Cycling in Waterloo Region

[danbrotherston]

I think what's going on here is that ac3r is strongly in favour of ideal solutions. Clearly, running a bike lane in the middle of the train tracks is less ideal than having a whole segregated bike infrastructure.

But I tend to believe in the quote of politics being the art of the possible, and I'm also in favour of incremental change, even if it's not perfect. I'd rather have a solution which is less crappy than what exists now, versus holding out for the perfect solution. (And I think that in the context of the LRT we would be looking at a zillion car lanes on King St now if we had held out for the ideal solution.)

Weirdly, we are in that situation now. The current solution is actually better than what was there before (i.e. nothing).

Disagree.

The lane on Northfield cost money and it cost opportunity. And yet it provides zero value, people who would cycle there before, will still, and nobody new will cycle because of that lane. So we've spent money, and achieved nothing. Even worse, people (often bad faith people, but sometimes just really stupid people) will point to that lane and complain "see we spend all this money on bike lanes and nobody cycles here".

EVEN WORSE THAN THAT...regional engineers look at that lane, and how little cycling it gets, and the conclude that building cycling infra won't meaningfully change the mode share in the region.  This is not hypothetical, this is EXACTLY what they did for the moving forward 2020 transportation plan.

So no, the Northfield bike lanes are actively harmful, they are worse than nothing.