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Old Posted Feb 25, 2010, 9:29 PM
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niwell niwell is offline
sick transit, gloria
 
Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Roncesvalles, Toronto
Posts: 11,021
Quote:
Originally Posted by fflint View Post
I'm generally laissez-faire about urban cycling practices--I average about 15 miles per day, all of it in central SF--but I absolutely detest sidewalk cycling. I never do it, and I refuse to tolerate it in others. Maybe in a city where nobody walks it might--might--be defensible, but not in a city like San Francisco or Chicago.
I can tolerate it in some cases in the suburbs such as northern Keele St in Toronto. It's fairly narrow, has a high volume of truck traffic and next to nobody on the sidewalks. Also with the proviso that anyone doing this ride much more slowly than usual. Even a hardcore bike activist friend of mine rode on the sidewalk for a short stretch of this roadway to get to our suburban University (this is a person who taught cycling safety classes and is usually vehemently opposed to sidewalk riding).

But anywhere in the central city? No freaking way. I'm always tempted to push people over when they bike past me on sidewalks near my place. I ride on the streets all the time and it's both faster and safer than the sidewalk despite the lack of a bike lane. Although the media in this city often portrays cyclists as young people with complete disregard for the law the average sidewalk cyclist I see is over 50.


Quote:
Originally Posted by 240glt View Post
Cities figure they'll just run a bike route down a quiet side street without thinking about the implications to someone trying to actually get anywhere on a bike. ROutes like this may be fine for my folks who toodle along on their city cruisers at a liesurely pace, but when I ride my road bike I put on anywhere between 50 & 100k's in a session. Hard to do when you're stopping every 30 seconds, & it sounds like that's what may be happenning in your case
Yep. People who don't commute by bike tend to think that bike lanes on side streets are an excellent idea. One of Toronto's mayoral candidates seems to be basing his entire platform on this. The reality of course is that it's far faster to use major streets - for the same reason it's faster to drive places on them. Even in older areas with grid patterns you have to contend with frequents stops. What's even worse is having to cross a major street from a minor one since usually there aren't any lights and you have to wait for the gap. On a major road any dangerous crossing has lights.

I feel the same way about recreational bike paths as well. Some cities love to brag about what great cycling infrastructure they have due to extensive pathway networks (Calgary and Ottawa come to mind). Pathways are great for weekend rides, but often don't follow the fastest way to get anywhere when it comes to commuting. For example in Ottawa it took me around 20 minutes to get downtown on-street but over 30 by taking the river pathway.

Not saying that pathway systems or side-street lanes shouldn't exist (they should), just that cities can't rely on them as primary cycling infrastructure.
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