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A couple of months ago, groups of cyclists set out on commuting routes into downtown Ottawa, writing down the problems and joys they encountered. The result is the Ottawa Centre EcoDistrict’s “Cycle In Report,” which is quite good and useful.
Very often, problems with travel in the city get dealt with as a series of points — one intersection, one light, one crosswalk. Traffic’s jammed here, unsafe there. What can we do to improve conditions here at this spot? You see this kind of problem-solving on the agenda at city council’s transportation committee fairly regularly, as engineers and planners propose ways of making a particular pathway or intersection work better.
But that’s not how human beings experience the city. We travel on routes, involving multiple roads, maybe sidewalks and paths. It can work out that over time, careful attention to individual spots results in functional end-to-end routes, but not necessarily.
That’s why the Cycle In Report is handy. They gave small groups of cyclists starting points and City Hall as an ending point and told them to figure out how to get from one to the other. Experienced riders have their own wisdom — shortcuts, workarounds, little cheats — which they put to use in deciding how they were going to make their way. Then they pointed out the unpleasant and dangerous parts of each trip that remained after they’d done their best to avoid them, and the EcoDistrict people collated them into a list of the locations that came up again and again.
These “pinch points,” many of them bridges, are spots that are problematic on multiple routes, risky areas that get in the way of lots of trips and either enervate cyclists or convince potential cyclists not to try.
Top of the list, unsurprisingly, is Billings Bridge, the Bank Street crossing of the Rideau River. Which is particularly interesting given that that’s also the site of Ottawa’s best-known and probably most-complained-about ghost bike, the memorial to late cyclist Meg Dussault. It sits there as a reminder of how awful that bridge and its attendant intersection of Bank and Riverside Drive are.
The Bank Street bridge over the Rideau Canal and the Bank Street underpass of Highway 417 (another kind of bridge, practically speaking) also make the list. Bank Street in general is evidently not so great.
Remaking a bridge isn’t cheap, but the report also highlights some improvements that are. Better protecting painted bike lanes so people aren’t always parking in them. Being freer with signs to make sure that were there are designated bike routes, they’re apparent. This stuff isn’t hard or very expensive but it goes a long way.
The report’s open about the consequences of neglecting even the easy fixes. Not only will the city stand no chance of doubling the share of trips made by bike, which is its stated goal, but there’ll be a lot of confrontations between cyclists and drivers (often when cyclists do something legal but annoying, like taking up the middle of a lane when the edge is dangerous in ways a driver can’t appreciate) and cyclists and pedestrians (often when cyclists do something illegal, like riding on a sidewalk by a road where they don’t feel safe).
There’s a lot of work to do, and it’s useful to have some fairly rigorous work done to help set priorities.
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
Very often, problems with travel in the city get dealt with as a series of points — one intersection, one light, one crosswalk. Traffic’s jammed here, unsafe there. What can we do to improve conditions here at this spot? You see this kind of problem-solving on the agenda at city council’s transportation committee fairly regularly, as engineers and planners propose ways of making a particular pathway or intersection work better.
But that’s not how human beings experience the city. We travel on routes, involving multiple roads, maybe sidewalks and paths. It can work out that over time, careful attention to individual spots results in functional end-to-end routes, but not necessarily.
That’s why the Cycle In Report is handy. They gave small groups of cyclists starting points and City Hall as an ending point and told them to figure out how to get from one to the other. Experienced riders have their own wisdom — shortcuts, workarounds, little cheats — which they put to use in deciding how they were going to make their way. Then they pointed out the unpleasant and dangerous parts of each trip that remained after they’d done their best to avoid them, and the EcoDistrict people collated them into a list of the locations that came up again and again.
These “pinch points,” many of them bridges, are spots that are problematic on multiple routes, risky areas that get in the way of lots of trips and either enervate cyclists or convince potential cyclists not to try.
Top of the list, unsurprisingly, is Billings Bridge, the Bank Street crossing of the Rideau River. Which is particularly interesting given that that’s also the site of Ottawa’s best-known and probably most-complained-about ghost bike, the memorial to late cyclist Meg Dussault. It sits there as a reminder of how awful that bridge and its attendant intersection of Bank and Riverside Drive are.
The Bank Street bridge over the Rideau Canal and the Bank Street underpass of Highway 417 (another kind of bridge, practically speaking) also make the list. Bank Street in general is evidently not so great.
Remaking a bridge isn’t cheap, but the report also highlights some improvements that are. Better protecting painted bike lanes so people aren’t always parking in them. Being freer with signs to make sure that were there are designated bike routes, they’re apparent. This stuff isn’t hard or very expensive but it goes a long way.
The report’s open about the consequences of neglecting even the easy fixes. Not only will the city stand no chance of doubling the share of trips made by bike, which is its stated goal, but there’ll be a lot of confrontations between cyclists and drivers (often when cyclists do something legal but annoying, like taking up the middle of a lane when the edge is dangerous in ways a driver can’t appreciate) and cyclists and pedestrians (often when cyclists do something illegal, like riding on a sidewalk by a road where they don’t feel safe).
There’s a lot of work to do, and it’s useful to have some fairly rigorous work done to help set priorities.
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
