Plow the bike paths

In his opinion piece on cycling safety measures, Jonathan McLeod notes that the City of Ottawa has reneged on its pledge to keep an additional 16 kilometres of bike paths free of snow all winter due to the estimated $200,000 annual cost. That comes to $12,500 per kilometre. However, imagine my surprise when I went to the City of Ottawa website and found that the city currently keeps about 5,400 km of roads and 1,500 km of sidewalks snow free in the winter at a cost of $4,224 “per lane kilometre.” I confess that I’m curious how a bike path costs $12,500 per kilometre while a sidewalk and road costs about a third of that.

I would call this decision, inflated expense scenario or not, short-sighted. Plowed paths in the winter keep more cars off the road all year, according to countless studies from across North America. Studies like the U.S. Department of Transportation-funded Bike Walk Twin Cities 2013 Report, which found that a relatively minor amount of funding towards winter path maintenance (about 130 km leading into the downtown core) resulted in a whopping 1,400 per cent increase from 2007 to 2013 in the number of cyclists using the paths in January. Perhaps that’s why Toronto now plows bike paths, Montreal does it, as do Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver and Minneapolis. Ottawa and or Gatineau? Well, apparently not. So you can expect to see me (commuting daily from Aylmer to downtown) and a growing army of winter bikers continue to wind our way through yet another vicious winter passing the idling cars stuck in gridlock as we go.

Hating us won’t make us go away, but plowing bike paths will. Doug Hoover, Gatineau