Raise the Hammer

but the situation in Hamilton is that cycling is really only a viable option for around 50%

This is precisely because the city doesn't have enough infrastructure and doesn't maintain it. There are lots of people in Toronto who cycle year round, and Toronto also doesn't have really great infrastructure or great winter maintenance of what it does have - and yet people put their coats and scarves on and ride their bikes. Despite the lack of infrastructure, 'the majority of people' rode for around 75% of the year in a really hard winter. People will ride their bikes in the winter, but you need good infrastructure that is maintained with a priority towards cyclists (i.e. you can't store plowed snow in the bike lane). Also, there is a higher bar for safety in the winter - 1m bike lanes or shared lanes are a lot less fun when you are trying to avoid ice patches. Separated lanes are way better.

Traffic in this city is already bad and not getting better by the recent decisions put in place.

Wait, what? You do realize that Hamilton has a nickname of 'the 20-minute city', right? Its actually just as fast to drive through the downtown from end to end as it is to drive around on the QEW - there is no city with actual traffic issues where that is possible. You can't seriously say that Hamilton has bad traffic. Maybe its bad in the sense that when you do interact with other cars they are speeding down Main St. and it is difficult to change lanes across a 4-lane highway..but that is not 'bad traffic'.

There has to be a balance, that's something that I think gets overlooked regularly when looking at things like this and anyone that brings it up gets labelled a villain for somehow being against green transportation or safe cycling.

This happens because what you are calling 'balanced' is in fact arguing against a balanced approach, which would consider all modes of transportation to be important. An approach to road design that accommodates automobile safety but doesn't incorporate safety for cyclists and transit users intermingled is by definition unbalanced. Articles like this are in fact calling for more balanced road design that no longer caters to fast vehicle traffic at the expense of all other modes of transportation and at the expense of local land use.

Also, if you had suggested pre-1920s that all roads be covered in asphalt, people might have said 'Now, we need to be realistic about the cost and maybe it isn't affordable to make every road better for cars and horses' and yet here we are. Why not for bikes?

Comment edited by AnjoMan on 2014-06-16 12:57:32