personal safety & signed bike routes in residential neighbourhoods

[shootingstar]

Rebecca:
shooting star….isn’t Calgary doing a new educational program in conjunction with the new cycle lanes being done in the city centre?

Well, the city uses the cycling advocacy organization (and gives them money) to run Canbike cycling skills program in the summer. Past few years. It's not a ton of people taking up on it. I'm talking about 10-15 people per course. Same sort of program in major Canadian cities in the past 20 years. It's strictly only up to the municipality and only if there's going to be funding. Sometimes from city or province.

The cycling education I think that you might have read for this summer, would be also outreach general public education with more marketing. The city will also hire student cycling ambassadors to be in certain downtown areas...

Of course all of our new separated bike lanes over the next 2-3 yrs., are not for the suburban areas. The emphasis of new separated bike lanes for the next 2-3 years, are only in the downtown area...not in the suburbs. I guess for negative response of some TE forumites here, that would meet their needs: no separated on road bike lanes in the suburban areas since people seem distrust/dislke them intensely.

So for the suburbs: put all the cyclists on just the park MUPs and they will not be encouraged to use bicycles for transportation since our paths rarely lead to schools, all major shopping centres, etc.....I'm being facetious. Have a few marked bike lanes but not separation barriers, right? My city is doing exactly this. Why bother wasting money on separated bike lanes in suburbs? The reality is that people in the suburbs have chosen to have a car-dependent life and many prefer that, no matter what I/we may think. Many people in the suburbs continue to get furious about the city wasting money on downtown separated bike lanes or any cycling infrastructure.

Cycling education combined with expanded, detailed awareness of bike routes that people cycle with experienced commuters, is helpful. Looking at a bike map still does NOT cement understanding in wannabes that our city does have some lengthy off-road MUPs that connect to a major linear park but also will take cyclists right by several major shopping malls in the suburbs via a MUP without inference of shopping mall car traffic. I cycle these routes weekly on weekends....and I don't see hardly any cyclists!! These same long park MUP routes connect up to the city's zoo and science centre, other local attractions.

Cycling for transportation attitudes is different from Toronto or Vancouver.

I cannot complain about crowded MUPs in our city: there are whole sections of a 700 km. parks system of connected MUPs. Only 25% of the whole system is busy and crowded enough to slow down cyclists at certain times from spring to fall. Most of the time, it's...empty on a beautiful sunny weekend when I'm on it. It continues to floor me but indicates the city where I live, a huge % of locals don't cycle often at all. But this system needs to be connected to on-road safe cycling routes.

Some of the crummy connections is that transportation engineers normally aren't trained on human behaviour aspects for cyclists and drivers. I've met transportation engineers...who don't cycle. They don't take mandatory courses at university on this. The push in their training is transportation efficiency, technical construction of infrastructure, technical understanding of materials and coping with volumes.

It's then not surprising, the shocking excitement by some people of driverless cars. It's like children playing in a fantasy world of model cars with mathematical calculations without babies and children (human beings) who make independent decisions --both logical and illogical with different human response rates on action as they travel.