Cycling in Waterloo Region

[danbrotherston]

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.

It is not, however, the only data point as a lot of other cycling infra has been added as well. In fact, the higher usage of the other new cycling infra can be used to point out that the Northfield infra is not getting much use because of the poor implementation.

I'm not saying that Northfield specifically is the single cause of the regional engineers arguing against bike infra.

But I can tell you first hand, that regional engineers have used the poor performance of their garbage infrastructure as an argument against building more infra.

I can tell you this first hand because this is an actual conversation I've had with actual engineers who are responsible for creating our transportation plans. They have used the poor performance of infra like Northfield as inputs to their traffic model, which they then used to argue that building cycling infra wasn't an effective way to shift modeshare.

After I picked my jaw up off the floor, I did make the argument that their infra was poor and disconnected and their response was..."oh well this is the data we have".

There is no exaggeration here, this is literally a key reason that our current moving forward master plan is so unambitious. They even showed me the plan they considered, doing things like shrinking Westmount into 3 lanes with infra, and they said that their modeling indicated this would not increase cycling modeshare.

Now, they COULD look at other infra and come to the conclusion that building a high quality connected network is important, but that is not the conclusion they came to, for what reason, I'll leave that up to you to decide...you already know what I think of our engineers.