Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123
They oversell a lot of this as "active transportation".
Cycling in cities can be a serious way for people to get around. It's often more convenient than taking the bus and it is a good way to get physical activity, but trails are useless for cyclists unless they go to real places. Unfortunately, many of the trails in Halifax seem to be designed for recreational purposes or exist only because they happened to be available. Many things are done in the HRM because they are the easy way out and somehow approximate a real solution but they are often not really worth spending money on.
This land cost $2.7M and the improvements are costing about $1.5M. I can imagine many better ways to spend that money for cyclists, and for others the arguments about connecting a trail system don't make a whole lot of difference.
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When I lived in Bedford most of my bike rides were for doing errands. I found it better than driving a car. Its much more scenic, quicker (yes Bfd traffic is really that bad), and as you mentioned it doubled as my badly needed exercise. HRM won't even install a bike lane if it requires moving a curb so yes all of the paths in the region are out of convenience and not made because they would be helpful were they are (exceptions being ones completed by trail associations). Of course towards the end of the summer I was beginning to wander wether I should risk my life everytime I wanted a carton of milk.
This is slightly off topic but I thought I'd mention my bike count has shown that most of the key intersections (that cyclists would use) in Bedford have a steady rate of 10 or more cyclists and hour. One even ranked at more than 10 everytime I visited it. The highest numbers per location belong to Rocky Lake Rd (35 max), Bfd Hwy @ HPR (21 max), and the Greenway (18 max). Of those three one is a trail, and the other two do not have bicycle lanes at the intesection.
BTW I've learnt that even though HRM is complant driven don't try to complain because they'll just ignore you. Hell I've talked to municipal councillors who are ignored by the bureaucrats.
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