One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Wait. A couple of them just went past. But there’s more appearing up ahead. Try that again:\u00c2\u00a0One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten! And that’s just the ones coming towards me. “What am I doing,” you ask? I’m counting cars. Actually, I’m just counting their headlights. I’m riding along Ontario St. at 29th Ave. in Vancouver at 5:30 on a rainy Tuesday night. And I’m counting the unbelievable number so SOV commuters I can see between here and 38th avenue where the road goes over a hill. Pretty severe for a side-street, you have to admit. But wait, it gets worse. This isn’t an ordinary sidestreet. This is a “Bikeway”. This is one of only about two dozen designated bike routes in Vancouver. What’s worse than that? Ontario is one of only a few that run right across the city and into downtown. Remember, we have well over 200 streets in Vancouver. So, when I have to navigate among dozens of cars on a bikeway each trip home from work, there’s something wrong with this.<\/p>\n
If I was a motorist\u00c2\u00a0 driving on Ontario bikeway, I could legally drive from King Edward Ave. (25th) to 41st Ave. and have the benefit of crossing lights to help me cross 33rd. In fact, if I didn’t care about the law, I could drive from 11th Ave. to 53rd Ave. with only having to drive around (not *over*) a flimsy right-turn-only curb at two points in the trip. And, believe me, motorists do this all the time. And I’ve never seen any of them stopped by the police and ticketed.<\/p>\n
This is the problem of good intentions that aren’t completely carried out. Bikeways in Vancouver usually consist of signs on poles, paint on the road, a few ineffective right-turn-only curbs for motorists, and roundabouts. Once in a while there are speed-bumps but those are usually associated with schools or parks and aren’t there for the sake of the bike riders. Essentially our bikeways are half-finished. Almost none of them are built to be actually bikes-and-not-cars roads. On very few of the routes that actually go through the city can a rider expect to ride without contending with cars on their roadway. And let’s face it, if there are cars on the road, I have to ride on high-alert and I can’t relax and enjoy the trip through my city’s neighbourhoods on the way to where-ever I’m going.<\/p>\n
This is the Lament for Ontario (bikeway, that is).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Wait. A couple of them just went past. But there’s more appearing up ahead. Try that again:\u00c2\u00a0One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten! And that’s just the ones coming towards me. “What am I doing,” you ask? I’m counting cars. Actually, I’m just counting their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bikes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.digitalcobbler.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.digitalcobbler.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.digitalcobbler.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.digitalcobbler.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.digitalcobbler.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.digitalcobbler.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53,"href":"http:\/\/www.digitalcobbler.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions\/53"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.digitalcobbler.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.digitalcobbler.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.digitalcobbler.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}