Side-by-side cycling doesn’t make sense outside of regional wishful thinking

BUCKING PUBLIC OPINION – and, some would argue, common sense – regional council has cleared the way for side-by-side cycling on regional roads. Woolwich and Wellesley townships aren’t going along for the ride.

The townships are content with current township bylaws that prohibit the practice, requiring cyclists to travel in single file. Safety is the key issue, as the combination of narrow lanes and high speeds on rural roads are already a problem for drivers overtaking cyclists. Letting them ride abreast – in practice, that already happens at times – would complicate the situation, leading to more collisions, perhaps, and bad blood, certainly.

Cyclists being in the right means pretty much zero in the event of collision. When car meets bike, bike loses every time.

“The only problem is the cyclists will be right; but my biggest fear is that there are going to be far too many that are going to be dead right,” said Township of Wilmot Mayor Les Armstrong in debating the issue last month at regional council.

In approving the change, regional councillors succumbed to pressure from a tiny but vocal user group, sprinkled with a healthy dollop of the same kind of wishful thinking that foisted an unneeded light rail transit system on the public: if you build it, they will come.

As with the proliferation of bicycle lanes, planners seem to think that by offering up alternatives, people will get out of their cars. It’s not going to happen. Few people use the bike lanes in the region’s cities. Instead of scrapping the idea, the solution is to create more of them.

In the rural areas, the scenic roads are the routes of choice for hobbyists. Outside of the Mennonite community, cycling is largely a leisure activity, not a form of transportation despite what regional planners would have us believe.

Sure, there’s little harm in paving out a little more of the shoulder when reconstructing rural roads, where space and budget allow for it. Some people are going to cycle, so making it safer for them and for motorists is a good idea. But just how much money should be spent on what is likely to remain marginally used infrastructure like bicycle lanes. Will people use the bike lanes? No, of course not. Oh, some people will. Enough to justify the expense? Not likely. Certainly not if getting people to use bikes instead of cars is the goal, any more than the region’s much more costly fiasco, light rail transit.

Perhaps separate bike lanes, removed from car traffic, will certainly encourage more people to cycle given the increased safety. Just add in miles and miles of contiguous segregated cycling lanes, and then you’ll have something useful. If planners want relevant numbers of cyclists, however, they’ll have to do something about the unsuitable weather eight months of the year.

Some of the same people now lobbying township councillors to change their opinion of side-by-side cycling will argue there are those who both use their bikes to commute and do so all year round. Certainly that’s true, but the numbers are tiny. Even advocacy groups such as the Share the Road Cycling Coalition note that the overwhelming majority – 96 per cent – of those who support more bicycle use would ride more often for recreation, not transportation.

A 2014 poll by the group found some 54 per cent of us would like to ride our bikes more often. Currently, 32 per cent of Ontarians (4.3 million people) ride their bike at least monthly. Of those, four per cent (540,000) say they ride a bike daily or almost daily.

One of the biggest hindrances to larger participation rates is safety: people don’t feel comfortable riding on the street. Plenty of us who actually own a bike let it sit unused much of the time. The biggest reason? Fearing for our safety. There’s good reason to be afraid: cars don’t share the road well, and our streets just aren’t made to accommodate cyclists, even on those with what are nominally called bike lanes.

The same poll revealed that the majority of Ontarians (more than 60 per cent) say they would like to ride a bike more often, but cite the same safety concerns.

Of course, the real reasons why we don’t cycle more often are similar to why we don’t walk more often, exercise regularly, eat healthier foods and spend less time in front of a video screen of some sort: we don’t want to. But few of us will come out and say that, making endless excuses to ourselves. We’re certainly going to answer questions in a way that puts our sedentary lifestyles in the best light.

So, where cycling is concerned, it’s safety and lack of bike lanes/trails that keep us out of the saddle, rather than copping to things we don’t even want to admit to ourselves.

Back to side-by-side cycling, safety is the real issue. Arguments about changing the rules to encourage more people to cycle are moot. In theory, we’d like to see more of that, but all the talk of health benefits and transportation options – the townships hear about how bikes will help prevent sprawl but, just like public transit, the reality is much different – they can’t trump real concerns for riders and drivers on actual roads.

Like bike lanes, the sideby-side cycling decision is linked to the transportation master plan the region is pushing through. It proposes to ease traffic woes by encouraging greater use of public transit, cycling and walking. The goal is to help curtail sprawl by promoting higher densities in the transit corridor – precisely the opposite of what’s likely to happen with so much greenfield development in the office – something like the LRT is a minor northsouth (well, the price is not minor) venture in an eastwest growth paradigm.

The two-abreast riding decision may make sense to some at the region in that it complies to the tale it wants to believe, but the townships have it right in the real world.