Raise the Hammer

"Cycling has quintupled to 400,000 rides a day since the city started building its network."

I agree.

Cycling is still sometimes quiet Hamilton but there has been a dramatic increase in bikes on the roads nowadays when really pay attention. I took citizen curbside & dashcam video surveys on Cannon Street.

As a car driver myself, when viewing it from this perspective, there doesn't seem to be many bikes. But when I look closely, bike use has definitely increased from the ultra-rare-microscopic ("never see bikes") into visibility ("I see a few bikes"). And when I ride my bike (or use SoBi) I notice more bikes than if I was driving my car.

By car, I can rocket Cannon downtown in 3 minutes and only see 6 bikes as I flow along. But when I video curbside, there's more. And I hop onto my bike, I notice even more, e.g. 30-40 bikes because I see them turn on-and-off Cannon at different blocks (going for shorter sections), as bikes don't always ride the whole length of Cannon.

Cannon is 4 lanes wide, so 1 lane for bikes (2-way) means it's fair to have 1 bike for every 3 cars on Cannon. We're not always at that level, but the graph slope of bike increase makes this inevitable, once the bike lanes are more connected.

And the cars often goes in platoon surges (of 10 cars) with often 1 full minute of quietness between platoons (because of synchronized traffic lights). If you're driving in a platoon, it feels deceptively busy, but there's a whole big gap of emptiness behind your platoon of cars.

I've made almost 10 different citizen videos that shows the Cannon bikes lanes are justified. Here's an example Cannon Dashcam Traffic Survey and a Cannon Curbside Video Traffic Survey

Also, separately, there were times where bikes outnumbered cars on Cannon. This does not happen as often as it does in certain parts of Toronto during bike peak (e.g. certain parts of College, certain parts of Adelaide).

Comment edited by mdrejhon on 2015-10-02 12:41:07