City of Calgary Cycling Policy Comments
Hello,
I heard about your last open-house in March, but was unfortunately unable to attend. Instead, I have read your draft cycling policy from calgary.ca.
(It's probably worth noting that I tried for about 20 minutes to find this and/or information about the open-house on calgary.ca including via Google and eventually got it via a comment at bikecalgary.org)
Anyway. My comments on the above policy:
Much of the (draft) policy sounds very good. The rough guidelines up to page 4 are decent, although I would make a few notes/additions:
- On your diagrams of bike lanes, try drawing open car doors andnotice that the cyclist will be killed or seriously maimed. I alwaysride further away from parked cars than approximately where their opendoors would be. Your diagrams put the cyclist directly in this "doorzone".
- [Some] Cyclists can travel up to 90km or 100km an hour down biggerhills, and can fairly easily reach 60km or more in the city onmoderate downhills (on road bikes). For example, Bow Trail,Shagganappi, Old Banff Coach Road, 19th Street.
- Many cyclists ride out of the city, at night or both. These tendto be racers training and are doing the opposite of commuters (thatis, trying to get OUT of the city as fast/nicely as possible). Theyoften ride road bikes, and hence avoid pathways (too slow/crowded) andgravel-strewn areas (too dangerous).
- It is apparent from my emails to the city and the transportation department
that nobody really knows which roads out-of-town riders use except for
the cyclists themselves. All surveys seem to concentrate on commuters,
yet I suspect (only through personal experience, mind) that a large percentage
of the on-road cyclists motorists encounter are actually cyclists on out-of-town
recreational rides (see point 5 below). Using some of the new $1 million/year
cycling budget to find out where these roads are would be a good idea --
then in future, if they're rebuilt they can get wide outside lanes or shoulders.
Here's my list to get you started (some of these aren't in the City proper,
but access to them is important and as more land is annexed these will
become part of the city):
- Old Banff Coach Road
- Lower Springbank + Springbank
- 101st Street SW
- Airport Road
- Burma Road (144 Ave NW)
- 85th Street NW + SW (getting quite busy)
- 17th Avenue SW west of 85th Street
- Canada Olympic Park road (access to Old Banff/85th)
- Symon's Valley
- Rocky Ridge Road
- Aspen Dr
- Meadow Dr
- Range Road 262
- 12 Mile Coulee
- Stoney Trail
- Nose Hill Drive west of Stoney Trail (in the river-valley)
- Tuscany Hill + Tuscany Valley View/Tuscany Way + Tusslewood Drive
- Highway 8 (rumble strips suck, though)
- Edworthy Hill (if you get sick of "illegally" using C.O.P.)
I live in the NW, so this reflects a bias to those routes which I know and see cyclists on a lot.
Many people in the city ride for recreation and training (e.g. all racers). These groups may (but surprisingly often don't) also commute to work on bikes. Their needs are a little different as they're typically heading out of town (rather than downtown), and often do so from outlying communities.
On such rides -- which can last several hours to all day -- it is often nice to have some conversations occasionally, and so roads where it is possible to ride two-up (at least occasionally) are required. As what was once countryside becomes acreages and former acreages become urban areas (e.g. I remember riding when Nose Hill Drive was the very fringe of the city), these routes are disappearing or taking much longer to reach than even a few years ago.
When re-developing very high-traffic training routes out of (or on the outskirts of) the City such as Lower Springbank, Old Banff Coach Road, Airport Road, Burma Road, Rocky Ridge, 12 Mile Coulee, Symon's Valley, the 567 (Big Hill Springs Road) and so forth this is very much worth bearing in mind -- full-size shoulders (such as on the 1A or Highway 22) allow two cyclists to ride side-by-side, at least when traffic is relatively light and the gravel has been swept.
These types of riders are typically on road bikes, with narrow (less than 2cm), high-pressure (120psi or more) tires and prefer virgin asphalt or as close as one can get. They will use bits of bike path if they are convenient (e.g. they make a shortcut or avoid some very unpleasant bit of road) but they need to be accessible at high-speed TO and FROM the road. If such paths are typically busy with small children and dogs or are very rough, these riders will probably avoid them. For example, the ex-bus-trap at Silver Springs is a good shortcut, but getting onto the path near there is hard since the entrance is usually blocked by cars waiting at the stop sign Silverdale Drive and Silver Springs Gate.
Some of these riders ride most (or all) of the year. In the non-summer months, "cyclocross" bikes are typically used; these can deal with more rough surfaces.
Small changes in infrastructure can make the roads much more pleasant for these types of riders.
Let us also consider the future, when (depressingly) it seems likely that much of the area between Cochrane and Calgary will be urban or at least small acreages -- will riders still have these opportunities then? If development doesn't change, unfortunately the answer is "no".
Riding for several hours with your friends but failing to ever talk to them (i.e. always riding "single file") is just not going to happen. As roads which used to be low-traffic enough to ride for a while side-by-side (and move over when cars approached in the distance) become busier and busier (e.g. Burma, Lower Springbank, Airport, 12 Mile Coulee, Lochend, Bearspaw), training cyclists are forced to either not talk to their training partners or only move over when traffic becomes especially heavy. Not surprisingly, many choose the latter. Of course, this makes some drivers excited and prone to yell, honk and/or throw things (somewhat understandably, I suppose, but still). This, I think, may be a large contributing factor as to why there are so many "anti-cyclist" car drivers in the city -- the ones who threaten me in various ways approximately monthly. (The police have always said some variation of "we can't do anything" whenever I've bothered to phone them.)
Examples of the city making horrible infrastructure mistakes in this regard (which could easily have been fixed with little cost at the time of installation):
- a total lack of shoulders or wide outside lanes on Old Banff Coach Road above Cougar Ridge -- I was told several years ago this would get such bike facilities when it was rebuilt, but alas it has gotten worse with single lanes each way and a center median making it impossible for cars to pass cyclists safely (even single-file cyclists);
- the medians on Old Banff Coach Road/7th Avenue between 77 Street NW and 85 Street NW make it impossible for cars to safely pass cyclists in this section -- this is a source of much excitement for car drivers;
- closing the Silver Springs and Shaganappi bus traps (without appropriate accommodation for all the cyclists who used them);
- putting inconvenient barricades at the end of 11th Avenue SW right before 77th Street;
- making it unfriendly to ride counter-flow down Lower Springbank where it connects to 69th St SW (by installing dozens of concrete barricades) and hard to turn North on 69th if you're heading east on Lower Springbank (again, barricades);
- the total lack of shoulders or wide lanes on Country Hills Boulevard -- one of the last remaining "good" ways to get from the NW out to Rocky Ridge/Bearspaw area, especially if you live on top of the Nose Hill escarpment as there isn't a good way across the former Coulee between Nose Hill Drive and Stoney Trail;
- again, no wide lanes on 12 Mile Coulee -- when I wrote during construction to suggest this, I was told that a "regional pathway would be provided". This doesn't accommodate on-road cyclists in any way, of course, and also has no good way to get onto it at the 1A or off of it where it ends near the Co-Op and veers into the park;
- the new medians on 40th Avenue between Shaganappi and 53rd Street make it very hard or impossible for (larger) cars/trucks to pass me, especially if there are parked cars whose "door zone" I am avoiding;
- nearly every time I've ridden the 53rd Street bike lane (southbound), there are several parked cars in it making the lane much less useful (is it legal for cars to park there?);
- often the curbs where the bike path meets the road are square instead of ramped -- examples include: in Sunnyside where the new-ish bikepath goes along below the cliffs, above the Fox Hollow Golf Course from Moncton Rd onto the path there, ...
Examples of good things:
- the bit of bike path from Schooner Landing NW to Stoney Trail before it was ripped up by construction -- presumably it will be rebuilt;
- the wide shoulders on Stoney Trail;
- the wide shoulders on the 1A (until you get to Stoney Trail);
- the 53rd Street bike lanes (although they're usually full of parked cars);
- Range Road 262 (new pavement, relatively low traffic);
- large shoulders on Sarcee south of the river;
- bit of bike path from Bow Trail/Sarcee to access Coach Hill Road SW (although minus points for it being a water-drainage route like so many of the new bike paths, and hence quite icy in the winter);
- four lanes on 17th Avenue SW west of 85th street, despite relative lack of traffic;
- Rumble strips are horrible for cyclists (this isn't an issue within the City, but you're rapidly annexing land which has roads including such "features" like Highway 8).
- During the summer, cycle touring is popular. Cycle-tourists arriving in Calgary will likely do so via the 1A (if they found good advice) or the #1 (if they didn't). In both cases, they find themselves on very busy roads with absolutely no hint of how to get anywhere -- contrast this with my experience in (e.g.) Switzerland, which has national routes with numbered signs giving one routes through all major cities (on well-designed mix of roads [with wide lanes, shoulders or bike lanes], bike paths and non-major roads). I merely followed small red "5"'s from Geneva to Zermatt through many cities. Something to think about, anyway. The standard "solution" for Calgary is to tell people to acquire a "Bikeways" map...
- Speaking of "Bikeways", most of these in the city that I've used are absolutely terrible: in any neighbourhood which I know well, there are almost always better ways to go than those recommended. The typical joke is that a bikeway will attempt to find the road with the most stop signs. Examples: 18th Avenue NW between 10th street W and 6th Street E has a stop sign on nearly every block, yet is the bikeway; 19th Avenue SW bikeway has a stop sign literally every block for about 15 blocks. Many times when trying to follow a bikeway, there's absolutely no indication of where you might be headed (e.g. some bikeways lead to gravel road unsuitable for road bikes, many intersections have a "three way turn" indicating that all possible roads are a bikeway, etcetera).
- Some of the bike paths (especially along the Elbow River) have signs showing where to go to get to major landmarks and how far away they are (in kilometers) -- these are very nice, and the concept could be expanded. For example, any bikeway sign with more than one option should say where each of the options go. Ideally, there would be "routes" (with names and/or numbers and colours) which one could follow. This would go a LONG way to making the "bikeway" system actually usable for route-finding. As of now, you have to remember so much from the bikeway map to successfully follow a route that it's not really feasible unless you already know the way -- in which case, you probably know a better way than the bikeway provides *anyway*.
- Although street-sweeping has started a little bit (as of April 15), there is still a ton of gravel on the roads despite over a month of mostly-good weather. This makes it very hard for a cyclist on a road bike to move over for cars, especially in areas where the right-hand side is "mostly" used for parking -- in these cases, the gravel isn't cleared away by traffic, yet I think most motorists just see a cyclist riding 2m from the curb without knowing that they would have a tough time riding on the gravel. Using some of the recently-announced $1 million/year cycling budget to prioritize "high quality" cycling routes for sweeping would be a good idea.
I also have some further comments, suggestions and so forth. In noparticular order:
Thanks for your time,