traffic

I recently got this excellent question about parking a cargo bike on a residential street's parking.

Toronto would benefit from some Hamilton-style activism. Hamilton activists, frustrated with inaction from the bureaucracy, took it upon themselves last year by installing a bump-out/neckdown with just some cheap traffic cones and screws. Tactical urbanism, it's called: quick and effective urban interventions to make the city more livable and equitable.

The following article is a reprint of an article by Albert Koehl, an environmental lawyer and cycling advocate. He was on the Ontario Chief Coroner's stakeholder panel for cycling safety.

By process of elimination, simple means of getting around like walking and cycling must be looking increasingly attractive to Ontario's provincial and municipal politicians as they struggle to fund new
transit to unclog roads.

A Dutch "anthropological" look at American bicycle culture by Mark Wagenbuur of BicycleDutch. Much the same for Canada. Glimmers of change, but we're still so much in a car-fetishizing culture with space dominated by cars.

The province of Ontario has finally acknowledged that we could use some cycling love. However, the current proposal put forth by the Minister of Transportation is slim and vague.

From Transportation Alternatives, New York. "For the past 40 years, Transportation Alternatives has been demanding (and winning) new bicycle lanes across the city. Now, it’s easier to bicycle than ever before."

On the day of the Complete Streets Forum in Toronto and just after the Toronto Cyclists Union said they would take their request for an Environmental Assessment on the Jarvis bike lane removal to the province, I was thinking about an outdated urban traffic planning - popular in the 1950s - that is favoured by some people on City Council.

The Public Works and Infrastructure Committee (PWIC) voted to reinstall the fifth lane of Jarvis and remove the Jarvis bike lanes after the installation of the Sherbourne Street separated bike lanes at its meeting on June 23, 2011. Cyclists, the Toronto Cyclists Union in particular, supported the Sherbourne separated bike lanes but were against creating a trade-off with the Jarvis bike lanes. The number one argument used to push for removing the Jarvis bike lanes was that it slowed down traffic (by about 2 to 5 minutes).

True words by Albert Koehl in Rabble of how Mayor Ford is doing more harm to drivers than good with his archaic, anti-city approach to moving people:

Don Cherry has a lesson to teach Toronto Mayor Rob Ford.

NOW featured a letter by the daughter of the man hit and killed by a cyclist on the sidewalk this month. She felt people were quick to blame cyclists when in fact her own father loved cycling but found it hard to bike in the suburbs: