Quote:
Originally Posted by rousseau
Exactly. Once this guy I rode with from San Francisco (a much smaller city than Calgary) tried to claim that one of the attractions of the city was cycling across the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito.
I had to laugh. Sausalito is not part of the city of San Francisco. Either you're in San Francisco or you're in Sausalito. They're totally different municipal jurisdictions.
Similar thing with Montreal. There's this friend of a friend in Laval who has suggested we do a ride together when my wife and I go to Montreal, but...hello...we don't vacation in Laval, we vacation in Montreal. They're totally separate and unrelated cities. I had to explain to the dummkopf that maybe someday we'd plan a trip to Laval, and then we could a ride, but until then it's totally out of the question.
By the way, I think I'm going to start an online petition to change the utterly ridiculous name "Toronto Pearson International Airport."
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Uh, okay, but the simple fact remains that cycling infrastructure just is not decided on at a CMA level nor is it built or invested in at that level either. OP's thread topic was relative to urban areas, not CMA - shit, Medicine Hat, as an urban area, fails miserably but at a CA level? Edmonton would be a great example of an extended urban area that is creating a cycling network but it is still invited in at an individual municipal level - I highly doubt that the city of Edmonton is putting any of their tax payer monies to work in the city of St. Albert or vice versa. The county of Leduc lies win the Edmonton CMA but probably spends no money within the city of Edmonton on Edmonton's cycling network and the last time I checked there wasn't no general outcry to have the international airport there renamed to Leduc County International Airport.
Sure, it is valid to compare cycling networks at an urban level but certainly not at a CMA or CA level and the builds are all done at a local municipal level. To this end, Toronto's CMA includes the cities of Mississauga, Brampton and the town of Oakville and all three of those municipalities appear to have a fairly good cycling network in place. So is this Toronto's cycling network or not? Were the investment and design/build decisions for these three locales done at a CMA, urban or municipal level? Is Toronto's urban network considered half decent?
Calgary at a municipal level has done well but at an urban level I don't think it has but then there currently are limited choices to get a cycling network out to the city of Airdrie or Chestermere or the towns of Cochrane and Okotoks. Even the payback wouldn't be worth the investment because the demand just isn't there for a dedicated cycling network to those four communities - paved shoulders will suffice for now or in the case of Chestermere, a paved path along side a meandering irrigation canal that is by no means a direct route between the two cities. Airdrie would probably be the first place to look at getting a proper cycling network connection in place but it would most likely be very, very underutilized.