General Road and Highway Discussion

[zanate]

Bike people want bike lanes. Car people want car lanes. It's never going to change. Yes you can voice your bicycle opinion but when it's a minority, what do you expect?

I'm not sure how this contributes meaningfully to the discussion, except to suggest that I'm a bike person and I'm in the minority and I should live with the status quo. Which is both depressingly pessimistic and insultingly reductionist.

A lot of the discussion around Westheights has become a "bike vs. car" debate, when I don't think that's what the plan is about. It's a traffic calming plan that attempted to look objectively at the use of the street, balance a 6% parking utilization rate with a cycling master plan decision to make Westheights part of Kitchener's bike network, and proposed a way to slow traffic down and make the street easier to deal with as a person on foot or on bike, while maintaining more than enough parking for residents.

The cycling aspect has been the target of a "fairness" attack because local residents value the convenience of their curbside parking but haven't been able to show a need for it. Unfortunately, there haven't been enough voices from other stakeholders: residents on other streets, parents of kids who use the schools here, and people like me who would like to see our cycling network complete and usable by many more people than can do so now.

And I'm not saying the streetside residents who object to this plan shouldn't have a voice in this! They're obviously stakeholders as well. But I don't think they've been forthright that the real source of their objections has been that this plan interferes with their private use of this public space.