Rosemont borough to work hard on cycle paths
Rosemont borough has had five cyclist fatalities since 2011. It will be upgrading its bike paths to make them safer, and adding more. Eventually parts of Bellechasse and St-Zotique will be made one-way. This is all reasonable, but it would be nice to see a bit more about pedestrian safety, since that borough has also had fatalities among people simply crossing streets on foot.
Bill Binns 09:37 on 2019-06-07 Permalink
Cyclists are really enjoying their newfound legal ability to zoom into crosswalks from traffic lanes to avoid red lights without so much as touching their precious feet to the ground. As someone who walks two dogs, it’s pissing me off on a daily basis. It’s a matter of time until someone gets hurt if it hasn’t happened already.
Tim S. 10:17 on 2019-06-07 Permalink
For whatever reason pedestrians just aren’t as organized as cyclists when it comes to lobbying. I joined Pietons Quebec a couple of years back, but am still not clear on what they do, apart from sending out the odd press release.
Kate 10:22 on 2019-06-07 Permalink
Likewise, Tim S.
DeWolf 13:56 on 2019-06-07 Permalink
Don’t these cycling improvements inherently benefit pedestrians? They include traffic calming measures and less overall space for cars. And they often lead to significantly more street greenery thanks to planted medians (like on Rachel).
Tim S. 16:18 on 2019-06-07 Permalink
Dewolf: sometimes. But as has been discussed here many times, many of these moves simply turn the car vs cyclist dynamic into cyclist vs pedestrian. For example, I saw somewhere, via @CyclistBartek I think, an extremely well-thought out design for an intersection that would protect cyclists from cars. The designers, however, thought that obliging cyclists to yield to pedestrians at the crosswalk could be an optional feature. So no, I’m not automatically cheering these plans. We’ll see.
Ian 19:02 on 2019-06-07 Permalink
If yielding is optional, most bicyclists simply don’t yield to pedestrians.
nau 20:03 on 2019-06-07 Permalink
Of course, some attempts to favour the pedestrian in car vs. pedestrian situations end up worsening car vs cyclist interactions, such as when they widen the sidewalks to make the distance for pedestrians to cross shorter and in so doing force cyclists to move over into the space where the cars are travelling. It’s almost as if they can’t conceive of all three modes at the same time.
Just as a necessary counterpoint to Bill and Ian’s standard line, in my walking around I rarely have problematic encounters with cyclists but frequently have them with drivers. What exactly drivers find hard to understand about their left turn not having priority over the pedestrian walking through the crosswalk on the walk signal, I’ll never understand.