Raise the Hammer

I'm beginning to rethink this bike lane thing. Why should I want to ride on routes with high auto use? Better, I think, to avoid autos, stitching together routes through quieter residential backstreets, parking lots, institutional campuses, parks and trails. Mind you, I'm mostly riding for exercise and recreation. Some parts of the city, I admit, lack the necessary abundance of these amenities, but even on busier streets I'm better off riding on the sidewalks. For starters, urban expressways have few pedestrians on the sidewalks. Mind, there's that little thing about the legality of bikes on sidewalks, but it is seldom enforced and should be repealed.

There's also a political upside. I think biking would get more support from non-bikers if it meant joining cause to reduce through auto-traffic in residential neighbourhoods, widening sidewalks on busy commercial streets and restricting more direct routes between the two to human-powered conveyances. I suspect it could be cheaper too. I note that auto traffic is reduced in some central downtown Montreal residential streets (Clark, running north & south between St. Urbain and St. Laurent) by making them one way in one direction for a few blocks, then one way the other. Easy access for residents, but frustrating for through auto traffic. Ferguson Ave. is relatively quiet in downtown Hamilton in part due to the block closed to auto traffic between King and Main. Paving stones aren't attractive to car drivers either, but this is a more expensive technique.

I'm thinking that the bike lobby in this city would find it a better tactic to advocate separating bike from car routes, limiting the points of confrontation to places where they cannot avoid crossing, rather than by trying to carve lanes from the urban expressways. At least until bike riding becomes more popular and its advantages even more evident to residents.