Tour of Penticton
Penticton and Area Cycling Association vice-president Max Picton and I recently led four members of our council along the proposed path of the lake-to-lake bike route.
As you are probably familiar by now, the proposed route starts at the north end of Martin Street, then continues on Fairview Road, Atkinson Street, with a small jaunt on Kinney Avenue, before going down South Main to Skaha Lake Park.
Joining us on bikes was Couns. Watt, Bloomfield, and Regehr. Coun. Sentes joined us in her car and stopped to chat with us at the points of interest and Mayor John Vassilaki met us to at the end of the ride. Due to a last-minute scheduling change by us, Coun. Robinson was unable to attend.
We felt it to be a fruitful exercise and a great opportunity to show the council the conditions on the ground. Thank you to the council members for accepting our invitation. We trust it was informative.
In what seemed to be incredible timing, as we were just about to depart, James Miller, editor of this fine paper, happened to walk by. He snapped a picture of us and promptly uploaded it to the Herald’s Facebook page.
What came next in the comments section was basically the same tired old myths about this project: cyclists should pay for the roads like drivers do, cyclists should require insurance and licensing, no one bikes and it’s a waste of money.
As I try to explain in the threads, albeit many times in vain, is that if you were truly a fiscal conservative in transportation, you’d try to get as many people as you could to walk, ride a bike, or use public transportation. You’d charge for parking everywhere and use it to improve sustainable and inclusive forms of transportation. You’d likely even consider paying folks to walk and bike.
When compared with moving people in private automobiles, walking and biking is not expensive, in fact it’s pennies on the dollar. You also get tremendous public health benefits and you literally provide a path to your constituents of less car dependency, with the opportunity for them to save thousands per year in automotive costs.
Funding of municipal roads are in no way tied directly to how much you consume of said road, no matter how many times you read this on Facebook. They are largely tied to municipal taxes. As a sustainable transportation advocate, I wish there was a direct correlation: we would likely already have better infrastructure as many more people would be incentivized to walk and bike.
I could make a pretty good argument in fact that the precise reason that our walking and cycling infrastructure sucks is that there is very little that ties how much you drive to how much you pay for the road.
The closest thing I have seen is “congestion pricing” which is currently in place in London and Stockholm, and soon to be in New York City. Another form is called “mobility pricing” and has recently been a topic of discussion in the current provincial election campaign.
I think people that advocate for cyclists to have insurance must be just jealous that a transportation device can be so efficient, cheap, and pose so little danger to others that insurance not be necessary. I’d love to see an insurance policy for a $100 bike. How much could they want for that? What is the deductible to replace a $23 fender? Will insurance cover replacement of a $6 brake cable? I’ll hang up and listen.