Cycling in Waterloo Region

[zanate]

There is a tunnel under Lexington so there's no need to dodge four lanes of traffic when crossing it.

If your destination is on the other side of the expressway, you have (at absolute minimum) about 400 metres of Lexington Road to contend with. I've dealt with this for years, having biked through Hillside Park and the Eastbridge neighbourhoods to get to work. You can use trails and Dearborn Blvd to cut down how much of Lexington you have to use, but it's still there.

That will change a little, soon. A multi-use trail is planned for King Street under the expressway that will be accessible from the Forwell Creek trailhead near the big Manulife building. But if your destination is over on the northeast side, Lexington is still a problem. The good news there is that the city knows it wants to improve Lexington for active transportation... but it's going to take a while.

Anyway, as a frequent user of Hillside Park I've been very vocal in my disappointment with the protesters who blocked the work on Tuesday. My thoughts are printed as a letter to the editor in the Record. I also have taken some pictures over the years because there has been substantial work in the park. (If the images below aren't visible, I posted the letter content and photos here.)

This is in Hillside Park, two years ago, during sewer reconstruction work. The bridge was removed and replaced, and as you can see, a wide swath was cut through that has since been resodded and planted. So there has already been a lot of change in the park.



This image is from almost the same spot, but earlier in the project. You can actually see the rubble from the old bridge footing and in fact this part of the trail was paved up until it was dug up in 2012.



Those images are basically to show that this is not some kind of time capsule that needs to be preserved unchanged. The park has rebounded quite nicely since the heavy work that took place in 2012. But, the weather of 2014 has been very punishing.

This is the kind of damage the gravel trails sometimes see. This one was very recent, September 2014 in fact. As you can see, the runoff ripped the gravel down to the foundation stone. Even after gravel was replaced, it was still too lose to cycle through. The strip along the right was the only (precarious) path you could take without dismounting for a couple of months.

It's also important to note that the trail surface has been damaged in other locations over the years, too.



This flooding and damage came up during the consultations. It's now incumbent on the city engineers to get this right, but paving (apart from improving accessibility) should prevent this kind of damage.