Category: Transportation

Bike to Work Week starts today

Today marks the first day of the annual Bike to Work Week. This years is two weeks early, to coincide with events across North America. The kick off this morning at the south end of the Selkirk Trestle. That was only the first of a whole host of celebration stations across the city over the next week.

Safer Cycling Oak Bay plans to be at a few of them promoting the bike master plan and asking people what routes they commute by in Oak Bay:

Morning (6:45 am – 8:45 am)

Tuesday – UVic Fountain

Wednesday – Front lawn of the Oak Bay Municipal Hall

Thursday – Royal Jubilee Hospital (uncertain exact location)

Afternoon (3:30 pm – 5:30 pm)

Thursday – UVic Fountain

There are lots of other stations. Check out the complete schedule (PDF).

I will also be heading up to Sidney this afternoon to the celebration station in Tulista Park between 3:30 and 5:30:


View Larger Map

I am hoping to get to a few more, just to talk with people and get inspired. Happy Bike to Work Week everybody!

Quick note about the map: It is from the , a user-editable map of the world. Although the map is incomplete, the Canadian government with its Geobase project has released much of its data under a free license and this is now being imported into OSM.

Why is free data important? It allows different views of the map, such as the cycle-specific version embedded above, which shows bike routes, parking and lanes. Sadly Geobase lacks any of this bike-specific data butyou can help.

Pictures and notes from the East Saanich Rd. open house

Mayor and councillor talk at open house
North Saanich Mayor Alice Findall and Councillor Peter Chandler at open house

I had heard the rumours of bike lanes and sidewalks on East Saanich Rd., so when I learnt that North Saanich was hosting an open house to display the plans, I decided to check it out. The open house took place over three hours in room just off the lobby in the Panorama Rec. Centre. With 60 people trickling through over the course of the evening, it was well attended event, always good for getting as much feedback as possible. On hand to answer questions and take comments North Saanich engineering staff, engineering staff from Declan, the consultant, as well as Councillor Peter Chandler. Mayor Alice Findall also stopped in for a few moments in the early parts of the evening.

Display from People for a Pedestrian-Friendly Dean Park
Suzanne Mophet with display from People for a Pedestrian-Friendly Dean Park

Outside the map room was the People for a Pedestrian Dean Park, a group seeking to make the Dean Park neighbourhood safer for walkers and bikers. Suzanne Mophet, who founded the group, had setup a large board with a map of the neighbourhood and was asking people about where they would like to see pedestrian paths, sidewalks and other amenities. She and I ended up having a long conversation about the challenges of traffic calming in the newer suburbs, especially with regards to getting political and popular support.

While I got a sense during the night that most people were supportive, I was confirmed with I spoke to Baohua Duan, one of the North Saanich Municipality’s engineering techs the next day. She is responsible for compiling all the myriad feedback from the 37 response forms. She confirmed that the overwhelming impression was very positive.

All in all, it was a very well run event. Kudos to North Saanich for giving the public the opportunity to give feedback. The Declan and North Saanich engineering staff were great at answering nearly any question and having a councillor on hand was a nice bonus. I am looking forward to early fall when all the construction (North and Central Saanich) should be done.

Happy? Hindenburg Day

USS Akron (Hindenburg sister ship) over Manhattan in the 1930s. US Navy Photo

Today in 1937, the Hindenberg caught fire and burnt at Lakehurst Naval Station. Along with it’s 36 passengers and crew died any hopes of a commercial airship industry. As a result today blimps and dirigibles are hard to see. Most famous is probably one of the Goodyear Blimps. Those lucky enough to live in the San Francisco area also get to see Airship Venture’s Eureka, a Zeppelin NT. And if you live in Germany, you can always visit the Zeppelin Museum (Wikipedia article), which has a partial full-scale mockup of the Graf Zeppelin.

Here’s hoping we will see a revival of the airship industry in the near future. Aside from being neat, airships are also fairly environmentally friendly, something that can’t be said for most other forms of aerial transport.

Hat-tip to Making Light for reminding us all of this day.

East Saanich Rd. bike lane Open House tonight

Proposed East Saanich Rd. bike lane
Proposed East Saanich Rd. bike lane

I will be at the East Saanich Rd. bike lane project Open House tonight. It is being run the Municipality of North Saanich and is being held at the Panorama Rec. Centre and runs from 5pm to 8pm. On hand will be North Saanich engineering staff to discuss the proposed plan.

This project ties into a similar Central Saanich project that was funded by the Federal and Provinicial governments (press release – PDF & LocalMotion projects page). According to this news story, the work on that should start in June and be done by October.

Maddeningly, I couldn’t find any information about Federal gov. money in the North Saanich portion. The above linked LocalMotion page lists $361,284 of Provinical money, which is cost shared 50/50 with the municipality.

Regardless, this is a much needed project. It provides yet another north-south route to complement West Saanich Rd. and the Lochside Trail. Hope to see some familiar faces there!

Wordle on Sunday’s raindrops and rainbows

It is no secret that I like tag clouds. They provide a great way to see what people are saying by popularity. They have really taken off in the past few years. Even the CBC was gotten into the act, with a tag cloud of the platforms of the three major parties in the 2009 election.

Creating them is a bit of an art with funky algorithms and the like. There are quite a few tools out there, but Wordle seems to be the most common. I used it for my announcement of my candidacy in the 2008 municipal elections, for example. So I figured I would run the raindrops and rainbows from the Safer Cycling Oak Bay table at the fair on Sunday and see what I got:

Rainbows

Rainbows from comm. fair
Things people liked about biking in Oak Bay

Raindrops

Raindrops from Community Fair
Things people disliked about biking in Oak Bay

A few things pop out at me: There was a strong current of environment and community running through the likes. Nice to see that bikes not only help the environment, they help everybodies health and help build community as a nice side benefit. The dislikes centred around two themes: respect and lack of infrastructure. People wanted to see more respect between drivers and cyclists, especially with regard to both needing to follow rules of the road. Bike parking and lanes were much talked about, as well as the growing number of potholes in roads.

As I said yesterday, I am very pleased at the amount of feedback we got and that people took the time to think about what they wrote. I am truly looking forward to the next few months. If you wanted to give us feedback in person, the next time to do so will likely be at Bike to Work Week coming up from the 11th to the 17th. When details are worked out, I will post more.

Rainbows & Raindrops from the community fair

At the Community Fair yesterday we put out two piece of bristol board, sticky notes and pens and then we asked people who came by to tell us about biking in Oak Bay, both what they loved and what they would like to see changed or disliked. We got some great feedback, as I have transcribed below:

Liked

  • Healthier and environmentally better way to travel. Oak Bay is awesome for biking
  • Riding along the waterfront (Dallas Rd.)
  • Path along the water
  • New bike lanes on Henderson
  • love riding on Oak Bay’s quiet streets
  • Part of Foul Bay Bike lane
  • Slow traffic in Oak Bay
  • Lanes
  • Quiet bike lanes. Sidelanes and back alleys
  • Bike lanes
  • Roads that are generally quiet
  • Bike lanes. Secure locking ???. beach dr & oak bay avenue
  • Quiet streets for making long traverses across the community
  • Fresh air and exercise
  • New bike parking at municipal hall
  • close to community, parking easy, fresh air, calories burned

Of course, life is not all roses. Sometimes there are thorns:

  • Disrespect by cyclists and motorists for each other
  • bicyclists who ride in the middle of the road instead of the cycle lane! 🙂
  • cars parked on Beach Drive
  • No road bike lane by Marina and Glenlyon
  • Need more bike trails
  • Roads where there is not enough room for bikes + car (McNeil Ave)
  • Lack of bike trails and lanes
  • Access to Galloping Goose from Oak Bay
  • Cyclists who ignore the rules of the road
  • Need bike lane on Foul Bay
  • Oak Bay needs more bike lanes
  • nervous of traffic
  • Parking along Cedar Hill X Rd up to Uvic is very dangerous!
  • Oak Bay needs more bike lane & bike racks
  • Potholes
  • traffic calming devices. potholes in street
  • Not enough bike racks in the village!
  • Cyclists who don’t follow the rules of the road. Cyclists who don’t have lights.
  • Foul Bay & Oak Bay intersection
  • not much bike parking on the avenue
  • clear glass from bike lanes
  • –> Please signal –> Wear helmets

Each line is a single note. Where possible I have tried to preserve the formatting/spelling/etc.

We also got a few comments about the pedestrian experience:

Liked

  • For wheelchair: Good in the village, Foul Bay rather rough
  • Safe, clean sidewalks that have been redone

Disliked:

  • More attention to care of sidewalks on non-busy roads
  • crosswalk at Brighton + Foul Bay to fit with the Brighton Ave Centennial path

Thanks again to Jill Croft and the whole OB Comm. Association for organizing the event, the OB Emergency Preparedness people for being so kind as to share their space and time and to Jane and David who came out and peopled the SCOB booth with me. Here’s looking forward to next years.

Come to the Oak Bay Community Fair today

Safer Cycling Oak Bay will be at the Oak Bay Community Fair today between 11:30am and 1:30pm. The fair, which is co-hosted with the emergency prepardness people, is in the Oak Bay Recreation Centre’s indoor soccer pitch. We will be there to talk about what we are working on, to meet more people from around Oak  Bay and learn what they love and want to change about biking in Oak Bay.

Entitled Driver Syndrome hits Liberal candidates

Candidate vetting is always a tricky process. It is far, far too easy to miss something that will bite the candidate and the party in the butt when they least expect it. This is partly the reason I duck out of sight whenever somebody brings out a camera at a party. I live in the internet generation. Nearly everything we do goes online, something Ray Lam, the former NDP canadidate for Vancouver-False Creek, discovered last week (CBC).

But there are mistakes and there are mistakes. Getting underwear pulled at a party is not the same as getting behind the wheel of a deadly machine and driving away while drunk. And getting a simple parking ticket is not the same as willfully ignoring traffic laws merely because you are “busy working”. It seems that some of Liberal candidates haven’t yet learnt that (CBC). Even the Solicitor General, the person in charge of ICBC, is getting in on the act (CBC).

The sad reality is that because of Entitled Driver Syndrome or the so-called windshield perspective, these people won’t drop out of the race. Part of  the blame for this can be laid at the feet of the journalists. They are often just as guilty (Streetblog), if not more so. It is ultimately a societal flaw. We let people get away with things behind the wheel that they never would be able to do outside a car. We invent cute phrases like “road rage” or explain away blame by using terms like “accident” rather than crash. Maybe somebody that will change. I guess I can only keep hoping.

Unconscious bias: the new BCTransit logo

BCTransit has slowly been rolling out the new corporate look for the past few months and as part of the new look, they got a new logo:

One of the interesting things about this new logo is the inclusion of a stylized road. Few transit logos include any explicit reference to the service they are offering. I expect this is largely an unconscious decision, as few logos in any field explicitly reference the product or service they are associated with. For example:

Image courtesy of Julie & Co, a design firm out of DC.

Rebranding of any kind usually involves most of the senior management, which brings me to the point of this post: I think that the senior management of BCTransit is biased against rail transit. I don’t think this is a conscious bias or that they are even aware they have it. After all, knowing you like blue doesn’t mean you always think about why you choose the blue thing. BCTransit’s management has so internalized that rail transit is not an option here in the CRD that they made their corporate image exclude it.

This is despite having an existing rail corridor running from the core into downtown Langford, arguably the two places we need to link most with transit. All this means that the shiny new study will suggest exactly the same as every other study listed on this page: do nothing. Talking about unconscious bias. The URL to the Victoria Regional Rapid Transit project is busonline.ca.