GuelphToday received the following letter about bike lanes and multi-use paths.
Nobody likes bike lanes.
Don’t get me wrong. I and my family get around Guelph mostly by bike.
But I don’t like bike lanes. No cyclist I know likes them, and I’ll prove it to you.
People who cycle have a term of endearment we reserve for them: “bike gutters.”
Sure, we’d rather a painted line and some elbow room - maybe even a bollard or two? - over having to compete with the Rams and F-150s of the world. But they’re mostly a collection area for street debris and delivery vehicles; a lame attempt to save face after something called over-engineering.
If you’ve ever been driving down a nice open road only to look down and realize you’re going 20 km/hr over the posted speed limit, you’ve been a victim of over-engineering (shout out to Strong Towns). For some bizarre reason, our traffic engineers built many of our roads, not for the speed that’s safe to drive, but for the sprawling space that was available.
So to cover up the gross misuse of resources, once city planners realize they over-engineered, they cut four lanes down to two and paint in a centre turn and two bike lanes (gutters). And voila! Traffic calming and active transportation for the price of one!
But if you read between the lines, city planners are, more or less intentionally, using bikes to slow cars down. No wonder drivers and cyclists hate each other.
Be that as it may, I’m a firm believer that a lot of hate is driven by misunderstanding. Allow me to illustrate.
A couple months back I was perusing the Caught in Guelph Facebook group as the complaints were coming in about the new “protected” bike lanes on Scottsdale and Silvercreek. I’d been alerted by some biking buddies about the raging anti-bike sentiment that was fomenting there.
‘Cyclists shouldn’t be on the road!’
Hey now!
‘Cars and bicycles shouldn’t mix!’
Wait, we can make this work!
‘Bicycles should be allowed on the sidewalk!’
My confirmation bias had nearly gotten the better of me until one fateful swipe brought me to a user who graciously attached a photo of the type of “sidewalk” they envisioned being suitable for bikes.
It was a “multi-use path” - MUP, for short.
And that’s when it clicked for me: Nobody likes bike lanes.
But everybody likes a MUP!
Guelph even sports a few nice ones in my neck of the woods: Woodlawn Road (west of Nicklin), and Silvercreek (north of Speedvale and the new “protected” bike lanes that have caused such a stink).
The hopeless romantic in me dreams of a day when drivers and cyclists might link arms and march in solidarity for more MUPs. Scottsdale and Silvercreek are great contenders with the wide, grassy boulevard – just saying. If you want to pinch pennies, you can even pave a shoulder next to the sidewalk like they do in Burlington.
But I get it, MUPs are more expensive than a gutter. And Guelph’s got Mayor Guthrie, flexing his strong powers in the name of “affordability”, keeping these infrastructure investments off the books for who knows how long.
Ironically, Mayor Guthrie took an all-expense paid trip to the pedal-powered promise land of Copenhagen to learn, along with other city officials, how to build cities for bicycles like the great Danes. I know this because I got to hear his highlight reel on a serendipitous shuttle ride back to Guelph from Pearson as he returned from Denmark and I from…Idaho, sigh.
Fact is: some people go for pilgrimage; others for pleasure. Which it was for Cam, I can’t judge. But as of late, it appears that any motion to make meaningful investments in cycling infrastructure that works for everyone is capped along with our city budgets. Vision 100, anyone?
Nobody likes the bike lanes. But without many MUPs in sight, I’d like to at least keep the gutters, thank you very much.
Cameron Mark Ogilvie
Guelph
