Raise the Hammer

nick, I'm very firmly in your camp MOST of the time. That said, this is a project that is a year late, 2/3 done, and done with at the absolute lowest design standard possible.

This is an opportunity to provide safe, effective cycling infrastructure to a key transit node in our city. It's a perfect place to showcase our city's growing commitment to cycling, to have them WANT to jump on a SoBi bike and ride around our city. Not only is it a great opportunity, but its a piece of SUPER low hanging fruit. TONS of pavement space, very little traffic and perfectly situated to be the alternate route to riding on the Highway 40Main.

Now I'm a very firm advocate against the type of whiny, you're-doing-everything-wrong style of advocacy that has dominated cycling discussions up until about the last 8 years in North America. The padded-shorts-helmet-mirror crowd, as I heard them called at a summit I was at recently, didn't really get much done, but they did get things on the agenda, paving the way for more positive, results-oriented advocacy.

This type of results-oriented advocacy is EXACTLY what RTH has done with regards to Hunter Street. Sure, it can sometimes drift into the negative and the "we never do anything right", but I would argue that on Hunter, that has not been the case. In fact, for over a year now, folks on this site have been working very hard to advance effective solutions for Hunter Street. Hell, people even went so far as to do a detailed design for the City FOR FREE! The suggestions that have been put out there over the past year that this project was delayed are not out there, they're not coming from wackos who just want to put bike lanes everywhere, they're coming from a very well researched position, and from a point of view that recognizes that having a 2-way bike facility just end on a one way street is a recipe for either complete disaster or sidewalk cycling all over the place. They also recognize that some degree of physical separation, no matter how slight, provides a huge boost in perceived safety, which is the #1 thing that gets more people to ride.

This is a half-measure delivered a full year late, in spite of several reasonable suggestions from the community to improve it. There's no good reason for it to be so incredibly poorly designed, and I think that's what frustrates people here, especially when the project should have been done in 2013.