From My Bottom Step

Traffic does not generally affect your human-powered travel time. This is a secret benefit to bicycling in a grid-like city. If you are walking then you really only get slowed down by the crowds near summer festivals. If you are bicycling, roller-skating, or skateboarding on side streets, then you are traveling slower than traffic. When faster traffic passes you they do not make you slow down. Aside from crossing main roads – due to a red light or cross-traffic – there is nothing making people stop and wait while you catch up. But why do some intersections have stop signs and others have red lights?

Do you know City Council chooses how to arrange our roads, traffic lights, and parks and, therefore, chooses which laws apply? They can even make up their own.

This is a plea for City Council to empower you and I as individuals. This post was motivated by Gina Barber’s Riding on the sidewalk post in which she asks her readers the following three questions that I will attempt to answer:

1. How do we get more people to choose to get on a bike instead of a car? (in the context of benefiting our individual health and collective sense of community)
2. Where is it safe to ride? (and later states “police are reluctant to enforce a by-law that results in $140 fines.”)
3. Why bother to ring your bell when people are listening to their iPods and don’t hear you?

Q1) How do we get more people to choose to get on a bike instead of a car?

More people will power their own transportation as it becomes easier for them to do so. I mean easy in a broad sense incorporating at least psychological, financial, and physical ease.

How do we make bicycling easy? I’d like to share with you this video of TEDxCopenhagen – Mikael Colville-Andersen – Why We Shouldn’t Bike with a Helmet as well as my own ideas:

• Psychological ease can come from better training for everyone. Would automobile drivers have a better appreciation of how their vehicles affect other individuals if they had to spend at least a couple years each using bicycles (being vulnerable) and motorcycles (being vulnerable at higher speed)?
• Financial ease comes from comparing transportation options and deciding which, if any, to subsidize and how. I want to see many city services remain as public goods. For example, parks, playgrounds and libraries are paid for by and, in theory, benefit everyone. Can we carry the full costs of transportation and its related services? Does everyone benefit from parking meters? What if every coin meter had loops for bicycle locks and pet leashes?
  • Parking lots are an example where walking, public transportation, bicycling, and motorcycling win over the personal automobile. (Carpooling helps, yes it does!)
  • One way to help people carpool is to fully subsidize our public transit system (paid by residents in advance as taxes and not paid at the time of boarding as fare). Would this allow the LTC to provide a level of service that would enable many, many more people to ‘carpool’ regularly by riding a bus?
• Physical ease has two parts: your bicycle and your route. You can make a bicycle easier to ride either uphill or fast downhill by adding another gear. Routes through our city often use our grid-like streets with a bunch of traffic control measures. These control measures have the side-effect of insuring a bicycle rider will frequently stop and start. (This Stop-Start-Repeat pattern is an okay way to build leg muscles, one aspect of fitness, but I find the extra effort is frustrating when my immediate goal is personal transportation. I address traffic controls – lights & signs – further in answering the second question.)

Q2) Where is it safe to ride?
Practical advice can be read at BicycleSafe.com and confirmed by the studies cited in the Go Ride In Traffic post. The gist is that it is safer to do what is legally expected and to be visible in doing it. (We’ve separated a few rules and myths about which rules of road apply to bicycles to help you.)

City Council decides where to put traffic lights, paint bicycle lanes, and use a yield sign instead of a stop sign in your neighbourhood. This gives City Council tremendous power over deciding which traffic laws our police service enforce because City Council effectively chooses which laws apply — or creates by-laws of its own!

Following the stop sign example:
Every unsigned intersection defaults to being an all-way stop in provincial law. Yet, we pay for stop signs to be erected ALMOST EVERY TIME.

Yield-as-default is how it appears the majority of road users treat stop signs today. People choose to do what makes sense instead of following the rules so long as they can tolerate all foreseeable consequences of violating the rules. Can City Council use the laws we have to reflect people’s behaviour instead of trying to change it? Yes.

We could replace stop signs with yield signs. If we want to avoid buying and installing lots of yield signs, then you and I and City Council can ask our provincial representatives, our MPPs, to change the rules.

Yield-as-default would further empower individuals. This added responsibility should encourage everyone to pay more attention to each other. No longer could you assume another road user will stop. Instead of assuming, we’d have to pay attention to and communicate with each other instead of, for example, just watching for the red light to vanish before proceding blindly forward.

Q3) Why bother to ring your bell when people are listening to their iPods and don’t hear you?

There’s just one way to test whether someone can hear you (and is willing to respond appropriately).