As to safety improvements in cars, some of that has actually resulted in people taking greater chances – we have better brakes, better steering and traction control, better tires, etc and people actually drive faster and in a less attentive manner.

As to the rude drivers cutting through neighborhoods and speeding, often times you’ll find that the cut through traffic IS your neighbor. We did a traffic study in a neighborhood one time in a little subdivision that had one way in and one way out. Drivers were often clocked at 60+ mph on the road leading to the subdivision, a relatively short distance btw. They were all people that LIVED in the neighborhood. Unbelievable.

My Wadeview Park neighborhood has been inundated with speed humps partly due to the traffic around Boone High School – a truly neighborhood school in many ways, but with 3500 kids, it’s a lot of people – and the new SODO development. The rationale was that SODO would encourage more cut through traffic. Traffic that really hasn’t developed and would mostly be residents in the neighborhood ANYway. Not all the humps have been installed that were proposed, I’m hoping that it’s partly because the City couldn’t find enough willing residents to allow them in front of their property.

Most mornings I take my dog out using one of these:
http://www.springerusa.com/

My dog is not much a runner and I will never drag him, so I let him set the pace. We go pretty darn slowly with many stops.

Only safe place to ride like this is on the sidewalk, but we go so slowly (most people walking pass us) that it can be done safely.

But STILL, even though we stop and look all around at every intersection before crossing, sometimes while we are crossing, cars will zip up and start making a left turn from the major street into the minor street we are crossing.

The driver sees no oncoming traffic, cuts the wheel and starts the turn only to THEN look at where they are going. At the last moment, the driver sees us and has to stop, usually in mid-turn.

This is precisely what I saw happening in Germany on the cycle track I tried to use. The difference was that it happened much more frequently there and it seemed that they had a harder time stopping because they were turning across two lanes of traffic, not one, so they had more speed on before they saw the cyclist.

I’m back. I was writing about the virtuous spiral that I’ve been seeing here in Toronto.

I stopped with describing the new bike shops that have opened. A bike shop around every corner has the effect of making it easy for ordinary people to get punctures repaired without getting their nice work clothing dirty. So that repairing one’s own punctures becomes like car drivers changing their own oil. A few enthusiasts do it, but most do not.

And city bikes tend to be sold with puncture-resistant tires. Tires like the Schwalbe Marathon Plus tyres which came as standard equipment on my beloved Pashley. They have never, ever got a flat.

Then a substantial number of the new cyclists joined us veterans of the cycle wars and got involved in advocacy. There was a big enough critical mass to start the new Toronto Cyclists Union and conduct demonstrations for better cycling facilities. Demonstrations such as hundreds of people packing the public galleries of Toronto Council Chambers to watch the City Councillors debate and vote 28-16 in favour of taking a car lane on Jarvis Street and turn it into two bicycle lanes.

This in turn put heat on Toronto City Council to complete the Bike Plan. The Toronto Bike Plan can be seen at:

http://www.toronto.ca/cycling/bikeplan/

This was set up as a 10 year plan from 2001 to 2011, but implementation had fallen behind. So Council looked for items that could be quickly implemented (particularily before the municipal election next year). One such item was putting bike racks on all busses. So all Toronto busses now have bike racks on them.

Another quick item was bike parking. So we now have a lot more bike parking, including a major bike station at the downtown train station, bike lockers at many locations in Toronto and thousands more of the ubiquitous post and ring bike stands.

The effect of all this was to persuade even more people to bike, so the virtuous spiral continues.

The primary reason why using a path to the side is, on average, much more dangerous is the greater temptation to travel opposite the direction of traffic. Statistically, that’s many times more likely to result in a collision. When they’re sharing the road, folks tend to travel on the wrong side less often.

As I’ve become more of a vehicular cyclist, I pause and remember her if I feel myself becoming too much of a zealot about it. She’s never been involved in a major collision in her decades of riding, so she must be doing it safely, although it can’t be what most of us would consider efficient. I guess it works for her, although it’s not what I would choose. So I guess I’d agree that, technically, sidewalk riding can be done safely (she seems to do it), but not at the efficiency that most of us would desire, including the efficiency that some other sidewalk riders seem to desire.

Like I said. It’s the behavior. If you’re going to ride on the sidewalk you have to stop and check carefully in ALL directions. If you do that, you can avoid getting hit. But it’s a tedious pain in the ass. Much EASIER to ride on the road.

The safety and congestion improvements that occurred after Shared Space redesigns has been significant, regardless of which factor is more significant. Quoting [with clarifications] from “Improving traffic behaviour and safety through urban design”:

—begin quote—
Clarifying whether each part of the
highway network lies in the traffic zone or
the public realm underpins Hans
Monderman’s work. The traffic zone is
not a place for anything but the movement
of traffic, and segregation [by mode type]
is usually appropriate. But traffic can also coexist
with other social activities within the public
realm, so long as the cultural messages
that govern human behaviour are made
explicit.

[In Shared Space] The driver becomes a citizen.
Eye contact and human interaction replaces
signs and rules. But for this to work, the
transition between the two worlds needs
to be made clear.
–end quote—
https://www.rospa.org.uk/roadsafety/conferences/congress2006/proceedings/day3/ballie.pdf

I was delayed by traffic, (ironic, isn’t it) and arrived at my turn just after he crossed the intersection. He looked to his right for traffic approaching the stop sign, but did not look to his left for crossing, turning traffic, which would have been me had I been able to keep up my normal speed.

He missed the bullet, literally and figuratively, but I’ve had closer calls from sidewalk riders.

Risk comes from behavior. If you ride like a gutterbunny on a fast road with narrow lanes, you are at a higher risk of being hit (sideswiped) than if you control the lane on such a road. If you ride 20mph and blow past commercial driveways on a sidewalk you are at higher risk of being hit than if you ride 5mph and stop and scan at every street and driveway.

Andrew chastises me for saying riding on the sidewalk is dangerous. He’s right. It’s only as dangerous as the rider’s behavior. The problem is that most people think it’s safer and don’t have a clue what and where the dangers are. So then you hear their hit-by-a-car stories which begin “I was riding on the sidewalk when…”