Bikeways or greenways (sometimes they have other names) are routes identified on roads that are designed as safe places for cycling. But as this video shows, they can really vary. What are they like in your city?
I’m a Calgarian living on Vancouver Island for a bit… The area I’m in has NOTHING. Want groceries? Gotta cycle on the side of Trans Canada Highway. Or you could take a “safer” route that takes at least double the time… 😂
I live in Phoenix. The multi-use paths along canals, the Salt River, and on green belts are great. Most are very wide and have underpasses, overpasses, or traffic lights at major stroad crossings. The bike lanes on stroads are frightening to me, though. I don't feel safe in a narrow lane with only a stripe of paint protecting me from giant trucks and SUVs going 40-50 mph. There are also several busy streets with designated bike sharrows where bikes are supposed to share the lane with cars, and those are pointless too, especially Central Avenue. However we have many residential and side streets that go through which are not marked as bikeways that are excellent to bike on because they're wide and have minimal car traffic on them. Some of the streets you were riding on seemed similar, and I was disappointed you graded them negatively.
When you revisit Vancouver I hope you check out the Central Valley greenway it’s a long bike path that follows the rail line it stretches from Vancouver all the way to new Westminster with practically no hills the entire way! (Which Vancouver is full of!) there are a few short shared sections but a lot of it is a bike/pedestrian walkway it’s a beautiful ride.
Hey Tom, James from Brisbane Australia here. How far did you ride on these routes? How did you pick the destination? I'd like to look at a comparison ride in my city which is good in some areas, but also has a lot of the "bikeways" that are not "bikeways" and NIMBY opposition to connections
@@Jande29793 Yeah, I was thinking something similar. 10ish km ride from, say, Bracken Ridge to Chermside, via Cabbage Tree Crk and Aspley. Some fairly nice sections strung together by some sketchy gaps.
I'm not even joking, i read a report today about making a street safer for cyclists and the recommendation was to "add paint markings to warn of possible line of sight issues". That was it.
@@alpd7638 I mean, be fair, what would you have them do? _Something?_ You should just be grateful they dedicated an entire report to belittling your place in society because you choose not to encase yourself in two tons of steel and glass every time you leave the house.
@@alpd7638 That is unfortunately the logic of many city planners and councils when adding bike "infrastructure". None of them have ridden a bike to get anywhere in their lives.
You didn’t highlight the Vancouver speed bump was actually a pedestrian crossing. That should be another +1. Instead of pedestrians climbing down onto the street to cross, cars must climb UP into the pedestrian area to cross. IE it’s clearly meant to be for pedestrians
I like the sentiment though. Normal speedbumps are really bad for cyclists. If you see ways around them, they get used quiet heavily. I would like to see cutouts on normal speedbumps
@@fluuufffffy1514 Replacing the ultrafashionable civic negligence with civic ethics, would help the pedestrians consistently suffering from terror on the sidewalks and crossing streets............... Downtowns are where "Velocitized" drivers terrorize every form of street folk and are unaware of their hallucinations, Cupcake............ Cyclists are unaware of this form of cycling terror. Cause underage drinking demands street cred. This buggers up their ethics and destroys their conscience. Cuz criminals destabilze your country and then streal your bikes!
"Actually, it was really hard to find a connected bikeway that would actually take you somewhere" Sounds like 95% of towns and cities in North America.
My college town actually has the multi-use path go near the suburban mall, a gym, some apts, and a few strip malls. I can't actually tell if that was designed on purpose though.
When I moved to my current small city the only bike path was very disconnected. It started and stopped at random places. Recently the city has started adding bicycle infrastructure. I can now use a combination of a sharrow, multiuse path, and painted bike lane with a bit of residential street to get from my house to my parents' house. The multiuse path is the best improvement of the three bike paths.
As an avid cyclist and motorist, I disagree. This is not a cars vs bike issue. It’s literally an infrastructure issue. There’s a time for cars, and a time for bikes, and the infrastructure should reflect that, just like when a new bridge or on-ramp is required for road access for cars, and entire pieces of land can literally be excavated, moved, and manipulated, the same should be done with cycling infrastructure. The issue is, not enough people care to do anything about it, and there’s little monetary incentive to probed said infrastructure.
@@RohitSharma-yr7li Saying that there is a time for cars and a time for bikes is kind of meaningless. No fair minded person would say that cars or bikes don't have their place. The point is about the amount of space cars take up, which I would argue is way too much. So, yes, it is an infrastructure issue in that the overwhelming amount of money spent on infrastructure in paces like the US, Canada, Australia, is on cars. Cyclists get a miniscule amount of that. Also, when you says 'cycling' do you mean for sport or commuting? I do both, but this isn't about sport.
I get the frustration felt by a car stuck behind a cyclist moving at half or less of the speed limit...but you'd think this would get commuters to push for *more* bike infrastructure! Just to get us out of their way! Course it also makes us safer but that doesn't seem to be a factor for many people, so might as well focus on what they DO care about. That said, I tend to stick to the road anyway, because I like to push hard and go fast which isn't always safe in bike lanes.
The greenways in Vancouver generally: are posted at 30 km/h, have regular speed humps, and allow only one lane for car travel (with parked cars on each side). So one can’t easily drive a car faster than a bike on one, which eliminates this sort of conflict.
@@Shifter_Cycling I've taken to using that reasoning on anti-bike infrastructure people. I also remind them that every bike is a car not clogging up their street.
I took my roadbike out today. There was a cycle lane on the other side of the road, where families and elderlies were using + it was up and down the curbs, which aren‘t fun on super skinny tires. The bikelane is optional (there are enforced ones in germany too) and while there was no traffic and I was easy to overtake, I heard the horn from some SUV drivers
@@Shifter_Cycling In my experience, it is because the motorists who really don't like cyclists, *really* don't like cyclists, cycling or anything on two wheels. It's basically being spiteful.
i moved to vancouver last year from a small strode town in the usa. have to say i havent even gone back to visit my parents yet. love the bike support here. not quite amsterdam, but probably one of the best cities to bike anywhere ive seen on north america
I actually have a small disagreement to make with what Tom said about how things like the concrete islands makes things less comfortable for cars. I'm a car driver and frankly I barely even notice them. They slow me down, but I don't feel like they are "inconveniencing me" or really impacting my journey at all. Which is great because it makes roads safer to ride on as a cyclist, without really affecting the driving experience. Bravo to this sort of thing!
Those island are described as "traffic calming" and if they don't bother you, like they don't bother me, then it is probably because you aren't an aggressive or impatient driver. People I know who hate them are also the kind of people who drive over the speed limit, take unnecessary risks, etc.
@@Korina42 the problem with thinking your “calming” traffic is people have places to go, ie people going to the doctors leave their travel time plus a little extra for traffic. If they are suddenly cut to half the speed limit for a bit of their journey they have to make up time somewhere else and where do you think they are going to make up time? That’s right, the quiet street where 10 to 20 over the speed limit “won’t be noticed” (unless someone gets hurt), another example, a delivery driver has (say) a half hour slot to deliver groceries and suddenly has part of their journey at half speed, if the delivery doesn’t get made on time, who gets yelled at for missing a time slot by the customer and possibly fired? Or do you plan every journey at 10mph and arrive everywhere very early when your not held up? Would you be happy if you book a taxi that suddenly travels to your destination at 10mph while your watching the meter go up? People have places to go and for a driving test here you have to demonstrate you are comfortable getting to within 10% of the speed limit. Would you like to be told you have failed because you drove perfectly but weren’t able to demonstrate that you are confident travelling close to the speed limit
@@1988dgs but traffic calming and reduced speed limits don't happen suddenly. They exist before you begin the journey, and thus you can plan around them.
@@randomdogdog they use the arguments here that coming across a bike on your journey will “calm” the traffic. They are trying to put travel back to the late 1800’s without coming straight out and saying it, putting all the onus on the traveller to still hit 21st century deadlines with 19th century means and pace of life
What makes a lot of the Vancouver routes safer is that they are used, thousands of city tax payers who choose bicycles use the route, so city tax payers who choose cars will generally avoid the route and choose a main arterial. Let me know if you want footage of Ontario street, water to water.
Thank You. A residential road labeled as a bike way or bike route only works if cyclists use it. This trains drivers to avoid it, and those who must use it to watch for bikes. Also, it should be getting signage or roundabouts that reduce braking. Stop whining! I know you are about to gripe. Don’t. DO THE MATH! That ONE spit on the windshield, cars don’t own the road SOB that ignores the bike route and blocks a 45 mph lane on a major thoroughfare instead, you know - that guy, aggravates hundreds of drivers (or thousands). The three or four bad drivers on the bike lane aggravate less than a dozen cyclists. We live in a Democracy people. DO THE MATH. We gotta be MUCH better behaved to win. And patient, too.
The single file sign on the share all most drivers assume it is referring to cyclist. They need to either be more specific or don't bother with the signs. Commuting by bicycle in Calgary you have 2 choices, either you have your experience trying to find your way and even if you do the routes take km's out of your way or you brave the roads, cut the km's down considerably and get to where you are going in decent time. If you don't get hit
They can't very well just come out and say "drivers, do not overtake cyclists!" because that would be singling every single driver out personally and communism.
The UK has a sign which is very clear. "Narrow Lanes. Do not overtake cyclists" makes it very clear to everyone that there's not enough space to legally and safely overtake a slower road user.
Having cycled around 40km today in the area around Rotterdam in the Netherlands, roughly 75% of the route not even seeing cars, but cyclists all over, storks sitting by the road, birds all over, even seeing a few deer.... this video is just saddening. These cities feel so lifeless, barren. As if you set foot into some weird post apocalyptic world with the only moving things left are ugly metallic objects. Vancouver had some better infrastructure, but still it just felt so desolate. Where are all the people?
I'm sick and tired of people comparing the Netherlands to ANYWHERE else when it comes to biking. You live in one of the most established river deltas in the world.
This video hit close to home, literally you rode right past my building in Chinatown. Vancouver is getting so much better lately and I think the lesson is how little they had to do to fix the conflict zones on these routes that were formerly just green lines highlighted on a map. A couple of traffic blockers with some jersey barriers and it's actually really nice now. That one quick left right where the ping pong table is used to be a pretty scary blind left turn into a through street in either direction. Didn't take much but it did take someone to actually see the route in person, highlight the problem areas and fix them.
This is what I keep telling people. I'm new here and I'd love to ride my bike to class and wherever I want to go but I hate riding on the road and multi use pathways appear and disappear so I'm forced to go to the sidewalk and piss off the pedestrians. Plus there are barely any direct routes
I "love" narrow, highly curved roads in hilly areas that have signs that say "share the road" along with a picture of a bike. If you ever want your family to be able to collect on your life insurance policy, biking one of those is the way to do it.
The Calgary Route literally feels like the Canadian version of Cheyenne, Wyoming, USA based on your footage. In our case in Cheyenne, the "bike routes" are green Bike Route signs, but they usually do the same thing; they refer to residential streets with no bike infrastructure primarily with the occasional separated bike path or mixed use pathway.
These are all over the united states. There's a local greenway near me that dumps cyclists on a 40mph road with no shoulder / bike lane and a "Share the Road!" sign and painted arrows
This reminds me of Portland Oregon. Lots of neighborhood Greenways, and difficult to interpret signage. It is still nice to be on low car volume streets, though.
The Union-Adanac route is part of my commute to the office (it’s an all-greenway commute, because they interconnect and I live on a greenway street). Regarding those crossings of busy arterials, superblocks and multilane arterials are Vancouver’s dirty little secret, and part of the reason why Vancouver has been able to get away with keeping freeways out of its urban core. (Vancouver has significantly more multilane arterial surface streets than either Seattle or Portland, the other cities I have cycled in extensively).
How would you compare these three cities as a commuting cyclist? I've ridden *some* in Seattle and Portland. Felt like Portland does a nice job with bridge crossings over the river, as well as neighborhood greenways. Meanwhile, Seattle feels like it has a lot of protected infrastructure, and also really good traffic-calmed neighborhood greenways up around Ballard/Greenwood/Phinney Ridge. Haven't visited Vancouver yet. But we are thinking about all three of these cities as potential next homes.
It's probably a bad sign that, on the "better" version there was still only one other bicycle parked at your destination. It could be an issue with the destination itself and its huge parking lot, signaling it's a place hostile to non-drivers. However, it could be all those stroad intersections on the greenway keeping people from using it despite all the actual amenities.
I bike this route sometimes and it's definitely very busy, but the Lowe's is like 45 minutes plus by bike from his starting point, it's like one block away from the municipal boundary into the suburb, so I'm not surprised that all the cyclists already turned off by that point to other destinations. There's also a big hill up Adanac that makes me really consider whether I want to travel east past Commercial Drive by bike, but that doesn't stop me from using the bikeway all the way up to that point and enjoying it.
Actually I can't recall any other cyclists at all. In either city. Reading your comment made me think of it but I'm not sure without rewatching the video again. But certainly even outside of peak commuting times a long way to go to get numbers up. Although motorised traffic was pretty light too to be fair.
Just to speculate, but the lack to other bicycles in the parking area may also be due to the nature of the destination itself. Lowes is a hardware and building supply store (ooops, sorry, "Home Improvement"), so much of what may be needed from that store would tend to be large, bulky, and/or exceptionally heavy. Apparently this location is some distance from where the population is concentrated (I have zero clue about the geography of the area), so if you put all of that together, there may be a quite a disincentive to ride regardless of the infrastructure. The only ones who might be inclined to ride under such circumstances may be mostly the employees, and I sincerely hope that any employees who do ride have a much better place to park their bikes than in a rack out in front of the store.
@@johnhodge5871 All of my own trips to Lowe's have been for a handful of things I could definitely carry out in a bike-style storage (basket, etc.) The last trip I made, I got one wrench IIRC. I recently moved out of an apartment, and I just wanted some packing tape, but my car was already hitched up to a trailer. If only I could have just walked or biked to a hardware store ... The small town I grew up in had an old-school small hardware store (about the size of a Dollar General if you're familiar with those) that people definitely could have walked to. It opened directly onto the street! I bet people went there all the time, just for a light bulb or something.
Need to add another +1 for Vancouver for having bike racks at the shop at the finish, something still rare in Australia or if they have one it fits 2 or 3 bikes max ...
"Which route would you bike on?" The road any time. The road is much more predictable. Maps show where it goes while bikeways can go anywhere or just end for no reason. Also roads need to be safe for cars, bikeways dont. So bikeways can have very large holes and cracks all over the place. Bikeways also have unpredictable pedestrians, children and dogs.
I don't know if you (can) do something like that, but it would be interesting if you'd interview the people who are in charge of planning these routes and get their thought process. Greetings, big fan from Germany.
I just read through Calgary’s Greater Downtown Plan (or whatever it was called). They have a lot of plans to make improvements, but it’s slow moving and doesn’t expand beyond the downtown area. (Based on other reports) They’re also aware that Macleod seriously needs a cycle track and sidewalk improvements. But they were sure to say “No funding is currently available”. 😭
I recently discovered Shifter as a source about urban biking. I live in Sacramento, CA, next to a 32-mile long paved bike trail along the American River Parkway. I have a drop bar road bike, but I have moved off of riding it lately (I'm 65 yo) in favor of a '68 Schwinn Racer, an upright riding experience with swept-back handlebars and a three-speed Sturmey-Archer hub. With a little bit of work, which I did myself, this bike is amazingly smooth and solid and easy to ride. I ride it almost 20 miles daily on the bike trail. I also ride it to buy groceries, go to restaurants or to occasionally to go clubbing in East Sacramento and Midtown Sacramento. I can use the bike trail for part of the distance on the sojourns, and mostly quiet neighborhood streets for the remainder of the trip(s). I want to plug these old vintage Schwinn three-speeds - built practically by hand in Schwinn's legendary factory in Chicago - as great urban bikes. They were so well-made that there are still a lot of them around, and they can be bought for cheap (in the U.S. anyway) from Craigslist. They are very heavy and as such may not be for everyone, but I've found my Racer to also be a great fitness bike. It takes a lot more endurance to peddle this bike 20 miles, compared to my road bike. I go slower - but not that much slower - and at my age the ride is more enjoyable than on my road bike.
A nice comparison, Shifter, thank you. In my city, in the States, all we have are small signs beside the street that tell you this is a "Bike route"; there is no infrastructure at all, not even sharrows. Trafic-light intersections have beg buttons for pedestrians, if I want to use them I either have to ride on the sidewalk or walk my bike over. Even Calgary looked great to me. We at least have a couple of rails-to-trails routes that pass through the city. Thanks for another great video.
I do love how in Vancouver street signs for roads with bike lanes have a little bike icon on them! super helpful when navigating around and seeing which streets are safe to bike on
Riding a bicycle in Central Florida is either very scary to super safe and beautiful. I read that one trail I used to sort of like was made complete. I tried it out a few days ago and they did a wonderful job connecting the two trails into one. I have always felt safe on the many bikes trails I have been on, but off the trails can be dangerous or risky at best. A lot of drivers think that green means go no mater where they are and that painted area across roads isn't a crosswalk, it's a finish line where you must be first to cross at a red light. Secure parking sure would be a plus. Thanks for another informative video.
Like in Orlando? I'm from Kissimmee and have seen them making improvements over the last decade with building segregated bike trails. I just avoid all on-street bike lanes on the insanely fast stroads and even arterial roads with 30 mph limit and use the plentiful sidewalks.
Where I live (the other Vancouver), bike routes are often through streets with sharrows. I often prefer parallel residential streets a few blocks away from them, because there are fewer cars (more frequent stop signs, but my state allows Idaho stops).
It starts with one street, then a broken route, adapted into a real route then an alternative route appears, and by then all streets are bike-friendly. Even here (NL) we have stretches that need better bike infra, as long as things are moving the right way it's something. As bike person I can imagine the frustration about the speed of changes, so let's be the dreamers ;-)
Thanks for your videos Tom! Living in Burnaby now and moving to Calgary in June/July. I kind of like sharrows in Vancouver because, there are so many of them on a bike friendly street and in my mind, at least, they serve as a good reminder for car drivers that this is a city bike route and the cyclists did a right thing by choosing this route as opposed to choosing a stroad or just a busy street.
In my city here in Germany there has been a push to make more space for bicycles and it's been going solid so far, although some people are pushing against it because this is Germany and we're strangely enamoured with cars. A bridge here that just got finished now has way more space for cycling and while it's the "painted gutter" approach, it feels great to be given this much space on a rather significant bridge that connects my part of the city with another. Bike routes aren't always perfectly clear though - we do have signage with kilometres but it can be weirdly uncommon, you can bike south and only see a few signs that show you where to go, especially if you don't cycle along major arterial roads (which I don't) and I often find myself cycling by using my general sense of direction and knowledge of the area and the other issue is that cycling space feels very "tacked on", i.e. sometimes you have to cycle on the road, sometimes it's the painted bicycle gutter other, sometimes it's a path (that can be split from the regular sidewalk just barely so get ready to use that bell) and sometimes it's a pedestrian sidewalk that allows for bicycle use (which is probably my least favourite, especially if the sidewalk is super narrow). On another positive note, false parking is being taken increasingly seriously (again, to the chagrin of some including members of a major political party) and it seems to reduce cars parking on the sidewalk, but we're still not quite there yet. All that said, that bridge at around 4 minutes is something *I* would give a -100 to because it would trigger my acrophobia real bad. ;)
Come down to Lethbridge! We have a great “bike boulevard” on 7th Ave South. Features Roundabouts, Barricades, bike-sensitive traffic lights, and connects downtown, the coulee bike paths, and a popular park! Plus, we just go a bike/scooter sharing app!
Oof that Calgary route wasnt even proper cycling infrastructure. Scary. Vancouver was... barest minimum. Clearly I've been spoiled by seeing all the amazing infrastructure in the Netherlands...
He actually skipped past a few of the limited permeability features - there's one at nearly every arterial and some in between, so cars are really discouraged from sticking around. There are some wide sections and there should be more protected intersections, but I think this one is pretty good, and the biker numbers do mostly reflect that.
A couple features on the Adanac greenway are actually pretty recent , that first speed bump by Benny market was just put in , so was the (shortcut) at 10:59
Great video as allways! Keep it up. Here in Brazil my city is filled with those fake bikeways, an absolute shame to know that this is a constant around the world :(
If I wanted to ride my bike from from the Vermeer Centrum in Delft to the Mauritshuis in Den Haag, it is a lovely ride with pleasant scenery and protected bike lanes. For comparison, it is the same distance from my home in Hollywood (CA, USA) over to the Neon Museum in Glendale (the next city to the east). There is not one bike lane. It's all on roads, with cars. And I must say, the Neon Museum does not quite compare to the Vermeer Centrum or The Mauritshuis lol. I so envy the Dutch!
So many great eateries, breweries, coffee shops, parks etc. along Union-Adanac bike corridor! Beers and tacos at Woodland Park and Pasteis de Nata with espresso at Union Market. Episode idea - Businesses that prosper along bike routes.
I live on the Union-Adanac bikeway near Nanaimo Street. It was one of the major selling points when I looked at the house, and I use it nearly daily to access downtown, and it links to lots of other routes including Lakewood, Pandora, Central Valley, and 10th Ave. And easy access to the seawall at False Creek!
As a Dutch person I'm actually fairly impressed by Vancouver. They seem to really make an effort. It would be nice to know how long both Calgary and Vancouver have been working on improving their bicycle infrastructure.
Vancouver is definitely a few years ahead of Calgary, but I think the real difference is that Vancouver has been making incremental progress every year, whereas Calgary had a big push about five years ago and has since stalled.
I left Calgary last Fall, but I still enjoyed the tour -- especially when it ended in my (former) neighborhood. I used to visit the Westbrook Mall several times per week.
Ahh yes I remember that Rona! they used to give out free popcorn in there the staff there was friendly too, Lowe’s is the complete opposite , the staff will just pretend you aren’t even there.
In Vancouver there are lots of bike ways/routes on side streets. The cool thing is there are controlled lights at every point these cycle way/routes cross major roads and many of the routes have traffic control methods built in. You past the Union Market, you needed to stop there, it is a must do, and sit with the locals and celebs (like yourself) and have a cappuccino and a Croissant and a chat +10. Some of the cycling infrastructure across the lower mainland can be a bit nightmarish at times but some of it is surprisingly good. Where I live (Salmon Arm) we have designated bike routes but some carry a lot of traffic but they have just put in a separate paved bike/pedestrian route on the west side of the city but that is the only one except for a highway underpass (bike and pedestrians) on the west side of the city. I don't mind Toronto too much just because they have the water front trails and couple of other car free routes that I have ridden there. I found that crossing through the core wasn't too bad but I got the feeling that some of the drivers would love to kill me. Montreal is pretty good and friendly the last time I was there, though I didn't do much cycling there except to mostly pass through. Easily getting through a city is a big thing. You gave some rave reviews of cycling in Victoria. I do like their commuter architecture for cycling. I cannot say I like Calgary as it struck me it as built for cars, not cycles or people though I do like Kensington. Edmonton doesn't fair much better but I took a long way around to avoid it nearly in its entirety (via St Albert.and #15). Saskatoon sucks but I found some pretty views in the city. Winnipeg scares me but I have been there quite a few times so I was able to navigate through its centre. They have a few cycle routes but they don't seem to go anywhere. I found very little cycling infrastructure in the Maritimes except PEI but it was easy to navigate avoiding busy roads.
This is a great idea. We often focus on main streets as areas to implement cycling infra but often I wonder if we should be focusing more on routes like this as a priority. We can achieve so much more with so much less. Of course, it needs to be a real effort, like you showed here. I have been thinking about doing a video of the great work with Shaw St. in Toronto but I wasn't sure what format. The Plus 1 Minus 2 might be a good way to do that.
Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota might have some of the best bicycle infrastructure in North America. The city parks are interconnected -- part of the original park design, with bike trails running through them. The "Midtown Greenway" in Minneapolis is a converted railroad right of way that was grade-separated in the 1920s, with short ramps to the streets at periodic intervals. It is very popular.
Without some centralized planning, bike routes (here I include, bikeways, trails, bike lanes) bike infrastructure become a token to the bike community. Sharrows are just confusing to all vehicles. We need to mobilize the community to speak up and demand safe interconnected infrastructure.
Routes in Norway have cherry red signs with name of the route, but the routes sometimes go on neighbourhood streets too, but those have 30km/h speed limit and are quite save as long as no crazy race track style driving driver comes along. it happen once a taxi almost wiped me off the road. Only happen once.
Coming from a community with NO bike infrastructure, both of these routes are an improvement! We can legally ride on sidewalks in Michigan though (pedestrians have right of way), so there's that one advantage. It's almost enough to forgive 20 businesses sharing one rusty bike rack at the far end of a complex. Thank you for the video!
I used to ride the Adanac bike boulevard every day back in the mid-90s from North Burnaby to Downtown. This bikeway is what got me into urban cycling. It was the first bikeway in Vancouver, and at the time there still wasn't any bike infrastructure downtown so your trip from the VAG would have been absolutely harrowing. It's great seeing all of the improvements that have been added in the last 25+ years, and I think a big part of the difference between this route and Calgary is that Vancouver has been creating bicycle infrastructure for a lot longer.
The bike rack at Lowe’s was worth 5 points alone … I never see that at big box stores in America. Here, we have “bike lanes” which are portions of road shoulder that randomly appear and disappear for no apparent reason.
I don't know if you mentioned it in the video, but most of the Vancouver route was noticeably narrower. That made it feel safer immediately, since if slows down cars and forces them to be more careful when passing. Furthermore, there just weren't as many cars because of all the porous intersections on the route, looked like pretty much only local residential traffic. The beg buttons weren't ideal, but it still much better than just a stop sign and "figure it out cyclists". My city also has some bike routes and some "bike routes".
Hey, getting a lapel mic would increase the audio quality of this video and decrease wind/car noise. Sometimes I watch these video's as "podcasts" and I assume others do too. Otherwise great video!
Where I live, there are also a lot of bike routs that go on and off in terms of being useful. Here though it is legal to bike on the sidewalk. Also watching this led me to look at a map and discover a multi use path I didn't know about
I would love those bike buttons on lights. I have to send one of my kids to push the pedestrian cross button then hop back on the bike when there aren’t cars to trigger the sensors. Those longer speed bumps are amazing. There’s one road that has them where I live. It feels so much safer biking because drivers aren’t going 10 to 20 over the speed limit.
Calgary is my home city too. There is a dire shortage of safe direct bikeways in most directions for commuters. However, the recreational network is fairly good.
I'll agree with the +1 for the push-button crossing. Living in a smallish city in the U.S. with a bunch of loop-sensor traffic lights that can't detect non-cars, just having the same kind of push button that pedestrians get to use would make my life easier with very little cost to the city. I'm tired of riding up onto the sidewalk just to cross the street. (Now if they could also let me turn left...)
At 3:49 is an example of a bike route that is worthless or even calamitous for recumbent trikes. Same deal at 6:56 and 8:04. I find it best on my trike to stick to the streets, following best-practices.
In Norway and all Nordic countries it's legal to ride on the side walk as long as it's not crowded. You can also ride on every hiking path too. unless landowner has a sign saying otherwise.
There's one of these bikeways in my city, I do use a stretch of it on my way to uni because it has roundabouts (so much easier and safer on a bike than intersections!) and these little bike signal things that you can press to make a red light on a couple slightly busier than average streets so you can cross. Still, there's 2 roundabouts and 2 bike signals on the route, along with signs that say share the road and a couple of sharrows, so it seems a little weird to call it a "bikeway" when it's more like a teensy bit of bike-friendly infrastructure here and there.
When you got to Lowe's, my first thought - now your bike gets stolen while you're in the store. North America needs much more security for bicycle parking.
I liked the button placement. In most places, the cyclist needs to get up onto the sidewalk to press the cross button. Those were well placed for bicycles.
Nashville TN has these weird "bike route" signs with arrows pointing to different streets that are supposedly on the route. That said if you actually follow the signs you'll quickly discover that the streets they point to aren't bike friendly at all and all of the arrows are either going in circles or just end randomly. It's always been super perplexing to me as to why they even exist.
I'm planning on flying to Calgary this summer for a bikepacking race in the Rockies and riding from the airport to the start of the race. The route that I'll have to take to traverse the city is just mind-blowing. It looks like a child scribbled on the map, and it will certainly require GPS navigation.
The sections of the route that go through the residential areas are technically fine, even if some of them are a bit too wide. The problem is that just having regular residential streets as part of a main bike route doesn't work that well, because it doesn't like it's a main bike route. Main bike route roads need to visually and physically be different from regular roads. There is a section of main bike route near my house that goes towards downtown, the whole length of the street is red asphalt, there are a bunch of speed bumps, the speed is lowered (both through sign/type of road and physically because it's narrowed), the street is a priority road and some sections of the road is one way for cars (which makes it mostly unusable as quick route for cars to take.).
I live on a greenway in Vancouver, for those that were asking, greenways in Van are meant to be routes where pedestrians, bikes, anyone including the less physically able can travel safely. On our street, which runs along a hill, they added multiple bump outs with greenery and even places to sit, pedestrian controlled lights, reduced the speed from 50km to 30. Our street went from a fast, busy cut thru for commuters to a huge increase in use by pedestrians and bikes. We used to have all these spots where cars could whip around corners which resulted in cars hitting trees regularly in the winter when they lost control and endangering kids, bikes etc. They also thought out the greenways for bikes in that they picked routes where you could get up hills without killing yourself, Vancouver is quite hilly. Now I only wish they would improve more of the traffic lights to keep pedestrians/bikers safer. We still have next to no left turn signals at incredibly busy intersections and the number of pedestrians killed each year is terrible and preventable. Other solutions like multi-cross intersections at busy spots would help too.
There were a couple of things here I didn't necessarily agree with: 1. Speed humps - I would have agreed at an earlier time, until someone pointed out to me that people are buying bigger and heavier cars in the city just so they can drive easily over these humps. 2. Roundabouts - Living in a suburb (of Melbourne) that has roundabouts at almost every intersection, I consider them the most dangerous of all intersections for cyclists. Cars will not give way, will not see you even if you are directly in front of them, and will perform any form of manoeuvre to pass you between two roundabouts, whether there is room to do so or not. Add this to the fact they are almost impossible to cross during peak times with traffic all going in one direction, you need to merge back with traffic that you can't see to navigate through them, and pedestrians are given _no_ right of way, and I would be close to considering them the worst type of intersection full stop. I was surprised you did not mention how much Lowe's car park you rode through to get to the half dozen bike spaces added as an afterthought! 😂
Nice video. Cities need to see lots of those. Many of the "fake bikeways" around Denver and the western suburbs are spaces hacked out of roadways by installing a line of paint. The surface quality will jar your fillings out if the debris kicked over by car tires doesn't dump you first. You have to ride up on sidewalks and really reach for most crosswalk buttons. Our geography runs down hill from mountains to plains. Consequently the best multi-use trails run East/West, following drainages. North/South routes are mostly shared with traffic. Many streets with painted bike lines have traffic on the left of the bike lane and parked cars on the right. Of course, the bike lane is so close to parked cars that someone could easily clock you with their car door. The burbs near Denver could really take a lesson from Boulder, a much more bike friendly place.
For me the 1st one is not that bad, considering how low the traffic is. I am also not sure why you go over the fact you have so nice bike lanes along the main roads in downtown - it is great and worth a point! I believe a lot is a matter of your perspective, my expectations are way lower :)
+2 for the A&W on your route. Last one around here has been gone almost 2 decades :-( But I'll say your routes in Calgary remind me of the bike routes around my city. Some good, but the connections between them can be horrible.
In Toronto that thing in Calgary would be called a bike "route". The bike routes are really only advertised as a safer / less unsafe path through existing road infrastructure. As a bonus some do have painted bike lanes that nudge cars a bit further away. Cycle lanes and greenways are completely different.
Markham Ontario has some real jokes. A road will be a bike route for 100 to 300m of simple straight street and then "bike route ends" for 10 or 20m whenever something complicated happens, followed by bike route restarting at the next section of straight street. This is the ultimate in disconnected bike infrastructure. This game lets them claim dozens of km of bike intrastructue for doing F all. Probably it qualified as credits for provincial or federal grants!
So, the second route was a lot better than the first, mainly for the cycle cut throughs. Re- "complete route" unless I missed it, it appeared to lack destination signs informing the user where it goes and approx how long it takes to get there. Really good cycle ways not only separate you from motor vehicles, they also indicate where they go. A system I noticed in South NL which particularly impressed me for countryside or intercity routes used maps on posts showing current location and routes.
I'm glad it's legal to ride bikes on the sidewalk here, there are a lot of crazy sections of road I wouldn't attempt otherwise. I do mostly stick to backroads and residential neighborhoods when I can, but main streets are unavoidable sometimes
Like if they going to both spend the time to do wayfinding signs and route markings they could at least add some paint to mark out the parking spots and narrowing lines to help reduce speed a little bit, it's only a few cents of a linear foot and make it a lot easier to follow the routes too.
Houston, Texas and surrounding cities have been widening sidewalks and calling them "multi use" pathways. Anything beyond 5 km (3.1 miles) in any direction from my house and I will be forced to deal with high-speed traffic with no bike lanes or pathways. As fuel prices continue to climb, more and more people in Houston are considering the bicycle for those short trips.
Yeah, Vancouver is quite good. I do Heather end-to-end as part of a commute. But then I hit Richmond for half of it. The city of Richmond has done all they can with what they have, but the original planners designed a grid of main arterials enclosing many 'protected enclaves' if you will, that have no through streets. So any direct route anywhere is on an arterial with an unprotected bike lane. There are a few other routes that are quite nice, but only a few. A case of being sabotaged before you start.
We have had a main “route” into the town centre here in Worthing UK for years. It’s a bunch of blue signs directing you to the town, that you can easily miss. And while it’s not a terrible route, it’s not all quiet, and it hasn’t increased cycling at all. No proper cycling infrastructure to speak of, aside from some very worn paint on some very broken up tarmac. I think the Vancouver methods of just blocking off certain streets to cars (LTNs as we would call them) is what everyone should be focusing on. It’s so much faster and cheaper to implement than trying to copy the Dutch, and we can get everyone on bikes really quickly. You could do this in no time.
Even what you showed of Calgary has more dedicated bike infrastructure than my city.. which has a 4m mixed use rail-trail and that's it. All other bike infrastructure are just painted gutters which - you guessed it - become a buffer between the snowbanks and the "real" road in the winter. And get filled up with water, soaking your back with grit. And this is if you're fortunate enough to get the painted bike lanes.. Currently, even though our city has a fair bit of bicycle commuters and cyclists for its size, the most they've done in recent years has been adding a couple traffic islands and then they're GOING TO finish the cross-town trail (before you had to go around the entire town.. because they sold off the inner city rail grounds.. great for sustainable transport, of course!)
Hi Tom, I’m from Calgary, not a crazy biker but doing biking on my day off. I’m thinking of replacing my bike hub with “"shimano alfine 8”. Do you recomend this hub?. If yes , which bike shop you recommend. Thanks Sergio
I don't know that I would -2 those seemingly quiet residential streets; they look narrow enough that drivers wouldn't drive very fast anyway. My small-ish town has a bit of everything; sharrows, bike boulevards, bike lanes, and MUPs. It's sort of connected, mostly. It doesn't help that we've been carved up into pieces by Highways 101 and 299. The city is in the (slow) process of creating a rail trail from one end of town to the other, connecting two parts. Interestingly, we don't have any stop lights.
As a kid I would use this route, but as an adult I would just ride straight down 17th avenue on the road where you could easily hit 50 kph on your bike. (Yet still, motorists want to pass you just because you are on a bike, and that sometimes gets very dangerous at those speeds) Going uphill on 17th avenue I would just ride on the sidewalk.
It would be interesting to compare the route you took along that bikeway compared to what you would have done if you weren't gonna take a route like this. A lot of these routes tend to take weird and twisty ways and not connect to many destinations because the direct route with destinations is solely reserved to cars. Also a possible improvement for the Vancouver one would be to have a road that has more traffic calming, that is narrower, and add a rule that you can't overtake cyclists. For the residents, it would only marginallly lengthen their car trips while making a much quieter neigborhood that's much more pleasant while having a even better experience for cyclists
I'm not sure if the Canadian Law allows for running stop signs on a bicycle, but it's a good way to get a blue light special in Dixie, as well as a good way to get flattened since most motorists expect all traffic to stop at them. ...though, yes, there is a lot of work that needs to be done to American cities to allow for safe passage of bicycle traffic.
I biked the Adanac / Union bikeway many days on the way to work. The cars along those streets know to look for cyclists; I've had my near-misses in other parts of the city, but that route is pretty great. Schools of cyclists use it every day.
Bikeways or greenways (sometimes they have other names) are routes identified on roads that are designed as safe places for cycling. But as this video shows, they can really vary. What are they like in your city?
I’m a Calgarian living on Vancouver Island for a bit… The area I’m in has NOTHING. Want groceries? Gotta cycle on the side of Trans Canada Highway. Or you could take a “safer” route that takes at least double the time… 😂
I live in Phoenix. The multi-use paths along canals, the Salt River, and on green belts are great. Most are very wide and have underpasses, overpasses, or traffic lights at major stroad crossings. The bike lanes on stroads are frightening to me, though. I don't feel safe in a narrow lane with only a stripe of paint protecting me from giant trucks and SUVs going 40-50 mph. There are also several busy streets with designated bike sharrows where bikes are supposed to share the lane with cars, and those are pointless too, especially Central Avenue. However we have many residential and side streets that go through which are not marked as bikeways that are excellent to bike on because they're wide and have minimal car traffic on them. Some of the streets you were riding on seemed similar, and I was disappointed you graded them negatively.
When you revisit Vancouver I hope you check out the Central Valley greenway it’s a long bike path that follows the rail line it stretches from Vancouver all the way to new Westminster with practically no hills the entire way! (Which Vancouver is full of!) there are a few short shared sections but a lot of it is a bike/pedestrian walkway it’s a beautiful ride.
Hey Tom, James from Brisbane Australia here. How far did you ride on these routes? How did you pick the destination? I'd like to look at a comparison ride in my city which is good in some areas, but also has a lot of the "bikeways" that are not "bikeways" and NIMBY opposition to connections
@@Jande29793 Yeah, I was thinking something similar. 10ish km ride from, say, Bracken Ridge to Chermside, via Cabbage Tree Crk and Aspley. Some fairly nice sections strung together by some sketchy gaps.
City planners: "This street isn't safe for cyclists!"
*Puts up a sign*
"If anything, we did too much here."
I'm not even joking, i read a report today about making a street safer for cyclists and the recommendation was to "add paint markings to warn of possible line of sight issues". That was it.
@@alpd7638 I mean, be fair, what would you have them do? _Something?_ You should just be grateful they dedicated an entire report to belittling your place in society because you choose not to encase yourself in two tons of steel and glass every time you leave the house.
It's because they need to indicate that bikes can go on the road because driver's shouldn't be expected to know how to drive
@@alpd7638 That is unfortunately the logic of many city planners and councils when adding bike "infrastructure". None of them have ridden a bike to get anywhere in their lives.
@@ichijofestival2576 how much glass do you really think is in the cars 😂
You didn’t highlight the Vancouver speed bump was actually a pedestrian crossing. That should be another +1. Instead of pedestrians climbing down onto the street to cross, cars must climb UP into the pedestrian area to cross. IE it’s clearly meant to be for pedestrians
Great point. Thank you.
This freaks also blows stop signs and doesn't signal....................... Death on two wheels!
Pedestrian-forward infrastructure: we love to see it!
I like the sentiment though. Normal speedbumps are really bad for cyclists. If you see ways around them, they get used quiet heavily. I would like to see cutouts on normal speedbumps
@@fluuufffffy1514 Replacing the ultrafashionable civic negligence with civic ethics, would help the pedestrians consistently suffering from terror on the sidewalks and crossing streets............... Downtowns are where "Velocitized" drivers terrorize every form of street folk and are unaware of their hallucinations, Cupcake............ Cyclists are unaware of this form of cycling terror. Cause underage drinking demands street cred. This buggers up their ethics and destroys their conscience. Cuz criminals destabilze your country and then streal your bikes!
"Actually, it was really hard to find a connected bikeway that would actually take you somewhere" Sounds like 95% of towns and cities in North America.
99.9%
My college town actually has the multi-use path go near the suburban mall, a gym, some apts, and a few strip malls. I can't actually tell if that was designed on purpose though.
When I moved to my current small city the only bike path was very disconnected. It started and stopped at random places. Recently the city has started adding bicycle infrastructure. I can now use a combination of a sharrow, multiuse path, and painted bike lane with a bit of residential street to get from my house to my parents' house. The multiuse path is the best improvement of the three bike paths.
You know you're in trouble when the blue sign earns a +1. Much more generous than I would have been.
What really gets me is the amount of space that cars seemingly have a right to. I hope that on-street parking isn't free!
You're absolutely correct, and the vast majority of the space you see in these videos is free parking. That's part of the problem, I agree.
Once you get out of the urban core, on-street parking in Vancouver’s residential neighbourhoods is generally free and unrestricted.
@Garden State NJ All commuters are equal, but car owners are *more* equal. Or, “freedom” as in “you are free to risk your health here with a bicycle.”
As an avid cyclist and motorist, I disagree. This is not a cars vs bike issue. It’s literally an infrastructure issue. There’s a time for cars, and a time for bikes, and the infrastructure should reflect that, just like when a new bridge or on-ramp is required for road access for cars, and entire pieces of land can literally be excavated, moved, and manipulated, the same should be done with cycling infrastructure. The issue is, not enough people care to do anything about it, and there’s little monetary incentive to probed said infrastructure.
@@RohitSharma-yr7li Saying that there is a time for cars and a time for bikes is kind of meaningless. No fair minded person would say that cars or bikes don't have their place. The point is about the amount of space cars take up, which I would argue is way too much. So, yes, it is an infrastructure issue in that the overwhelming amount of money spent on infrastructure in paces like the US, Canada, Australia, is on cars. Cyclists get a miniscule amount of that. Also, when you says 'cycling' do you mean for sport or commuting? I do both, but this isn't about sport.
I get the frustration felt by a car stuck behind a cyclist moving at half or less of the speed limit...but you'd think this would get commuters to push for *more* bike infrastructure! Just to get us out of their way! Course it also makes us safer but that doesn't seem to be a factor for many people, so might as well focus on what they DO care about.
That said, I tend to stick to the road anyway, because I like to push hard and go fast which isn't always safe in bike lanes.
The greenways in Vancouver generally: are posted at 30 km/h, have regular speed humps, and allow only one lane for car travel (with parked cars on each side). So one can’t easily drive a car faster than a bike on one, which eliminates this sort of conflict.
I agree. If motorists hate having bikes on the road, why aren't they the first ones arguing in favour of separated routes?
@@Shifter_Cycling I've taken to using that reasoning on anti-bike infrastructure people. I also remind them that every bike is a car not clogging up their street.
I took my roadbike out today. There was a cycle lane on the other side of the road, where families and elderlies were using + it was up and down the curbs, which aren‘t fun on super skinny tires. The bikelane is optional (there are enforced ones in germany too) and while there was no traffic and I was easy to overtake, I heard the horn from some SUV drivers
@@Shifter_Cycling In my experience, it is because the motorists who really don't like cyclists, *really* don't like cyclists, cycling or anything on two wheels. It's basically being spiteful.
i moved to vancouver last year from a small strode town in the usa. have to say i havent even gone back to visit my parents yet. love the bike support here. not quite amsterdam, but probably one of the best cities to bike anywhere ive seen on north america
When he said "... So thats - 2", i ask "Why!" Clean, wide and quite streets without traffic, its a dream.
I actually have a small disagreement to make with what Tom said about how things like the concrete islands makes things less comfortable for cars. I'm a car driver and frankly I barely even notice them. They slow me down, but I don't feel like they are "inconveniencing me" or really impacting my journey at all. Which is great because it makes roads safer to ride on as a cyclist, without really affecting the driving experience. Bravo to this sort of thing!
This. We're not trying to make drivers feel uncomfortable, we're trying to make drivers feel comfortable driving in a way that's safer for everyone.
Those island are described as "traffic calming" and if they don't bother you, like they don't bother me, then it is probably because you aren't an aggressive or impatient driver. People I know who hate them are also the kind of people who drive over the speed limit, take unnecessary risks, etc.
@@Korina42 the problem with thinking your “calming” traffic is people have places to go, ie people going to the doctors leave their travel time plus a little extra for traffic. If they are suddenly cut to half the speed limit for a bit of their journey they have to make up time somewhere else and where do you think they are going to make up time? That’s right, the quiet street where 10 to 20 over the speed limit “won’t be noticed” (unless someone gets hurt), another example, a delivery driver has (say) a half hour slot to deliver groceries and suddenly has part of their journey at half speed, if the delivery doesn’t get made on time, who gets yelled at for missing a time slot by the customer and possibly fired? Or do you plan every journey at 10mph and arrive everywhere very early when your not held up? Would you be happy if you book a taxi that suddenly travels to your destination at 10mph while your watching the meter go up? People have places to go and for a driving test here you have to demonstrate you are comfortable getting to within 10% of the speed limit. Would you like to be told you have failed because you drove perfectly but weren’t able to demonstrate that you are confident travelling close to the speed limit
@@1988dgs but traffic calming and reduced speed limits don't happen suddenly. They exist before you begin the journey, and thus you can plan around them.
@@randomdogdog they use the arguments here that coming across a bike on your journey will “calm” the traffic. They are trying to put travel back to the late 1800’s without coming straight out and saying it, putting all the onus on the traveller to still hit 21st century deadlines with 19th century means and pace of life
What makes a lot of the Vancouver routes safer is that they are used, thousands of city tax payers who choose bicycles use the route, so city tax payers who choose cars will generally avoid the route and choose a main arterial. Let me know if you want footage of Ontario street, water to water.
Thank You. A residential road labeled as a bike way or bike route only works if cyclists use it. This trains drivers to avoid it, and those who must use it to watch for bikes. Also, it should be getting signage or roundabouts that reduce braking.
Stop whining! I know you are about to gripe. Don’t. DO THE MATH! That ONE spit on the windshield, cars don’t own the road SOB that ignores the bike route and blocks a 45 mph lane on a major thoroughfare instead, you know - that guy, aggravates hundreds of drivers (or thousands). The three or four bad drivers on the bike lane aggravate less than a dozen cyclists. We live in a Democracy people. DO THE MATH.
We gotta be MUCH better behaved to win. And patient, too.
The single file sign on the share all most drivers assume it is referring to cyclist.
They need to either be more specific or don't bother with the signs.
Commuting by bicycle in Calgary you have 2 choices, either you have your experience trying to find your way and even if you do the routes take km's out of your way or you brave the roads, cut the km's down considerably and get to where you are going in decent time. If you don't get hit
They can't very well just come out and say "drivers, do not overtake cyclists!" because that would be singling every single driver out personally and communism.
The UK has a sign which is very clear. "Narrow Lanes. Do not overtake cyclists" makes it very clear to everyone that there's not enough space to legally and safely overtake a slower road user.
Having cycled around 40km today in the area around Rotterdam in the Netherlands, roughly 75% of the route not even seeing cars, but cyclists all over, storks sitting by the road, birds all over, even seeing a few deer.... this video is just saddening. These cities feel so lifeless, barren. As if you set foot into some weird post apocalyptic world with the only moving things left are ugly metallic objects.
Vancouver had some better infrastructure, but still it just felt so desolate. Where are all the people?
The overwhelming majority of them can't afford to live in the city.
This is shot in the wintertime. In Vancouver at least, these paths look and feel very different in the warmer months.
America only worships profit and money
I'm sick and tired of people comparing the Netherlands to ANYWHERE else when it comes to biking. You live in one of the most established river deltas in the world.
@@bindingcurve like new orleans ....
Fun fact: "Adanac", the Vancouver street you were on, is "Canada" spelled backwards
I did not know that. Thank you 🙏
@@Shifter_Cycling really? I kind of assumed most Canadian cities have an Adanac St somewhere, but a search for one Calgary failed.
This video hit close to home, literally you rode right past my building in Chinatown. Vancouver is getting so much better lately and I think the lesson is how little they had to do to fix the conflict zones on these routes that were formerly just green lines highlighted on a map. A couple of traffic blockers with some jersey barriers and it's actually really nice now. That one quick left right where the ping pong table is used to be a pretty scary blind left turn into a through street in either direction. Didn't take much but it did take someone to actually see the route in person, highlight the problem areas and fix them.
This is what I keep telling people. I'm new here and I'd love to ride my bike to class and wherever I want to go but I hate riding on the road and multi use pathways appear and disappear so I'm forced to go to the sidewalk and piss off the pedestrians. Plus there are barely any direct routes
Ugh. Missing connections are a huge problem.
I "love" narrow, highly curved roads in hilly areas that have signs that say "share the road" along with a picture of a bike. If you ever want your family to be able to collect on your life insurance policy, biking one of those is the way to do it.
The Calgary Route literally feels like the Canadian version of Cheyenne, Wyoming, USA based on your footage. In our case in Cheyenne, the "bike routes" are green Bike Route signs, but they usually do the same thing; they refer to residential streets with no bike infrastructure primarily with the occasional separated bike path or mixed use pathway.
Yes, and then the signs just vanish on some routes, so you really have no idea where to go.
These are all over the united states. There's a local greenway near me that dumps cyclists on a 40mph road with no shoulder / bike lane and a "Share the Road!" sign and painted arrows
@@cwmoo Wow but that doesn't surprise me XD Got several bike lanes here that dump you either into a sharrow or into a normal street or stroad.
This reminds me of Portland Oregon. Lots of neighborhood Greenways, and difficult to interpret signage. It is still nice to be on low car volume streets, though.
The Union-Adanac route is part of my commute to the office (it’s an all-greenway commute, because they interconnect and I live on a greenway street). Regarding those crossings of busy arterials, superblocks and multilane arterials are Vancouver’s dirty little secret, and part of the reason why Vancouver has been able to get away with keeping freeways out of its urban core. (Vancouver has significantly more multilane arterial surface streets than either Seattle or Portland, the other cities I have cycled in extensively).
How would you compare these three cities as a commuting cyclist? I've ridden *some* in Seattle and Portland. Felt like Portland does a nice job with bridge crossings over the river, as well as neighborhood greenways. Meanwhile, Seattle feels like it has a lot of protected infrastructure, and also really good traffic-calmed neighborhood greenways up around Ballard/Greenwood/Phinney Ridge. Haven't visited Vancouver yet. But we are thinking about all three of these cities as potential next homes.
@@dustinbranham9746 Seattle has improved in recent years but still trails its neighbours to the north and the south.
It's probably a bad sign that, on the "better" version there was still only one other bicycle parked at your destination. It could be an issue with the destination itself and its huge parking lot, signaling it's a place hostile to non-drivers. However, it could be all those stroad intersections on the greenway keeping people from using it despite all the actual amenities.
I bike this route sometimes and it's definitely very busy, but the Lowe's is like 45 minutes plus by bike from his starting point, it's like one block away from the municipal boundary into the suburb, so I'm not surprised that all the cyclists already turned off by that point to other destinations. There's also a big hill up Adanac that makes me really consider whether I want to travel east past Commercial Drive by bike, but that doesn't stop me from using the bikeway all the way up to that point and enjoying it.
Actually I can't recall any other cyclists at all. In either city.
Reading your comment made me think of it but I'm not sure without rewatching the video again.
But certainly even outside of peak commuting times a long way to go to get numbers up.
Although motorised traffic was pretty light too to be fair.
Just to speculate, but the lack to other bicycles in the parking area may also be due to the nature of the destination itself. Lowes is a hardware and building supply store (ooops, sorry, "Home Improvement"), so much of what may be needed from that store would tend to be large, bulky, and/or exceptionally heavy. Apparently this location is some distance from where the population is concentrated (I have zero clue about the geography of the area), so if you put all of that together, there may be a quite a disincentive to ride regardless of the infrastructure.
The only ones who might be inclined to ride under such circumstances may be mostly the employees, and I sincerely hope that any employees who do ride have a much better place to park their bikes than in a rack out in front of the store.
@@johnhodge5871 All of my own trips to Lowe's have been for a handful of things I could definitely carry out in a bike-style storage (basket, etc.) The last trip I made, I got one wrench IIRC. I recently moved out of an apartment, and I just wanted some packing tape, but my car was already hitched up to a trailer. If only I could have just walked or biked to a hardware store ...
The small town I grew up in had an old-school small hardware store (about the size of a Dollar General if you're familiar with those) that people definitely could have walked to. It opened directly onto the street! I bet people went there all the time, just for a light bulb or something.
Need to add another +1 for Vancouver for having bike racks at the shop at the finish, something still rare in Australia or if they have one it fits 2 or 3 bikes max ...
"Which route would you bike on?"
The road any time. The road is much more predictable. Maps show where it goes while bikeways can go anywhere or just end for no reason. Also roads need to be safe for cars, bikeways dont. So bikeways can have very large holes and cracks all over the place. Bikeways also have unpredictable pedestrians, children and dogs.
I don't know if you (can) do something like that, but it would be interesting if you'd interview the people who are in charge of planning these routes and get their thought process. Greetings, big fan from Germany.
Love this idea!!
This is a great idea!
I just read through Calgary’s Greater Downtown Plan (or whatever it was called). They have a lot of plans to make improvements, but it’s slow moving and doesn’t expand beyond the downtown area.
(Based on other reports) They’re also aware that Macleod seriously needs a cycle track and sidewalk improvements. But they were sure to say “No funding is currently available”. 😭
So the worst street in Calgary will continue to uphold the title.
Macleod Trail is an awful street to drive on, walk on and bike on
I recently discovered Shifter as a source about urban biking. I live in Sacramento, CA, next to a 32-mile long paved bike trail along the American River Parkway. I have a drop bar road bike, but I have moved off of riding it lately (I'm 65 yo) in favor of a '68 Schwinn Racer, an upright riding experience with swept-back handlebars and a three-speed Sturmey-Archer hub. With a little bit of work, which I did myself, this bike is amazingly smooth and solid and easy to ride. I ride it almost 20 miles daily on the bike trail. I also ride it to buy groceries, go to restaurants or to occasionally to go clubbing in East Sacramento and Midtown Sacramento. I can use the bike trail for part of the distance on the sojourns, and mostly quiet neighborhood streets for the remainder of the trip(s).
I want to plug these old vintage Schwinn three-speeds - built practically by hand in Schwinn's legendary factory in Chicago - as great urban bikes. They were so well-made that there are still a lot of them around, and they can be bought for cheap (in the U.S. anyway) from Craigslist. They are very heavy and as such may not be for everyone, but I've found my Racer to also be a great fitness bike. It takes a lot more endurance to peddle this bike 20 miles, compared to my road bike. I go slower - but not that much slower - and at my age the ride is more enjoyable than on my road bike.
A nice comparison, Shifter, thank you. In my city, in the States, all we have are small signs beside the street that tell you this is a "Bike route"; there is no infrastructure at all, not even sharrows. Trafic-light intersections have beg buttons for pedestrians, if I want to use them I either have to ride on the sidewalk or walk my bike over. Even Calgary looked great to me. We at least have a couple of rails-to-trails routes that pass through the city. Thanks for another great video.
So cool that I found a calgary-based bike channel. I am starting to bike to work. This channel is so helpful for a new cycler like me.
I do love how in Vancouver street signs for roads with bike lanes have a little bike icon on them! super helpful when navigating around and seeing which streets are safe to bike on
Riding a bicycle in Central Florida is either very scary to super safe and beautiful. I read that one trail I used to sort of like was made complete. I tried it out a few days ago and they did a wonderful job connecting the two trails into one. I have always felt safe on the many bikes trails I have been on, but off the trails can be dangerous or risky at best. A lot of drivers think that green means go no mater where they are and that painted area across roads isn't a crosswalk, it's a finish line where you must be first to cross at a red light. Secure parking sure would be a plus. Thanks for another informative video.
Like in Orlando? I'm from Kissimmee and have seen them making improvements over the last decade with building segregated bike trails. I just avoid all on-street bike lanes on the insanely fast stroads and even arterial roads with 30 mph limit and use the plentiful sidewalks.
Where I live (the other Vancouver), bike routes are often through streets with sharrows.
I often prefer parallel residential streets a few blocks away from them, because there are fewer cars (more frequent stop signs, but my state allows Idaho stops).
Oh, to have Idaho stops.
Biking in van is so nice! Whole reason I was able to move to car light life is translink+ebike
It starts with one street, then a broken route, adapted into a real route then an alternative route appears, and by then all streets are bike-friendly. Even here (NL) we have stretches that need better bike infra, as long as things are moving the right way it's something. As bike person I can imagine the frustration about the speed of changes, so let's be the dreamers ;-)
I agree. My city has made great progress in recently years, so I'm hopeful. That's partly why this channel exists!
greenway: a corridor of undeveloped land preserved for recreational use or environmental protection
Thanks for your videos Tom! Living in Burnaby now and moving to Calgary in June/July. I kind of like sharrows in Vancouver because, there are so many of them on a bike friendly street and in my mind, at least, they serve as a good reminder for car drivers that this is a city bike route and the cyclists did a right thing by choosing this route as opposed to choosing a stroad or just a busy street.
when you pulled out a map, i had to make sure this video wasn't 15 years old :D
In my city here in Germany there has been a push to make more space for bicycles and it's been going solid so far, although some people are pushing against it because this is Germany and we're strangely enamoured with cars. A bridge here that just got finished now has way more space for cycling and while it's the "painted gutter" approach, it feels great to be given this much space on a rather significant bridge that connects my part of the city with another. Bike routes aren't always perfectly clear though - we do have signage with kilometres but it can be weirdly uncommon, you can bike south and only see a few signs that show you where to go, especially if you don't cycle along major arterial roads (which I don't) and I often find myself cycling by using my general sense of direction and knowledge of the area and the other issue is that cycling space feels very "tacked on", i.e. sometimes you have to cycle on the road, sometimes it's the painted bicycle gutter other, sometimes it's a path (that can be split from the regular sidewalk just barely so get ready to use that bell) and sometimes it's a pedestrian sidewalk that allows for bicycle use (which is probably my least favourite, especially if the sidewalk is super narrow). On another positive note, false parking is being taken increasingly seriously (again, to the chagrin of some including members of a major political party) and it seems to reduce cars parking on the sidewalk, but we're still not quite there yet.
All that said, that bridge at around 4 minutes is something *I* would give a -100 to because it would trigger my acrophobia real bad. ;)
Good on your city for making an effort! Remember to thank the relevant people, and keep pestering them for more!
Come down to Lethbridge! We have a great “bike boulevard” on 7th Ave South. Features Roundabouts, Barricades, bike-sensitive traffic lights, and connects downtown, the coulee bike paths, and a popular park! Plus, we just go a bike/scooter sharing app!
Oof that Calgary route wasnt even proper cycling infrastructure. Scary. Vancouver was... barest minimum.
Clearly I've been spoiled by seeing all the amazing infrastructure in the Netherlands...
Vancouver’s cycling infrastructure is good *by North American standards* (one hell of a weasel phrase).
He actually skipped past a few of the limited permeability features - there's one at nearly every arterial and some in between, so cars are really discouraged from sticking around. There are some wide sections and there should be more protected intersections, but I think this one is pretty good, and the biker numbers do mostly reflect that.
A couple features on the Adanac greenway are actually pretty recent , that first speed bump by Benny market was just put in , so was the (shortcut) at 10:59
Great video as allways! Keep it up. Here in Brazil my city is filled with those fake bikeways, an absolute shame to know that this is a constant around the world :(
Seeing your videos make me realize how privileged i am to live in the Netherlands, Thank you! Keep up the good work!
If I wanted to ride my bike from from the Vermeer Centrum in Delft to the Mauritshuis in Den Haag, it is a lovely ride with pleasant scenery and protected bike lanes. For comparison, it is the same distance from my home in Hollywood (CA, USA) over to the Neon Museum in Glendale (the next city to the east). There is not one bike lane. It's all on roads, with cars. And I must say, the Neon Museum does not quite compare to the Vermeer Centrum or The Mauritshuis lol. I so envy the Dutch!
So many great eateries, breweries, coffee shops, parks etc. along Union-Adanac bike corridor! Beers and tacos at Woodland Park and Pasteis de Nata with espresso at Union Market. Episode idea - Businesses that prosper along bike routes.
I live on the Union-Adanac bikeway near Nanaimo Street. It was one of the major selling points when I looked at the house, and I use it nearly daily to access downtown, and it links to lots of other routes including Lakewood, Pandora, Central Valley, and 10th Ave. And easy access to the seawall at False Creek!
As a Dutch person I'm actually fairly impressed by Vancouver. They seem to really make an effort. It would be nice to know how long both Calgary and Vancouver have been working on improving their bicycle infrastructure.
Vancouver is definitely a few years ahead of Calgary, but I think the real difference is that Vancouver has been making incremental progress every year, whereas Calgary had a big push about five years ago and has since stalled.
I left Calgary last Fall, but I still enjoyed the tour -- especially when it ended in my (former) neighborhood. I used to visit the Westbrook Mall several times per week.
I used to commute downtown via the union-adanac route, up to commercial/Victoria. It's a nice route. And yeah, the Lowe's used to be a Rona until 2018
Ahh yes I remember that Rona! they used to give out free popcorn in there the staff there was friendly too, Lowe’s is the complete opposite , the staff will just pretend you aren’t even there.
In Vancouver there are lots of bike ways/routes on side streets. The cool thing is there are controlled lights at every point these cycle way/routes cross major roads and many of the routes have traffic control methods built in. You past the Union Market, you needed to stop there, it is a must do, and sit with the locals and celebs (like yourself) and have a cappuccino and a Croissant and a chat +10. Some of the cycling infrastructure across the lower mainland can be a bit nightmarish at times but some of it is surprisingly good.
Where I live (Salmon Arm) we have designated bike routes but some carry a lot of traffic but they have just put in a separate paved bike/pedestrian route on the west side of the city but that is the only one except for a highway underpass (bike and pedestrians) on the west side of the city.
I don't mind Toronto too much just because they have the water front trails and couple of other car free routes that I have ridden there. I found that crossing through the core wasn't too bad but I got the feeling that some of the drivers would love to kill me.
Montreal is pretty good and friendly the last time I was there, though I didn't do much cycling there except to mostly pass through. Easily getting through a city is a big thing.
You gave some rave reviews of cycling in Victoria. I do like their commuter architecture for cycling.
I cannot say I like Calgary as it struck me it as built for cars, not cycles or people though I do like Kensington.
Edmonton doesn't fair much better but I took a long way around to avoid it nearly in its entirety (via St Albert.and #15).
Saskatoon sucks but I found some pretty views in the city.
Winnipeg scares me but I have been there quite a few times so I was able to navigate through its centre. They have a few cycle routes but they don't seem to go anywhere.
I found very little cycling infrastructure in the Maritimes except PEI but it was easy to navigate avoiding busy roads.
This is a great idea. We often focus on main streets as areas to implement cycling infra but often I wonder if we should be focusing more on routes like this as a priority. We can achieve so much more with so much less. Of course, it needs to be a real effort, like you showed here. I have been thinking about doing a video of the great work with Shaw St. in Toronto but I wasn't sure what format. The Plus 1 Minus 2 might be a good way to do that.
Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota might have some of the best bicycle infrastructure in North America. The city parks are interconnected -- part of the original park design, with bike trails running through them. The "Midtown Greenway" in Minneapolis is a converted railroad right of way that was grade-separated in the 1920s, with short ramps to the streets at periodic intervals. It is very popular.
Good suggestions for both cities, Calgary is quite widespread and got lots of potential imo. Haha few weeks ago parked at the same rack at Lowes.
Should have -2 for each stop sign on those neighbourhood streets.
Without some centralized planning, bike routes (here I include, bikeways, trails, bike lanes) bike infrastructure become a token to the bike community. Sharrows are just confusing to all vehicles. We need to mobilize the community to speak up and demand safe interconnected infrastructure.
Routes in Norway have cherry red signs with name of the route, but the routes sometimes go on neighbourhood streets too, but those have 30km/h speed limit and are quite save as long as no crazy race track style driving driver comes along. it happen once a taxi almost wiped me off the road. Only happen once.
Vancouver looks like it has some really good elements. Also at 5:34 a motorway crash barrier in a residential zone? That makes it look high speed
That narrow bridge is prone to accidents. And what do you do when you approach another bridge user? That bridge should be deconstructed.
And that part at 3:49 ... boy, if that ever freezes over you're going right off that path and onto that driveway way down there. 😮
I like those cut-throughs on the second route.
Coming from a community with NO bike infrastructure, both of these routes are an improvement! We can legally ride on sidewalks in Michigan though (pedestrians have right of way), so there's that one advantage. It's almost enough to forgive 20 businesses sharing one rusty bike rack at the far end of a complex. Thank you for the video!
I used to ride the Adanac bike boulevard every day back in the mid-90s from North Burnaby to Downtown. This bikeway is what got me into urban cycling. It was the first bikeway in Vancouver, and at the time there still wasn't any bike infrastructure downtown so your trip from the VAG would have been absolutely harrowing. It's great seeing all of the improvements that have been added in the last 25+ years, and I think a big part of the difference between this route and Calgary is that Vancouver has been creating bicycle infrastructure for a lot longer.
I also credit Vancouver’s recent years with consistently building improvements, rather than resting on its laurels.
The bike rack at Lowe’s was worth 5 points alone … I never see that at big box stores in America.
Here, we have “bike lanes” which are portions of road shoulder that randomly appear and disappear for no apparent reason.
I don't know if you mentioned it in the video, but most of the Vancouver route was noticeably narrower. That made it feel safer immediately, since if slows down cars and forces them to be more careful when passing. Furthermore, there just weren't as many cars because of all the porous intersections on the route, looked like pretty much only local residential traffic.
The beg buttons weren't ideal, but it still much better than just a stop sign and "figure it out cyclists".
My city also has some bike routes and some "bike routes".
Hey, getting a lapel mic would increase the audio quality of this video and decrease wind/car noise. Sometimes I watch these video's as "podcasts" and I assume others do too. Otherwise great video!
I had no idea people just listen to these videos, so thanks for sharing. Anybody else do that?
Where I live, there are also a lot of bike routs that go on and off in terms of being useful. Here though it is legal to bike on the sidewalk. Also watching this led me to look at a map and discover a multi use path I didn't know about
I would love those bike buttons on lights. I have to send one of my kids to push the pedestrian cross button then hop back on the bike when there aren’t cars to trigger the sensors.
Those longer speed bumps are amazing. There’s one road that has them where I live. It feels so much safer biking because drivers aren’t going 10 to 20 over the speed limit.
Calgary is my home city too. There is a dire shortage of safe direct bikeways in most directions for commuters. However, the recreational network is fairly good.
I'll agree with the +1 for the push-button crossing. Living in a smallish city in the U.S. with a bunch of loop-sensor traffic lights that can't detect non-cars, just having the same kind of push button that pedestrians get to use would make my life easier with very little cost to the city. I'm tired of riding up onto the sidewalk just to cross the street. (Now if they could also let me turn left...)
You have better luck with the loops if you wait on top of the wire rather than in the loop. Supposedly.
At 3:49 is an example of a bike route that is worthless or even calamitous for recumbent trikes. Same deal at 6:56 and 8:04. I find it best on my trike to stick to the streets, following best-practices.
find myself doing plus 1 minus 1 in my head every time I ride my bike now!
In Norway and all Nordic countries it's legal to ride on the side walk as long as it's not crowded. You can also ride on every hiking path too. unless landowner has a sign saying otherwise.
There's one of these bikeways in my city, I do use a stretch of it on my way to uni because it has roundabouts (so much easier and safer on a bike than intersections!) and these little bike signal things that you can press to make a red light on a couple slightly busier than average streets so you can cross. Still, there's 2 roundabouts and 2 bike signals on the route, along with signs that say share the road and a couple of sharrows, so it seems a little weird to call it a "bikeway" when it's more like a teensy bit of bike-friendly infrastructure here and there.
When you got to Lowe's, my first thought - now your bike gets stolen while you're in the store. North America needs much more security for bicycle parking.
I liked the button placement. In most places, the cyclist needs to get up onto the sidewalk to press the cross button. Those were well placed for bicycles.
Nashville TN has these weird "bike route" signs with arrows pointing to different streets that are supposedly on the route. That said if you actually follow the signs you'll quickly discover that the streets they point to aren't bike friendly at all and all of the arrows are either going in circles or just end randomly. It's always been super perplexing to me as to why they even exist.
I'm planning on flying to Calgary this summer for a bikepacking race in the Rockies and riding from the airport to the start of the race. The route that I'll have to take to traverse the city is just mind-blowing. It looks like a child scribbled on the map, and it will certainly require GPS navigation.
The sections of the route that go through the residential areas are technically fine, even if some of them are a bit too wide. The problem is that just having regular residential streets as part of a main bike route doesn't work that well, because it doesn't like it's a main bike route. Main bike route roads need to visually and physically be different from regular roads.
There is a section of main bike route near my house that goes towards downtown, the whole length of the street is red asphalt, there are a bunch of speed bumps, the speed is lowered (both through sign/type of road and physically because it's narrowed), the street is a priority road and some sections of the road is one way for cars (which makes it mostly unusable as quick route for cars to take.).
I live on a greenway in Vancouver, for those that were asking, greenways in Van are meant to be routes where pedestrians, bikes, anyone including the less physically able can travel safely. On our street, which runs along a hill, they added multiple bump outs with greenery and even places to sit, pedestrian controlled lights, reduced the speed from 50km to 30. Our street went from a fast, busy cut thru for commuters to a huge increase in use by pedestrians and bikes. We used to have all these spots where cars could whip around corners which resulted in cars hitting trees regularly in the winter when they lost control and endangering kids, bikes etc. They also thought out the greenways for bikes in that they picked routes where you could get up hills without killing yourself, Vancouver is quite hilly. Now I only wish they would improve more of the traffic lights to keep pedestrians/bikers safer. We still have next to no left turn signals at incredibly busy intersections and the number of pedestrians killed each year is terrible and preventable. Other solutions like multi-cross intersections at busy spots would help too.
loved the video... you seem to be riding in the door zone.... too close to parked cars....
There were a couple of things here I didn't necessarily agree with:
1. Speed humps - I would have agreed at an earlier time, until someone pointed out to me that people are buying bigger and heavier cars in the city just so they can drive easily over these humps.
2. Roundabouts - Living in a suburb (of Melbourne) that has roundabouts at almost every intersection, I consider them the most dangerous of all intersections for cyclists. Cars will not give way, will not see you even if you are directly in front of them, and will perform any form of manoeuvre to pass you between two roundabouts, whether there is room to do so or not. Add this to the fact they are almost impossible to cross during peak times with traffic all going in one direction, you need to merge back with traffic that you can't see to navigate through them, and pedestrians are given _no_ right of way, and I would be close to considering them the worst type of intersection full stop.
I was surprised you did not mention how much Lowe's car park you rode through to get to the half dozen bike spaces added as an afterthought! 😂
Love your videos man you have taught me so much in the little time I have been following you!
There's so few streets without potholes in my part of NYC, any stretch with fresh blacktop is a bikeway.
5:03 maybe I'm misunderstanding these shared lanes and stop signs.
Nice video. Cities need to see lots of those. Many of the "fake bikeways" around Denver and the western suburbs are spaces hacked out of roadways by installing a line of paint. The surface quality will jar your fillings out if the debris kicked over by car tires doesn't dump you first. You have to ride up on sidewalks and really reach for most crosswalk buttons. Our geography runs down hill from mountains to plains. Consequently the best multi-use trails run East/West, following drainages. North/South routes are mostly shared with traffic. Many streets with painted bike lines have traffic on the left of the bike lane and parked cars on the right. Of course, the bike lane is so close to parked cars that someone could easily clock you with their car door. The burbs near Denver could really take a lesson from Boulder, a much more bike friendly place.
For me the 1st one is not that bad, considering how low the traffic is. I am also not sure why you go over the fact you have so nice bike lanes along the main roads in downtown - it is great and worth a point! I believe a lot is a matter of your perspective, my expectations are way lower :)
He was rating the greenways, not the downtown bike infrastructure.
+2 for the A&W on your route. Last one around here has been gone almost 2 decades :-( But I'll say your routes in Calgary remind me of the bike routes around my city. Some good, but the connections between them can be horrible.
In Toronto that thing in Calgary would be called a bike "route". The bike routes are really only advertised as a safer / less unsafe path through existing road infrastructure. As a bonus some do have painted bike lanes that nudge cars a bit further away. Cycle lanes and greenways are completely different.
Markham Ontario has some real jokes. A road will be a bike route for 100 to 300m of simple straight street and then "bike route ends" for 10 or 20m whenever something complicated happens, followed by bike route restarting at the next section of straight street. This is the ultimate in disconnected bike infrastructure. This game lets them claim dozens of km of bike intrastructue for doing F all. Probably it qualified as credits for provincial or federal grants!
So, the second route was a lot better than the first, mainly for the cycle cut throughs.
Re- "complete route" unless I missed it, it appeared to lack destination signs informing the user where it goes and approx how long it takes to get there. Really good cycle ways not only separate you from motor vehicles, they also indicate where they go.
A system I noticed in South NL which particularly impressed me for countryside or intercity routes used maps on posts showing current location and routes.
Separation from motor vehicles is absolutely the best option. This is almost an examination of the third or fourth best options!
Hey Tom you should check out the Arbutus greenway next time you're in Vancouver!
I'm glad it's legal to ride bikes on the sidewalk here, there are a lot of crazy sections of road I wouldn't attempt otherwise. I do mostly stick to backroads and residential neighborhoods when I can, but main streets are unavoidable sometimes
Like if they going to both spend the time to do wayfinding signs and route markings they could at least add some paint to mark out the parking spots and narrowing lines to help reduce speed a little bit, it's only a few cents of a linear foot and make it a lot easier to follow the routes too.
Houston, Texas and surrounding cities have been widening sidewalks and calling them "multi use" pathways. Anything beyond 5 km (3.1 miles) in any direction from my house and I will be forced to deal with high-speed traffic with no bike lanes or pathways. As fuel prices continue to climb, more and more people in Houston are considering the bicycle for those short trips.
Yeah, Vancouver is quite good. I do Heather end-to-end as part of a commute. But then I hit Richmond for half of it. The city of Richmond has done all they can with what they have, but the original planners designed a grid of main arterials enclosing many 'protected enclaves' if you will, that have no through streets. So any direct route anywhere is on an arterial with an unprotected bike lane. There are a few other routes that are quite nice, but only a few. A case of being sabotaged before you start.
Share the road is the default. No need for signs to indicate that you are supposed to share the road.
We have had a main “route” into the town centre here in Worthing UK for years. It’s a bunch of blue signs directing you to the town, that you can easily miss. And while it’s not a terrible route, it’s not all quiet, and it hasn’t increased cycling at all. No proper cycling infrastructure to speak of, aside from some very worn paint on some very broken up tarmac.
I think the Vancouver methods of just blocking off certain streets to cars (LTNs as we would call them) is what everyone should be focusing on. It’s so much faster and cheaper to implement than trying to copy the Dutch, and we can get everyone on bikes really quickly. You could do this in no time.
I like the point you make about how signed routes will do nothing to increase cycling numbers. Thanks for sharing.
Even what you showed of Calgary has more dedicated bike infrastructure than my city.. which has a 4m mixed use rail-trail and that's it. All other bike infrastructure are just painted gutters which - you guessed it - become a buffer between the snowbanks and the "real" road in the winter. And get filled up with water, soaking your back with grit. And this is if you're fortunate enough to get the painted bike lanes..
Currently, even though our city has a fair bit of bicycle commuters and cyclists for its size, the most they've done in recent years has been adding a couple traffic islands and then they're GOING TO finish the cross-town trail (before you had to go around the entire town.. because they sold off the inner city rail grounds.. great for sustainable transport, of course!)
Hi Tom, I’m from Calgary, not a crazy biker but doing biking on my day off. I’m thinking of replacing my bike hub with “"shimano alfine 8”. Do you recomend this hub?. If yes , which bike shop you recommend.
Thanks
Sergio
It should get another +1 at the end for having a bike rack at Lowes. You don't see many bike racks anywhere in the US.
I don't know that I would -2 those seemingly quiet residential streets; they look narrow enough that drivers wouldn't drive very fast anyway.
My small-ish town has a bit of everything; sharrows, bike boulevards, bike lanes, and MUPs. It's sort of connected, mostly. It doesn't help that we've been carved up into pieces by Highways 101 and 299. The city is in the (slow) process of creating a rail trail from one end of town to the other, connecting two parts. Interestingly, we don't have any stop lights.
As a kid I would use this route, but as an adult I would just ride straight down 17th avenue on the road where you could easily hit 50 kph on your bike. (Yet still, motorists want to pass you just because you are on a bike, and that sometimes gets very dangerous at those speeds) Going uphill on 17th avenue I would just ride on the sidewalk.
It would be interesting to compare the route you took along that bikeway compared to what you would have done if you weren't gonna take a route like this. A lot of these routes tend to take weird and twisty ways and not connect to many destinations because the direct route with destinations is solely reserved to cars.
Also a possible improvement for the Vancouver one would be to have a road that has more traffic calming, that is narrower, and add a rule that you can't overtake cyclists. For the residents, it would only marginallly lengthen their car trips while making a much quieter neigborhood that's much more pleasant while having a even better experience for cyclists
I'm not sure if the Canadian Law allows for running stop signs on a bicycle, but it's a good way to get a blue light special in Dixie, as well as a good way to get flattened since most motorists expect all traffic to stop at them. ...though, yes, there is a lot of work that needs to be done to American cities to allow for safe passage of bicycle traffic.
I biked the Adanac / Union bikeway many days on the way to work. The cars along those streets know to look for cyclists; I've had my near-misses in other parts of the city, but that route is pretty great. Schools of cyclists use it every day.