Midland has been experimenting with bike routes and bike lanes as of late. It seems to echo a move back in the mid-70s to get people biking more. Back then, they at least had small bike lanes marked out on a number of roads where bikes would (in theory) have the right of way.
Emphasis on in theory. One of the problems of having bicycles in well-traveled areas is that cars going 25-45 MPH are interacting with 10-15 MPH bikes; that brings out the highway factoid that differences in speed is more of a problem than speed itself. The 21st century version of it has actual whole lanes dedicated to bikes on the three-lane one-way streets (Ashman and Rodd) going in and out of downtown from the northeast; that should minimize problems to some extent, as is routing bike routes through residential areas.
However, putting a lot of bikes on main drags creates problems, especially when bikes act like they are not subject to traffic laws, running lights and not paying attention to traffic. I've yet to see a bike get pulled over for bad driving. Even when bikes are playing by the rules, cars can treat them as pedestrians or worse, so the problems can run both ways.
Strangely, a BBC piece on Toronto's bike wars pulled my chatty ring. The BBC might have wandered into a minor skirmish between abrasive conservative mayor Rob Ford (think Chris Christie with about a third the charm) and Toronto's left. Previous Toronto governments have been more bike-friendly, and Ford is moving to be a bit more safety friendly and car friendly, which begs for a culture clash.
Not all bike-riders are liberals, but the activists generally are. Thus, the bile that has been flowing between Ford and the Hogtown left gets tacked on to this issue.
If you can build a bike expressway, like Midland has tried on the south side of town, turning the median of M-20 going out of downtown into an urban bike trail, you can be traffic-friendly and bike-friendly at the same time. If you don't have the free space to do that with and have cars and bikes coexisting on the same pavement, problems tend to crop up unless you're in a low-density subdivision setting, where working around a bike isn't a major issue.
One downside of bikes and cold-weather settings like Midland and Toronto is that they're not all that useful for about half the year. From about Halloween to early April, the weather is a bit too chilly to bike comfortably as temperatures go down towards freezing and below in the morning and you create your own 15MPH wind-chill. Even so, it's not a bad thing to encourage biking, but not at the cost of tying up traffic.
"think Chris Christie with about a third the charm..."
You are being kind.:^)
Posted by: Bene D | May 05, 2012 at 01:56 AM