Police Services to let me know that it was now back in the room. I talked with him for a bit, and then went down to confirm that it was in fact there, and. . . there it was. 

The worse for wear: It had had every single accessory removed. Fenders gone. Trailer hitch gone. Camera mount gone (the cameras, thankfully, come off every time I leave the bike, so I still have them). The OneUp multitool I'd just gotten from a friend and installed - gone. Even the bell was gone. And the Project 529 shield on the seat tube was spraypainted over in white. The seat had been dropped several inches too. But - it's my bike. 

Aside from dealing with the sense of violation when I look at the smear of white spraypaint across the frame and the derailleur, and the hole where my cute OneUp tool was stashed, I'm also left with some patchy information and a lot of other questions.

The cop I spoke with told me that after the bikes were stolen, the property manager posted notices about the theft in the building and got some information from tenants. The security cameras in the elevator area also caught the kids taking the bikes out of the basement where the bike room is. The kids were apparently identified from the video, because the cop was able to tell me that they were eleven years old - a girl and two boys. The girl lives in the building and let her two friends in.

At eleven years old, I'd have assumed they were just messing around. But they - or someone - systematically removed anything that might identify the bike. Including the OneUp tool, which requires you to know what it is and how to take it out: it's a tool housed in a little cylinder that you drop into the steering tube and then bolt into place through the bottom of the cylinder. And they spraypainted over the Project 529 shield. 

These children can't be experienced bike thieves. For one thing, they didn't hock it or ditch it. One of them seems to have been riding it: the seat was lowered and there was an elastic LED light on the handlebars. But - that spraypaint says they know something.

When I emailed the cop back to let him know the condition of the bike, his answer was "oh, wow," and he said he'd go talk to the boy and his parents, so I guess he also thinks the fact all the identifying items were removed is sketchy. And I still don't know how the bike wound up back in the room - did the boy fess up? Was he caught? Did he just put the bike back and the property manager noticed it? I didn't think to ask, so I guess I probably won't ever know.

But at least, and very improbably, I got my bike back! 

Ride review (and introducing Idris)

It was probably an ideal day to take the new Priority Continuum (I have named it Idris) to the office. Drizzly, a little above freezing, with balls of slushy snow in the bike lanes. The sort of thing I imagine this bike was designed for. 

I ride about 20km round trip to the office building I work in. Plenty of time to get used to a new bike. So, first impressions.

First, that big internal gear hub does make the back end heavy. At some spots, like intersections, where I might have stopped, put feet down, and then just swung the bike under me to a new direction, I couldn't easily do that. The bike itself is not light; it's something like 40 pounds. I felt that a little bit on hills, but I don't mind the extra legwork. And the weight does make it feel sturdy. I'm interested in how that heavy back wheel performs in winter with studded tires (I'm getting a set this weekend). 

One odd thing about it is that it's so quiet. There's no chain; there's no derailleur; the gearshift is a barrel shifter with no separate gears to cycle through; there's no clicking.  I think even when you're coasting, there isn't that little tiktiktik noise from the freewheel. It's just silent.

I'm still getting used to the shifting, I think. Because there aren't discrete gears, you just sort of ease the resistance back and forth to where you're comfortable. Your indicator, instead of numbered gears, is a little dude on a bike on a hill. The hill gets gradually steeper as you shift into lower gears. I admit to being kind of charmed any time I had to climb a steepish hill and shifted the little bonhomme till he was practically aiming for the sky.

It seems counterintuitive to me that you twist the barrel forward to go into lower gears and backward to shift back up - but my last couple of bikes had paddle shifters, so I might just be out of practice with barrels. I kept accidentally shifting the wrong direction. But again, because you just flow between "gears" it didn't do a bunch of mechanical clicking and jumping from cog to cog.

It was rainy and dark enough that I left the office ahead of twilight: people drive like morons in this town when the weather's bad, and I didn't want the temperature to fall and lay down ice on the roads - I don't have the studs on yet. So I didn't really get to see how bright the lights are for night riding. I expect I'll want to have a separate headlamp if I'm going to be on unlit paths or streets at night, but it really is nice to know that I'm lit up front and back no matter what. 

(Update, added later: the front headlight is actually plenty good enough to see by on an unlit path, in the rain. Hurrah!)

I'm slowly amassing the accessories that were stolen along with the Trek - the mount for my Fly12 camera, the bell, the trailer hitch. They've been ordered, and I'll start decking the bike out with them as they come in. 

So. . . so far, Idris and I seem to be getting along just fine. Looking forward to seeing what happens with studs and snow.