09-12-2016, 12:16 PM
(09-12-2016, 11:16 AM)zanate Wrote: If it's not a "crosswalk", so the rule about cyclists dismounting to cross shouldn't apply: depends on how it's painted, I guess. The "elephant's feet" crossing you see in places (Davenport, and along the Spur Line Trail) permit cyclists to ride across.
There's also the signalized, delineated crossride that's in place on Erb near Willow.
But, we're going to run into some potential cycling/walking coexistence problems with the upcoming level 2 pedestrian crossovers. On the plus side, we could start to see rollout of crossings where the motorist needs to allow pedestrians to cross, placed at roundabouts and likely at key crossing points. But, so far as I know (and based on my recollection of a discussion with regional staff) they're pure crosswalks and people on bikes will be obliged to dismount, and they can't be combined with crossrides.
So what do you do? Permit what people are going to do anyway (ride across), or provide a higher degree of pedestrian safety but criminalize behaviour that could have otherwise been permitted?
I don't like those choices.
Easy. Promote multi-use trails to be streets that happen to have no motorized vehicles permitted. Then where they meet motorized vehicle streets, have a regular intersection. With, obviously, no turns permitted by motorized vehicles. Incidentally, this solution also occurred to me as a possibility for some LRT problems: make an “off-road” section of LRT actually be street running, where the street part is a dead-end that goes nowhere and does nothing other than providing really good bicycling infrastructure (there would be a multi-use trail connecting the dead end to the next street so it would be a through street for bicycles). Voila! No need for crossing arms or fences! Wouldn’t work where freight travels, unless you can get street-running approved. Although at the low speeds used by the freight, maybe street-running could still be approved, I don’t know.
Also, what is this “can’t be combined with crossrides” stuff? Ok, so don’t combine them, put a crossride next to a crosswalk. If the rules provide for a minimum separation between the two, put the crossride straight in line with the path. So theoretically pedestrians should walk over to the crosswalk, but there is no actual need for them to do so. If necessary, put a secondary set of buttons at the crossride that activate the crosswalk 30m away or however far it needs to be. So then the crosswalk is stupid and pointless, but less stupid and pointless than bicyclists piously dismounting.
It just occurred to me, some religious communities are expert at working around rules passed down from on high. Why can’t secular communities do the same? Or better yet, give designers actual responsibility for good design rather than excessively detailed rules that are required to be followed exactly.