Cars vs Bicycles vs Pedestrians

Just came across this old thread and was wondering how people are viewing these issues, just over two years later?

From the Singapore perspective, there has been a marked increase in cyclists on the roads, including people using bicycles for their daily commute. As you can imagine, this has created an increased tension on the streets. Online forums are a buzz with furious drivers vs. cyclist debates.

While the city has been installing bike paths as part of their park connector plans (these are paths that have a space for pedestrians and cyclists) these do not address those who wish to simply commute from point a to point b. These park connectors are all about leisure cycling. Add to this, zero push for cycling infrastructure and a car culture that thinks drivers should get all because they pay so much for their cars (car taxes, road tolls, etc. all aimed at controlling the number of cars on the road make owning a car very expensive).

This attitude extends to their treatment of pedestrians. I can't tell you how many times I have almost been hit by cars at intersections. Not the kind with a traffic light but the kind where it's either a stop sign or no sign -- mostly side streets. Pedestrians do have the right of way, but these clowns (almost to a car) cruise on through like there isn't someone on the road. Oblivious.

How are things in your part of the world? Any better?

 

i support the removal of the bike lanes on Jarvis. That arrangement was just dumb. There so much that can be done, and as a cyclist I would rather ride down a parallel major street than a virtual thru way that Jarvis is. One block east or west doesn't matter to me. It should never have been on Jarvis in the first place. The biggest issue now , is getting used the return of the suicide lane (the middle lane on Jarvis that changes direction based on the time of day).

As for a bike lane on Bloor, on boy. Let's move these lanes to blocks north or south of the major car arteries. City council could be sooooo much more creative and innovative.

 

300K is a lot of gravy.
--- merged: Dec 19, 2013 4:54 AM ---
I guess the issue I have with the removal of Jarvis was it's replacement on Sherbourne isn't all that great either.

 

@Leto do you actually cycle? I miss the Jarvis bike lane. I live just off of it and felt much safer when the lanes were there.

And which street exactly could a bike lane be on instead of Bloor? It's the only central street that runs all the way across the city. Here's what I feel: like the powers that be are ok with bike lanes until they "get in the way" of cars. How about this instead (politically impossible): drivers have to fill up their cars instead of driving them as single. It would cut traffic in half at least!

 

lol - @arkana, yes I cycle ( I bought my commuter Nishiki at Duke's Cycle in 1984 and use it to this day - even on the Enbridge Ride). Lived on Seaton street at Dundas as well as 40 Gerrard for 20 some years and commuted to the Tip Top Tailor bldg for work on my bike ... actually prefer the new Sherbourne street bike lane (as opposed to Charlatan) and didn't like the Jarvis bike lanes as cyclist or as a driver. - I hear you wrt to Bloor and I have no options for that transverse that would make anybody happy, except to do what I always do: as I live out in the burbs now (Coxwell & Danforth area) I ride along the bike route to the viaduct, then drop down Sherbourne to Isabella. From there I can go pretty well anywhere east/west or north south fairly simply.

But I wont hide that I prefer the car when ever possible. When we pop over to Christie & Bloor for some Soon Tofu soup, we take the car (usually min of 2, max of 5 of our family) It's way faster than cycling and way cheaper than transit. Even so, there's such a heavy flow of traffic along Bloor, I tend to drive Pottery rd to Rosedale Valley road then along Davenport to Christie.

I'm also happy that the bike lane along Pharmacy, north of St Clair was removed. I NEVER saw a cyclist on it, but car traffic was always constricted. That was a good experiment that finally proved that a bike lane was not necessary.

As far as the 'powers that be' I think it's heavily skewed towards the cycling crowd. It would be difficult to fill up cars prior to every ride. What I would like to see is a driving permit that is zonal. EG, if you are Zone 9A (where my parking permit is issued) or any other city area, your can drive/park for free. If your car is from out of the city (eg from the '905') then the regular parking rules apply and possibly consider access tolls similar to London UK.

 

@snowy I spent time in Apeldoorn, Holland. They have it right from the get go - separate lanes, with their own signals. Too late for a city like TO to retrofit without sacrificing something for somebody. But having used the roads here for many decades, I don't have too much of a problem - really it's the TTC drivers (the buses) that are the worst offenders.

 

I'd agree. I live at the top of a mountain pass in a very bicycle centric area. 15 miles uphill or down with a gazillion turns and a single passing zone. I see confrontations and bad behavior on every commute during the summer. It's just an unrealistic place to share a road.

 

It will take a brave politician to solve Toronto's transit woes.

We had a plan that would have been great. That plan was dismantled and made into a shadow of what it was. The new Scarborough subway is bad joke.

This trend in Toronto isn't new. We've been cancelling transit plans for decades. We're good at it.

 

As an Obnoxious Cyclist™, I will offer into this discussion the wildly unpopular fact that a majority of roads in the United States, by law, are open to vehicles, which include bicycles. Of course the laws vary by state, and there are obvious exceptions—using Maryland as an example, these include interstate expressways and any roads with speed limits of 55mph or higher. But the fact remains that road transportation does not exist for the sole use of motorized vehicles. In fact, historically speaking, paved roads would not have come into being at the time that they did had it not been for strong advocacy efforts by cyclists near the turn of the 20th century.

Now, of course, the heavily auto-centric culture that has dominated the past several decades in the U.S. (and Canada) has made it impossible for this to work everywhere, and there are plenty of areas where cars and bicycles just shouldn't share roads. But the mentality that exists among many drivers that they own the road, and that no other kinds of vehicles have any right to it, isn't helping anyone.

What doesn't work, of course, is the extremely counterproductive—and yet strangely similar—position held by many Obnoxious Cyclists™ that they own the roads they travel and are, for example, within their rights to ride three or four abreast (or more) along a single lane, windy road full of blind curves and corners. Yes, the cyclists are entitled to legal use of that road. Yes, they should be taking the lane, by law, in order to discourage drivers behind them from trying to overtake them when it is clearly not safe to do so. What they shouldn't be doing is dominating the entire road as a bunched pack—at most (again, using Maryland as an example), it's legal for two cyclists to ride abreast, but not more. What should happen in this case is for the cyclists to single up once it's safe for the cars behind to pass them and, if possible—and if safe—move closer to the shoulder once the road is clear of oncoming traffic to make more room for the cars behind to pass, not only for safety and efficient movement of traffic on the road, but also for decency and courtesy. Sometimes, on such curvy mountainous roads that cyclists enjoy riding on so much, this just might not be possible, and drivers behind will have to wait. It might take a few minutes. But is it really the end of the world? I believe it would be a lot easier for these drivers to stomach those few minutes of waiting if they were able to accept that people riding bicycles on roads are, in fact, operators of vehicles, with just as many rights as the operators of motor vehicles.

Food for thought:

• Would you get impatient being stuck behind a farm tractor traveling at 25mph (or some arbitrary speed well below the limit) on a 45mph single lane country highway? Sure.
• Would you try to run him off the road or pass him unsafely? Maybe, if you've got a death wish, but probably not if you have some sense about you.
• Is the operator of the tractor a road user? Yes.
• Can he go much faster than however fast he's going (which is not nearly fast enough, as far as you're concerned)? Possibly, but let's say for the sake of argument that he can't.
• As a road user, does he deserve any less respect, or space on the road, than any of the impatient motorists behind him? No. Chances are if he's courteous, he might even pull off to the side of the road, once it's safe to do so, and let those impatient people behind him go around.

When I ride my bike, I think of myself as the driver of that farm tractor. The space I occupy on the road is, by law, mine, and nobody is entitled to take it from me by trying to run me off the road. If it's safe for others behind me to pass me, I'll move aside—obviously I can't speak for everyone, but it sure would be nice if others followed this practice as well. If it's not safe, I take the lane, because if I don't, it's entirely possible that some impatient driver behind me will try to snake around me and have nowhere to go once another car comes rushing toward him other than to veer straight into me. Nobody wants that.

Again, it doesn't work everywhere, but bike paths and lanes can only do so much, especially when emphasis on bike path construction is often put much more heavily on recreational use instead of transportation use, leading to lots of circular trails that take people nowhere. If there's no existing bike transit infrastructure and no money to create new infrastructure, you have to work with what you have, and that includes working within the structure of existing laws. The solution, as far as I'm concerned, doesn't need to be to kick all the cyclists off the road.

 

Yes, it's legal and subject to dubious interpretation. We have two or three fatalities every year from bicyclists insisting on their rights. On any given weekend, there will be 100-200 bicyclists in a narrow, winding canyon. There are no businesses here, virtually all of these riders are recreational. 500-600 residents get the pleasure of doubled and sometimes tripled commute times because of bicyclists that "take the road" the entire way down. A "few minutes" is an additional 40 to me, each way. For the most part, I ride a motorcycle in the summer. I've been hit twice by bicyclists that crossed the center line (one in front of a cop ).

In Colorado, bicyclists are supposed to keep to the right and autos are supposed to leave 3 feet when passing. I regularly encounter bicyclists within 3 feet of the center line, where a bicycle lane exists. You'd think that the physics of a motorcycle aren't that different than a bicycle. I've been know to pass bicyclists in the bike lane when they weren't using it.

I love the mountains, I want everyone to enjoy them; but not all roads are conducive to shared usage.

 

Yes, they could be a part of a commute from point a to b. When I ride 8 miles downtown, it is 1.5 miles to the bike path, and 6.5 miles connecting between two parks and only 1 crossroad. My city's parks department has spent the past 40 years putting in bike paths to connect all of their parks and connect the city to the suburbs and next major cities. You will be able to ride a bike trail from Cleveland to Cincinnati in 2015 (2017?).

I do hear from bike riders here that the bike paths remove bikes from roads and makes drivers less aware of them, and there is less push to add bike lanes and shoulders to the roads... But, I feel much safer on a bike trail than on any road. It isn't the road, it is the distracted driver, the late driver, and the big trucks that I don't like. Add in all the dirty pollution generated by those, and the bike paths are the only way to ride. And it is possible to ride 60 - 90 minutes to get somewhere with this setup. When I did a group ride on rural roads and city streets, I was tired from being on edge about traffic and the starting and stopping of lights and stop signs.