I’ve never understood the strong opposition that some people have to traffic calming. For some, I think they frantically view it as an infringement upon their rights as drivers, while for others I think it stems from confusing perceived safety with actual safety; some people are fools, and some people  mean well but are off the mark. Take my hometown neighborhood, for example, which a few years ago installed bump-outs and neckdowns. People still claim that they have made the street more dangerous, nearly always citing that “two cars can’t pass safely”. The very same people say that the side streets are dangerous because they’re too narrow for two cars to pass, as if that was the benchmark for a safe street. I have tried (in non-confrontational, pleasant terms) to persuade them that the very fact that they must slow down to pass each other makes the street safer, but to little avail.

Someone in my class the other day commented that North America isn’t ready for the woonerf (the Dutch extreme in traffic calming). Typical traffic calming and the woonerf aren’t exactly the same, but that attitude that traffic calming doesn’t belong is disturbingly common.  Drivers take their cues from their environment, and narrow streets simply don’t convey the idea that it’s OK to fly. North American drivers may not be ready to  embrace and to celebrate traffic calming, especially at first, but that does not mean it won’t work on them.

I always come across articles and say “oh I should post that on the BW”, and then I stop myself because I have nothing noteworthy to add… well, I have nothing noteworthy to add to this article about the soon-to-be-retired Montreal metro cars, but I came across one paragraph and realized I just had to share.

“See this?” asks Arseneault, brandishing a planed piece of wood about 40 cm long, four cm thick and as wide as a stick of Juicy Fruit. It smells like it just came out of a deep fryer—which it did. “They’re the brake pads. They’re made out of yellow birch, from Quebec. We douse them in boiling peanut oil and salt water so they don’t heat up.” Why wood? “Regular brake pads are rough on the wheels, and because the Métro is totally enclosed, carbon dust from regular brake pads would be a health concern. Plus, these are cheap. Ten dollars each. We had to fight like hell with the engineers from Bombardier to get them on the new cars.”

Who would have thought? Wooden brake pads on the metro! Damn that is awesome.

Also, while we’re at it, most of you probably haven’t seen the following video about the Metro’s new cars:

They’re coming over the next two years. Four words: Open.Concept.Fucking.Awesome.

As for the TVs in each car,I think we could do without it. They’re gonna show weather and hockey highlights and every jackass is gonna have their mouth open looking up at the screen.  oh wells. Still can’t wait to ride them.

The fact that we couldn’t fathom closing the bridge to cars to prevent accidents during or after a storm, while employing this same rhetoric to prevent cyclists from choosing their preferred mode of transport—“for ecological, economic and health reasons,” as Causabon has said—speaks to the paternalistic attitude often used to dismiss bikes as a viable means of getting around.

True that!

And in the same vein, I stole this from the Montreal City Weblog but the STM posted a bunch of pictures of cool STM-related things that happened in the month of January. Check it!

A reader forwarded this STM survey to me. I like the one with arrows. Can’t wait until they’re up and running!

Enough chat, let’s test this thing out. How do I get from my house to McGill University?

Good call, Google Maps. I never even thought to go up the biggest possible hill in Milton-Parc.

How about from my house to Jean-Talon Market? That should be pretty easy.

Google maps would rather I ride all the way up Saint-Laurent than take advantage of the wonderful bike path on Clark?

Hmm, OK Google, how should I get to Parc La Fontaine?

This one’s a toss-up. Up St Laurent to the bike path on Rachel seems like the obvious choice for a program that claims to give dependable bike directions, but I would probably take a similar route to GM’s.

Finally, how about my house to Atwater Market?GM sends me to the Lachine Canal bike path. OK, not bad. But why not go down Saint-Urbain, take a left on the Maisonneuve bike path and then a left down Peel? It’s much more direct, you stay on a bike path for longer, and it gets you to the same entrance of the Lachine Canal bike path. Peel’s a little busy, but it’s hardly a worse street to bike on than McGill st. down there.

Out of four tries, GM gave me directions that are on par with or worse than the directions that I was able to find by my own gumption or with the aid of a map, on my first try. Before anyone says it, yes, the directions are still in Beta. But that’s besides the real point. Even if Google Maps gave me perfect directions, I’d still hate it. I don’t want people to forget that when it comes to this, we are just as good as computers and as this shows, in many cases, we’re better. The more we get used to relying on computers to do things like this, the easier it will be for us to forget that we are perfectly capable (and in this case, more capable) of doing it ourselves.  And it’s not just a pride thing, as I pointed out in my NYC post, it’s a matter of preserving cognitive ability and mental health. I await the full version, we’ll see if I’m proven wrong.

PS Again, here is Bixi’s map of the bike paths. I think you can handle it.

Catherine’s main beef: cars often fly through the crosswalk above the designated speed of 50 kph.

The city’s answer: first, they moved the crosswalk 17m away from what they perceived to be the most dangerous crossing. Well you know what people do when they have to walk 20m out of their way to cross the street? They jay-walk, and that makes matters even worse.

Second, the city said they will be installing a sign to warn drivers of the upcoming crosswalk. That may have some effect; a glimpse of the androgynous black pedestrian in his yellow snowstorm may pluck the moral heartstrings of drivers, compelling them to slow down and let pedestrians cross, but when was the last time you saw a “slow children” sign and did anything but giggle, if you saw it at all?

The Real Solution. First of all, what business does an urban street have with a designated speed of 50kph? More importantly, what business does an urban street have with a design speed of over 50 kph? Because let’s be honest, drivers are going over 50kph because that’s what the infrastructure allows them to do; it is subconsciously telling them it’s OK to go 60 kph.  Moving crosswalks and putting up signs won’t sufficiently address the real issue: cars driving too fast. To get cars to slow down, the city must design the street to fit appropriately into its context. The picture below shows Decelles just above the Cote St. Cat crossing. That SUV has more space than it would on the highway. Here is a paper from the American Planning Association that  shows that narrower streets kill less people by forcing drivers to slow down. If they bumped out the curbs and narrowed the crossings, cars would not feel as comfortable flying down the hill, and they would slow down. We have to stop designing urban streets to rural and highway standards. Yes, it will take a little longer to get down Ave. Decelles, but what is the cost of speed and what are the benefits? Charles Marohn from StrongStreets posted this article, in which he calculated the extra time he would have to spend on a section of his commute if the speed limit was reduced from 40 mph to 25mph. The difference: 40 seconds. Calculate you own commute. How many minutes is the cost of a life?

And finally, Catherine’s closing statement was that “if the safety there cannot be improved, the borough should consider removing the crosswalk”. Are we so used to making concessions to automobiles that people like Catherine are willing to throw in the towel, that people think it is simply not possible to strike a compromise between vehicles and pedestrians? I hope not, and fortunately, the city said that removing the sidewalk altogether is not on the table. Baby steps.

Each bicycle must have a working bell, a “transparent, porous” basket, an onboard GPS unit, a three-speed gear system, and front and rear lights that switch on automatically whenever the bicycle is in motion.

Bells, basket, 3-speeds, front and rear lights – sounds a lot like Bixi, tried and true. But wait, GPS? Really?? GPS?? I know it’s New York and everything’s gotta be the best and brightest but come on, let’s chill our boners here. Bixi makes a wonderful map, which you can get for free (in paper, not just online), that shows the different types of bike paths all across the city. It costs a lot less, it won’t ever break, no one could possibly give a shit to steal it, and most importantly, it requires you to think for 1 minute before you set off on your merry way. The amount of information presented on a map subtly forces you into a much richer understanding of where you actually are and how you get from point A to point B. If you’re a tourist who has never been to NYC, I guarantee that you could bike around NYC for a whole weekend, looking at your 3”x3” screen showing 250 square meters, and then head back the next weekend without a clue of how to get from Central Park to Washington Square (hint: go straight) because you never saw the two together at the same time, you don’t actually have an understanding of where the two are in relation to each other. Besides that, by putting a GPS on each bike, NYC is depriving people of the fun they didn’t even know they could have!  There is something immensely satisfying about looking at two locations, thinking about how you want to get there, and BAM – it works! You arrive, all by your own gumption! Where is the fun in passively letting “tom tom” or whatever spit little arrows at you. Plus, how badly do we really want people biking around with their heads down, tapping on a little screen? OK fair, not as badly as we don’t need people riding bikes around trying to fold a map, but I’m assuming that most people would pause for a minute to read their map.

And in the bigger picture, weekend fun aside, GPS is making our spatial cognitive abilities more stupider. For my fellow McGillians, if any of you check the links in the “myNews’ section, you might have noticed this article about a recent study by McGill researchers.

But the researchers also found a greater volume of grey matter in the hippocampus of older adults who used spatial strategies. And these adults scored higher on a standardized cognition test used to help diagnose mild cognitive impairment, which is often a precursor to Alzheimer’s disease. These findings suggest that using spatial memory may increase the function of the hippocampus and increase our quality of life as we age, says Bohbot. More simply: it could be a case of use it or lose it (emphasis mine).

You see that? I will be expecting a written apology from anyone with whom I’ve ever had this argument. Man, vindication feels good. What that quote basically means that if we stop using our brains to get where we’re going  and we fully rely on GPS, we’re going to lose something important. It’s not even the Alzheimer’s that scares me as much as the loss of general day-to-day cognitive ability. I urge you to think about that next time you’re in NYC testing out their new public bikes; take a look at your map, keep your head up while your riding. That is, unless Mayor Bloomberg reads my post.

EDIT: If the GPS referred to in the NYT article is actually just a tracking system to monitor how they’re used and to prevent theft, I’ll eat some of my words. Everything I said about maps still stands.

I’ve had a couple conversations about staying carless as I get older that always lead to the question “what happens when you have kids?”. Here’s your answer. For the hippest and most conscientious of parents,  the cargo bike is the only way to go carless with kids. The video highlights Kelly Craig and her 4-child tricycle. The article goes on a little more. Kelly’s daughter explains why she likes the cargo bike: “I don’t usually get carsick, but sometimes I do and in here I never get carsick – because it’s a bike”. Seriously cute stuff.  Granted, once she turns 15 and needs a ride to the movie theater there’s no fucking chance she’s going to allow herself to be seen on the back of the trike, but another man, Peter Hoffman, claims to have successfully carried his kids to school for 12 years on a cargo bike. By that point, I’ll probably subscribe to Zipcar or CommunAuto for when a bike simply won’t do. It’s far cheaper in the long run. Think about it…