Grassroots democracy at work?

It is not yet apparent exactly how this money will be spent, but it is certainly a welcome change of direction!

The Sun made a good point (I know, quite a surprise) that even the Sierra Club admitted that the votes that this assessment is based on were all pretty insignificant decisions.

Also, this was an “environmental” report card; not specifically cycling. It is technically possible, then, that they had improved on cycling but gotten worse in all other environmental areas.

But most importantly, they could not have gotten worse on cycling, because funding in the budget for cycling for 2007 is at $0, from $400,000 a few years earlier. You simply can’t get worse than zero.

Right now, the cycling education and promotion programs are in the 2008 budget (actually, the first time in my memory that we didn’t have to remind council to put it in), albeit tucked away as part of the TDM department.

The Ottawa Cycling Plan, which has been in draft phase since 2003, might get passed this year, but even if it is, there is no funding at all to implement it. The budget has a $75,000 item below the cutoff line for educational programs, but development of the cycling network and infrastructure is still entirely unfunded.

Cycling infrastructure still gets built, but only if it can piggy-back onto larger road reconstruction projects. There are many “missing links” in the cycling network between these larger reconstructions that simply will not get fixed/built.

The proposed cycling funding in the city budget for this year is a welcome change, as is the extra staff to support Robin Bennett. It’ll be interesting to see what they do with the downtown: an obvious solution would be to convert the albert/slater bus lanes to cycling routes once the transit tunnel is completed, but that’s a long ways away and would be sure to cause a stink.

Even so, we need segregated lanes in Ottawa not for people like you and I who already feel relatively safe, but for the huge percentage of the population that doesn’t cycle, but could given the right conditions. Sense of safety (perceived or real) is consistently cited as the number one reason for choosing not to cycle.

On the funding front: the city has 16 million from the Feds for cycling infrastructure in 2010. The Ottawa Cyling Plan calls for 5 million of municipal revenue to be spent per year — admitedly, this has been on hold so far, but should begin very soon.

The question of feasibility is an interesting one. We often can’t simply add bike lanes downtown because, by and large, there is no space. This is why cycling infrastructure requires a change in thinking: city planners needs to start thinking about converting some infrastructure currently dedicated to cars, to cycling lanes. Ottawa’s cycling coordinator knows this, but I’m not sure he has much support on the issue. Fortunately, in every example I have heard of, this type of approach has reduced congestion, not created it.