12-07-2020, 08:42 AM
(12-07-2020, 12:17 AM)tomh009 Wrote: It looks promising (at the article level), though the devil is in the details. It won't turn Kitchener into an Amsterdam but it should make bicycle-based transportation considerably easier (and safer).
That's definitely true. On the whole, I think it's a step forward, but I have some reservations about the details, which I've already shared to the city. I know others will disagree with me, but one that stands out to me is is the two-way cycling infrastructure on one side of a road, which I'm not a fan of. Implementations I have seen just don't seem safe to me, though I'd gladly see statistics in a N. American context to contradict that view.
In general, this comes back to a general criticism I have of how cycling infrastructure is dealt with here. It's too ad hoc and it seems that every time a new project comes out, they are reinventing the wheel. What that means for road users is that there is no consistency in the experience. A large part of road safety is avoiding surprises to road users, so that they can anticipate and plan. Part of that is creating a consistent streetscape.
What we have now is on some roads there are MUTs separated from the road like Fischer-Hallman. There are separated two-way lanes like on Erb, there are curb-separated and painted lanes like on Lexington, but sometimes they randomly end. In some places there are bike boxes, but mostly there aren't. Some lanes have bollards, some have concrete. You get the picture.
The province has design guidelines for roadways for a reason. And we generally have a fairly consistent system across the province as a result. There are aspects of those guidelines which should maybe be changed, but the consistency is a good thing. It's well past the time that we have a more coherent approach to cycling infrastructure design, if not at the provincial level, at least regionally. The fact that a single plan has so many different approaches in it is not particularly encouraging to me.