01-18-2022, 04:34 PM
(01-18-2022, 03:22 PM)Acitta Wrote: Where is your house? I have ridden all over the Region for the last 20 years, and there are very few places that I feel unsafe. Having cycled in Montreal in the '70s, Toronto and York Region in the 70s, 80s and 90s, Waterloo Region is the best of all (though Montreal has improved considerably since I lived there).
Hidden Valley now (yeah, puke, but it is big albeit rather ugly haha). I work downtown Kitchener/uptown Waterloo very often so there is truly no safe way for me to get to those areas from where I stay. Plus, I am often all over the city bouncing between projects, consultations, meetings etc and the roads/rails are just awful. Pick any major arterial road - Westmount, Fischer-Hallman, much of King, Lackner, Dundas, George, Hespeler etc - they're all suicidal to be on. I could ride quieter streets but then you're twisting and turning all around and that wastes a lot of time.
True, compared to Toronto or Montréal we have it good in every regard despite what people think, but those are huge cities and public transit is great which offsets that. They have great subway networks, streetcars (at least in Toronto) and buses where you can bring your bus on to get around. Here...we've got an LRT that you can basically bike faster than it moves for most of it, which is annoying. I can't complain about the buses, they're decent. But as for protected bike lanes, we could improve them much more which I hope we do to connect distant areas of the city. A lot of the improvements we've made have been focused on the core or urban corridor, but there's a lot of other places left unserviced. I know we tried a pilot project on Westmount (the traffic cones which pissed off every driver in the city) but that was so extremely divisive and I can't remember if we approved separated bike lanes to replace them.