They're doing some of this stuff on the peninsula in Halifax too, which is leading to some, uh, "interesting" discussions in the Halifax active transportation thread.
This is fine as long as there is room to accomplish this. Using Mountain Road as an example (again), it is a relatively narrow four lane stroad with no on street parking. There is really no potential for widening this road, so any move to add bike lanes would only result in reducing the number of traffic lanes on the road.
I know your response to this would be "good!!!", but Mountain Road is congested as it is during rush hours and any reduction in travel lanes would only result in increasing congestion and unhappy voters. It is a non starter.
Again, your response would be "well, if there is increasing congestion, then this would only provide impetus to getting people to use public transit." Again, this would be fine except public transit in Moncton is pretty lousy, and would be very expensive to fix. I see no easy solutions to improving the situation in the short term.
In the long term, downtown density will improve, and there should be fewer commuters, but this will take considerable time.
In the meantime, Moncton does have active transportation options with out trail network, and I think this should be optimized first. The Northwest Trail (for example) should be widened (there is room to do so), paved, and divided into lanes to keep pedestrians and cyclists apart. The most serious point of conflict along the trail is where it crosses Berry Mills Road. I would be in favour of building a flyover active transportation bridge over the roadway to maximize bicycle and pedestrian flow.
I am not against active transportation. I just want to find practical solutions which are not overly disruptive.
Threaded Mode