Don’t Give Up, Catherine.

The Montreal Gazette’s Squeaky Wheels section, a weekly Q&A dedicated to answering yokel questions about transportation in the city, featured an interesting question about a crosswalk in CDN/NDG.  A resident, Catherine Mann, wrote in to voice her frustration with motorists’ common disregard for the crosswalk. Both Catherine and the crosswalk are pictured on the left. (The problem is not, as you may guess from the picture, that she cannot see the crosswalk).

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.

Come on, NY.

On Tuesday, Mayor Bloomberg announced that NYC will be the next American city to tick bike-sharing off its list. ‘Bout time. Given the recent firestorm over bike-lanes, you have to wonder how the city will convince the masses that this overt display of social-/communism is worthwhile, but the Bloomberg administration seems serious and they hope to have 10,000 bikes up and running as early as 2012. I have just one bone to pick (for now). From the NYTimes:

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.

Carless with kids

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…

Retrofitting Suburbia

I’ve heard about Ellen Dunham-Jones and her scheme for a long time – stumbled across her TED talk today. Not directly bike related but I thought it was worth sharing. It’s pretty long but it gives an interesting look at how suburbs can be made more urban to address rising gas prices and pollution. You would think that this type of change would evoke opposition from suburban dwellers but recent polls and studies have shown that people are craving a more urban lifestyle coupled with suburban serenity. And why not? A library or a studio is much more appealing than an empty box store. The only problem I can see is that an old Provigo makes for a pretty ugly library. Oh well, I’ll live.  I could go on but I’ll let Ellen give you the deets:

BW Facelift

Check the new banner courtesy of a dear friend of the BW’s, Rebecca Chapman. Scope some more of her work at Buxxyland Art.

Biking used to be so much cooler

I want one

“Most artisans stop making bikes because they know the name means nothing without the experience that’s in their own hands.”

Not Giuseppe Marinoni. Even his game has changed a bit, but he’s still keeping it impressively real.

Everybody loves a Marinoni. I considered buying one that crossed my path a few weeks ago but wasn’t able to justify the expenditure in the end. Closing my eyes on my test ride and imagining my $600-poorer-self rolling smoothly through the foothills of the Alps was a true pleasure, though.

Before riding one, I couldn’t really appreciate the performance of these bikes, but I’ve always admired the elegance and attention to detail – I’m a sucker for pantographs (fleur-de-lis lugs? Yes Please). Even so, I had no idea of the true craft and work that goes into Marinonis until I stumbled across this article from the Gazette. Who knew that just a short car trip outside of Montreal, a 72-year-old Italian immigrant bikes 90km daily and manages to personally hand-paint each of his frames? For a little bike history and some interesting points ab0ut cycling, it’s definitely worth a read.

http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/yourbusiness/story.html?id=2253a1ff-a288-45bf-9ada-e3ef22e91d56