With an eye toward helping people feel safef while cycling, city officials are directing cyclists off major roads onto “quiet residential streets” with signed and suggested routes.
“We recognize not everyone is comfortable riding in painted bike lanes,” said Benita van Miltenburg, the city’s project manager of sustainable transportation, of what inspired the initiative. “Some (cyclists) don’t feel safe in mixed traffic.
“Everyone’s comfort level and confidence level is different.”
In many cases, van Miltenburg explained, the signed and suggested routes take cyclists through residential areas, along streets that run parallel to major roads.
Suggested routes, she noted, simply have not yet been signed.
While signed cycling routes are nothing new to the city – some have been around for years – an additional 10-kilometres of route signage has gone up in the past two weeks (now 37 kilometres in all), along with the release of a map illustrating those routes and others.
In addition to a downloadable PDF version of the map, it’s available through the Avenza Maps app which allows people to pinpoint their current location on the map so they can find their way to the nearest signed or suggested route.
The concept has the backing of Guelph Coalition for Active Transportation (GCAT).
“It’s a great tool to help cyclists,” he said of the city’s map and route signs, suggesting they will help convince more people to get out of their motor vehicles and use active transportation," said GCAT president Mike Darmon.
While supportive of the step, Darmon would like to see the city go a few steps further by installing way-finding signage to let people know what destinations they can reach using those promoted routes and/or trails. He’d also like to see connections throughout the city improved, pointing to two examples along the same stretch of Eramosa Road.
In both cases – the new city-planned cycling route and the Trans Canada Trail – users need to leave the path and make their way to the nearest signalled intersection, cross four lanes of roadway, then make their way back in order to complete their trek.
“This is actually discouraging active transportation,” Darmon said. “What (users) really want is safer infrastructure.”
Some of that infrastructure is in the works, van Miltenburg noted.
In January, city council approved a new transportation master plan that seeks to improve connectivity between the various modes of transportation, reduce vehicular greenhouse gas emissions by getting people out of personal vehicles and improve safety for people of all abilities.
In order to achieve those goals, the plan calls for 13 kilometres of protected bike lanes to be installed along some sections of road, with potential road widenings to accommodate those bike lanes as well as possible transit-only lanes, increased winter maintenance of trails and more.
That plan, like the new map and directional signs, has the support of GCAT. Other transportation groups also stepped forward in support of the transportation master plan.