Comment 93578

By Kevin Love (anonymous) | Posted October 23, 2013 at 13:12:16

Portland, Oregon is not "everyone's favourite example." My favourite example is Groningen in The Netherlands. And yes, that didn't happen overnight either.

There is a legitimate debate on quantity vs. quality and pace of implementation. Here is my take:

Infrastructure should be constructed to the CROW bicycle traffic design engineering standards. Why? Because if we don't have design engineering standards then what gets built is all-too-often worthless, dangerous crap.

Having said that, bicycle infra is dirt cheap. Particularly compared to the cost of building and maintaining car infrastructure. A tiny fraction of what was wasted on building the Red Hill Expressway would CROW-ize all of Hamilton. So it is really not about money.

Fundamentally, it is about bigotry. But with my own two eyes I have seen bigots change. For example, I used to have relatives whose opinion about homosexuals was changed by knowing people like that. All the rational arguments in the entire world had zero effect. It was personal knowledge that changed this bigotry.

It is the same with transportation infra. When the sky doesn't fall when downtown becomes car-free on a "trial basis only," and things become much nicer, then the bigots will change their minds.

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