It also provides links to bike stores in Ottawa, dicsussion forums and a blog roll which features our little home in cyberspace.

Last weekend, my girlfriend and I took off from Brussels for a two day bike trip through part of the Flemish region, taking the train back to Brussels on Sunday evening.  I had heard that bike touring was good in Belgium, but coming from some experience bike touring in Canada, I assumed that this meant that there were plenty of country roads and generally polite drivers.

But, no, that’s only the beginning.  In fact, in the Flemish region, there is a huge network of bike-exclusive roads, which you navigate by going from one numbered checkpoint to another.  Actually, to be clear, the routes alternate between bike-exclusive paths and shared use as a minor road, which hardly differed from the bike-exclusive paths.  The entire network is in a fantastic state of maintenance, and extremely well sign-posted.

I’ll give a brief photo journey of the trip.  Coming out of Brussels, we went through the Foret de la Soigne, just outside the Brussels city centre, which boasts great scenery and a comprehensive set of trails for walking, running and cycling.  It suffered a little bit on the sign-posting front, but made up for it in beauty.

From there, we connected onto the Flemish network, which largely passed through the country-side.  There, we probably saw more apple orchards in harvest than cars.

So, why is it possible for Belgium to maintain this system over Canada?  There’s no doubt that it benefits from the proximity of one town to another.  However, there are certainly areas of Canada that have the same layout, and we don’t see a similar system.

More importantly, it benefits from the culture in Belgium.  People bike here.  They bike to work (although that is somewhat less the case in Brussels itself given how crowded the city is with cars).  They bike for recreation.  They bike to get groceries.  They bike as families, as couples or alone.  On Sunday morning, we saw at least a dozen bike teams, in matching jerseys, biking around the Flemish region.  Some appeared to be quite competitive, others didn’t.

There simply isn’t the same barrier here to bicycling as a mode of transport.  It’s done recreationally on a much wider scale than in Canada, but bicycles are also used for practical purposes on a routine basis, which probably in turn fosters their recreational use.

It’s this culture of bicycling in Belgium that allows them to sustain such an impressive system of bike routes.  It’s this culture that explains why Belgium does it so much better.

This is an entirely misguided approach to building a more sustainable city.  I’m strongly behind the notion that we should encourage more dense building, particularly in central areas of the city, supported by a good public transit system.  That said, a more built-up, dense city, isn’t liveable without sufficient park and recreation space.  The Greenbelt, as Baird says, is some of the most substantial parkland for large areas of the city, and forms part of a fantastic system of recreational bike paths.

It would be a shame to see that valuable green space sold to developers through some misguided understanding of how you build a more dense city.