Quote:
Originally Posted by Keith P.
Many cycling-addled people like yourself see the car as Public Enemy #1 and therefore believe anything done to make life worse for those users in favor of the tiny minority of cyclists is fair game. The truly unfortunate thing is that certain HRM staff and councillors have the same belief and are diverting millions in tax dollars towards a totally unrealistic and unreachable goal. We are not Amsterdam and never will be.
Given the explosion of growth in HRM, moving people around should be a priority and eliminating existing ways of doing that should never be an option. Adding ways, however, should be. I offer up one example: virtually every street in residential parts of the city except for a few newer suburbs has sidewalks on both sides that get very little use except for within the downtown. Use one of them exclusively for the handful of cyclists and leave everything else alone. Problem solved. The existing mindset within HRM (and yourself, apparently) that all drivers are bloodthirsty lunatics looking to kill cyclists is insane.
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I don’t believe that this is an accurate take on the situation, though. Nobody is trying to turn Halifax into Amsterdam. Cyclists just want a safe way to be able to get around the city on their bikes. If you have read the posts from the people who use this infrastructure, you should notice how many also drive cars, and thus do not have the opinions that you are accusing them of having.
The conversation around this is strange at times. On one hand you have cycle activists who occasionally voice extreme views of cars, then you have views like this, painting all cyclists with the same brush while suggesting that sidewalks be decommissioned in favour of vehicle traffic. Meanwhile, the other 99% of the population has more reasonable views that favour a compromise, but their views are not as aggressive or spoken with outrage, so our impressions are that everyone is an extremist fighting for one all-or-nothing side or the other. It’s the point I was attempting to make previously, and hopefully the rest of us will realize that most of it is just noise, and continue to work towards reasonable compromise that protects cyclists while allowing people to get where they need to go. (Almost time for another LRT discussion…lol)
I can’t help but think that the first time you stepped out onto one of your decommissioned sidewalks and have to dodge a cyclist who is using them as they are told to, there would immediately be a post on how irresponsible it is to let cyclists use sidewalks like this, etc., blah blah…
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