Bike Plan of Mississauga: Bikes stay out

I don't willingly go to Mississauga, in fact, I try to avoid it altogether. But I happen to get paid for being there two days a week so this gives me the opportunity to rant and rave about this frontier of humanity. This rant will focus on my first bike commute of the year.

I don't think I'm unusual in wanting to ride on some more leisurely and safer routes. This is why I go from Dundas West to take Bloor St West across the 427 into Mississauga and then cut south back to Dundas east of Dixie Road. I try to stay away from the high-speed traffic and large trucks of Dundas and Dixie. I can ride on these heavy traffic routes if I have to, but I wouldn't expect the average Mississaugan to be comfortable ditching their cars for bikes if these roads were the only option.

Thus my usual fair weather route takes me across Bloor and a quick jaunt down an unofficial hydro corridor trail to Dundas. Unfortunately the corridor is still full of massive dumps of snow, and where it has melted the trail is left a muddy mess. It may be a month before it's passable. So this forced me to find an alternative.

Outpost MississaugaI remembered finding a possible informal route while researching last year Google maps for good bike routes through the streets between Bloor and Dundas. I knew it would be no gilded path but the reality was worse than my already jaded expectations. Turns out there are two small openings in a chicken fence separating trailer park trash from middle-class, upstanding taxpayers. The openings have large bollards meant to screen out all strollers, bikes and fat people from passing to the other side. (One of the openings has been conveniently marked on my map above.)

Let me put this into context. Those bollards are like a guarded outpost keeping all the Bloor people out of the Dundas people's territory and vice-versa. They are the only entrance for a stretch of 3 km (at least until the snow melts). And though I did manage to lift my bike over, they are an effect way to control these two "classes" and ensure that people don't get the idea into their heads that they can get from Point A to Point B by bicycle, let alone on foot.

The answer to riddle of why people don't bike in the suburbs is this: the government doesn't want them to and they'll use the resources at hand to ensure that. But, perhaps I'm just being too paranoid. Perhaps such barriers are relics from a naive, ignorant era of car-mania.