Quote:
Originally Posted by bradnixon
It sounds like you're a pretty hard-core road warrior cyclist. These separated facilities are not for you; they're for the majority of people who would like to cycle but they are concerned for their safety.
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I hear what you're saying, but I don't think that OTown is saying that he'd rather ride in the street than on dedicated infrastructure. My understanding is that he's saying that the way we make dedicated infrastructure is so convoluted, that it's near-unusable.
And I think that there's more than a bit of truth here. Some infrastructure is straightforward and comfortable (Laurier and O'Connor, despite their flaws) and are a pleasure to use. But sometimes, even when there is cycling infrastructure, it's so unreasonably complicated and unwieldy that it just isn't practical or pleasant to use.
Hull provides some good examples:
To avoid modifying the little-used off-ramp onto Lac-Des-Fées, the bike path forces you to take a half-kilometre, 11m-down-and-up-again double loop in order to literally end up a full 4m from your initial position.
It's no surprise that there's a well-beaten path of people jumping over the jersey barrier and darting across the off-ramp, sometimes bikes or kids over their shoulders.
You can even see the path on the satellite image.
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Only a few kms east, the bike path requires you to cross the Allumettières 6-8 lanes of Allumettières three times - an average of once every 500 metres. When the bike lane ends, you have no idea that it's now on the other side of the street. And part of the bike path just doesn't exist at all. It just ends unceremoniously at a highway on-ramp.
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This isn't uncommon. And when it happens, it almost doesn't matter whether there's dedicated infrastructure because it's unusable for most reasonable people.
That doesn't mean that people will necessarily take the street: they might if they feel comfortable, but others will take the sidewalk (like on Allumettières and Mackenzie), and others just won't bike at all.
The "interested-but-concerned" crowd - of which I consider myself a member - aren't committed enough to cycling to take risks. But they're also not committed enough to put up with this kind of unreasonable infrastructure. And those who are committed may be more tolerant of risk, but they're even less tolerant of bullshit - they'll just take to the street.
Just look at the path on Mackenzie: the cautious cyclists still use the western sidewalk because they don't want to cross and re-cross the street (I do this every day on my commute), and the road warriors still use the street for the same reason. So the bike lane ends up in the weird situation of being surrounded by bikes, and used by none of them.
So in the end, this sort of infrastructure is kinda useless for anyone on a bicycle, no matter where they stand on the spectrum.
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