Update: The Toronto municipal bureaucracy, however, does keep hope alive with a plan to add bike boxes around five busy intersections, including the terrifying College & Spadina.

2. The New York Times’ ethics columnist goes for a bike ride around New York City and discusses cycling ethics.

3. The 2010 Bikeway Network Improvements pass Toronto City Council, but the high-profile plan for a segregated lane on University Avenue (which I was really looking forward to) fails due to an ostensible voting error by one councillor.

4. An NDP private member’s bill in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario would require drivers to leave 3 feet of space between their vehicles and cyclists; write your MPP.

With winter finally seeming to have been beaten, it’s time to take this blog out of its seasonal (albeit never planned) hibernation.

There’s been a lot of attention paid in the past few weeks to a pilot project that would see the city create a segregated cycling route through centretown on a trial basis. The Sun was the first to report on it on March 15th (though doesn’t have most of the details exactly right and is pretty slanted against), Centretown News followed up on the 26th (their details are right, but they managed to get some names wrong), and the Citizen has something published today. Note all stories talk about different events: the Sun followed the original presentation to the Roads and Cycling Advisory Committee (full disclosure: I’m chair of RCAC. I  write here as an individual), the latter follow Councillor Holmes’ stepping in to propose the creation of a different consultation mechanism.

I think that there’s lots to be optimistic about in this. Given that this will be a bit of a first for Ottawa (at least in the core). My impression, at least based on what RCAC was told, was that the plan was to begin meeting with other community and business groups. What is being proposed here is to make the consultation process more formal. That might slow things down a bit, but I’m not sure that we would have seen any changes this cycling season in any case. It’s more important that we do what is needed to make sure that everyone is comfortable with the process and is able to contribute as much as is possible: it’ll produce a better result, and it will help avoid infighting amongst various road users/business groups/residents.

Now, in The Citizen Holmes’ suggests that downtown was listed as an option, but the cycling plan calls for considerations of larger east-west routes, which is true. I think that the idea of a downtown route for the pilot has more to do with it being an area where there is a good concentration of places to go, local residents, and people commuting in. There’s also already a lot of bicycles. That’s a good mix for a first project, and is probably different than if it were farther from the core.

Finally, I recently bought a print subscription to Spacing, and despite the high price, it’s definitely worth it. Given the huge amount of content these folks create covering urban issues in a variety of cities, I’m happy to support them.

City officials have asked police to begin cracking down on both cyclists and motorists. Police have said they are planning a cycling safety blitz for next month.

Talk about blaming the victim. The five cyclists who were hit were doing everything right and (allegedly) were injured because the car entered their lane and hit them. Even in the case of the man who was injured in Gatineau, who was not wearing a helmet, it still doesn’t make the accident his fault.  The simple fact remains, the vast majority of cycling injuries (as I’m sure many readers can attest) occur because drivers simply don’t think about cyclists, they turn right in front of us, open their doors as we are ridding by or fail to give us the 3m space the law grants us.

Cracking down on cyclists who don’t have a bell or ride through a red light isn’t going to solve this problem. If the city were to take a similar approach to drunk driving, they would have a blitz to ensure everyone wears a seat belt. That would be insane and people would rightly be up in arms about it yet this slides by as two lines at the end of a news report. This isn’t to say that safe cycling programs are a waste of time but seriously, crack down on the thousands of cars each day who fail to follow traffic laws just as you would crack down on people who drive under the influence. That just makes sense so why can’t the city see it?

It is easy to say this was a random act which could not be predicted but I think what this really demonstrates is in order to make cities safer for cycling the municipal government can’t just paint some bike lanes on a road, call it a cycling plan and then sit back. In order to make cycling truly safe, other vehicles have to respect cyclists for the vehicles they are under the law. This necessarily means a shift in how drivers think when they are behind the wheel of a car. It means checking for cyclists as well as cars when they open doors, turn right and fly down the road at night. I believe that both the provincial and municipal government has a role to play in changing the driving culture of their particular city and province. While a previous commenter pointed out that thousands of cyclists co-exist with cars without problems every day, these events clearly show we are a long way from where we need to be.

Finally though, how do you do this:

“He angled into the lane, brushed up against the female cyclist, hit the other four — who are the ones who are in bad shape — and then carried on out,” he said.

Then just keep on driving? He is charged with five counts of failing to stop at the scene of a collision causing bodily harm but in my mind this should be on par with attempted murder. He had no idea if any of the people he hit were alive when he left the scene. His intentions were exactly the same regardless of the condition of the victims, the law should treat them the same not be subject to whether all of the victims survive.

The service will be made available through bike rental stations to be set up at various points throughout the downtown core of both Ottawa and Gatineau. Users will also be able to submit comments and suggestions about the service at these rental stations.

This is, ofcourse, good news. I suspect at this first stage it will primarily benefit tourists, but when fully implemented should help those that take the bus into the downtown in the morning, but need to do some running about during the day.I think that the ultimate idea is to echo Paris’ rent-a-bike system, which is unbelievable in both its scope and use. I was there in the summer (I have pictures, and will eventually blog about my adventures, seriously!), and I think I saw more people using the rental bikes than personal ones.

Some important questions to be answered:

1. What does “various points” mean? I assume that there will be something in the Market, along the Canal, and closer to Bank, but I also really hope that they put something further south in the core as well.
2. Will you have to return a rented bicycle to the same location?
3. How big will the trial run actually be?