Cycling in Waterloo Region

[danbrotherston]

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.

I agree that much of the city is very inaccessible by bike, but Hidden Valley is actually quite accessible to the downtown cores, I've ridden that way several times, going to Wabanaki Dr. through the best buy parking lot to cross Fairway Rd. then through the parking lot and to Wilson (or now the trail parallel to the LRT and up Vanier) and to Wilson Park and then under the expressway at Eckert, then through Rockway Gardens and onto the Iron Horse Trail. It's like, adjacent to one of the most major bike routes in the city.  And obviously you can also pick up the LRT at Fairway. I literally do this ride for recreation (although the part through Fairway and Bestbuy are unpleasant to be sure).

As for our protected bike lanes, the initial grid is downtown because that's where the most opportunity is (along with the university district). Some of our census areas have almost a 10% bike mode share. If you look at the cycling plan for Kitchener, long term, most of these areas are intended to be served, but it will take some time. Sadly, council has already significantly drawn out the timeline. The downtown grid probably should have been done in one year, staff proposed 2 years as a compromise, which council drew out to 3 years. So it's going to be a long time to build out the rest.

Westmount has no planned bike lanes as a result of the COVID lanes. It will get MUTs between Glasgow and Highland, the rest of the road, which is a bike route on the transportation plan, will be a fight, one that won't be won unless there is big turnover in the next election.