Yet another reason why European socialism is Evil; bicycle-sharing

First, they invented public health-care, then the notorious welfare state. The latest evil to spread across Europe is Bicycle sharing. The tall athletic socialists who always win sporting events are now trying to surpass even America’s own superman with this endemic.

A red bicycle, a sure sign of commies

The idea is simple, borrow a bike from a central hub, ride it to work. Leave it at a hub, ride it home. Nobody’s going to steal it, because they can just spend 30 euros and buy a card. Read more here

Dots Mark the (Traffic Light) Sweet Spot

Watch for the Dots

The problem with some innovative ideas is that no one knows about them. ‘Bike Dots’ in the city of Toronto are one of these great innovations that most people tend to not know about. Bike Dots are the kind of thing that you know about if you are an avid cyclist, have avid cyclist friends, or have a tendency to notice things around you and then ask what they are. The City of Toronto has been painting “biked dots” for a number of years now at intersections scattered across the city.

“It’s the best-kept secret in the city,” Councillor Adrian Heaps.

The “Bike Dots” or “bicycle detector pavement markings” in official jargon are painted on the traffic sensor sweet spot. We are all aware that there are sensors in most of our intersections to help detect cars, the “Bike Dots” are painted in the area of pavement that is sensitive enough to notice if a cyclist stops on top. If you know how to use them it will keep you from sitting on your bike waiting for what feels like forever for the light to change, or at least until a car comes up beside you.

The city started installing the sensors in the nineties following a recommendation by the former Metro Transportation Department. The City estimates that approximately twenty percent of the city’s signalised  intersections have the dots.

Toronto isn’t the only city that uses bicycle sensors, the City of Berkeley has installed a number of ‘Bicycle Detector Loops’ at all eighteen of the intersections in the city that have ‘traffic-actuated signals.’

If your city hasn’t been kind enough to install bike sensors then there is extensive online recearch into coming up with ways to trick the vehicle sensors into thinking that your bike is actually a car.

Inductive loops designed to sense vehicles.

Read the Article that caused me to discover ‘Bike Dots.’ TheStar.com | GTA | Dots mark the spot for bicyclists to trigger traffic light

The Waterfront Trail

A Floating Bridge on Hamilton's portion of the trail

The Waterfront Trail was inaugurated this past year after the community organization in charge of the trail. The Waterfront Regeneration Trust was finally able to strike a deal after twelve years of hard work. The creation of the trail was no small undertaking with seventy different municipalities and other groups involved. The goal of the trust is to make sure that everyone has access to the waterfront and that the waterfront is worth getting to.

The trail is designed to take into account the history of the area. Most of the shores of Lake Ontario and the portion of the Saint Lawrence River that the trail fronts on was settled by Loyalists fleeing the United States who wanted to remain loyal to the British crown. They exerted a profound influence on the social, political and business life of Ontario for more then two centuries and played a major role in the development of Canada. The trail bears witness to this history by passing a number of historical reminders; Loyalist College, Loyalist Parkway, Loyalist Township and even the Loyalist Motel.

The goal of the trail is for it to link waterfronts from Niagara-on-the-Lake to Brockville and, then eventually, to connect it with Upper New York State’s Seaway Trail. It currently includes 31 communities, 182 parks and natural areas, 152 arts and cultural heritage attractions, 37 major annual waterfront festivals, and 170 marinas and yacht clubs.

Map of the Entire Trail

The trail is designed to be a multi-use recreation trail for use by people from all walks of life. The trail is also used by 24% of its patrons to commute to and from work. Currently the trail is about 30% off road dedicated path and 70% on residential streets or the paved shoulders of major roads. Most sections of the trail are paved but some are still gravel or packed limestone.

In the future the trust seeks to complete the few portions of the trail that are as of yet secured and expand the trail through a further 52 projects along the waterfront.

For more information on the trail check out their website.

Plus Petrina, the promotions and events manager for the trust has added some great suplementary information about the trust down below in the comments section so give it a click and check out what she has to say!

Who Owns Central Park?

Image composed from the loop in Central Park. (Peter Funch)

New York Summer Guide has a great article on the battle for public space going on right now in Central Park. It seems that there is a turf war going on right now between cyclists, runners, dog owners, and, generally, any other mode of locomotion in the park.

It’s shortly before six on a recent morning in Central Park. Dogs frolic, off-leash, through meadows. Joggers breeze along the roadways. In the half-lit hours just past dawn, the park is the urban idyll that its founders, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, envisioned at the park’s birth, 150 years ago.

But then you hear it, approaching in the distance, a stiff wind rustling leaves. The presence grows louder and crescendos until—whooooosh—they’re upon you: a teeming pack of cyclists bursting around the corner in a flash of neon spandex. Runners brandish their fists—or middle finger. Dogs and their owners scramble across the road, lest they be run down by the onrushing horde. It is every biker, runner, or canine for him, her, or itself. Before many New Yorkers have even had their first cup of coffee, the ongoing battle for Central Park is in full swing. “People think the park is a refuge, when you’re actually going into a cage match,” says Chris Yerkes, a Citi staffer who races on an amateur cycling team in the park. “You can liken it to an area which has no local government, no rules,” Manhattan Borough president Scott Stringer told me. The current situation is a New York City case study of the economic phenomenon known as the tragedy of the commons, whereby a shared resource is, inevitably, overexploited. Although interspersed with the tragedy are moments of high comedy.

Continue Reading ‘Who Owns Central Park?”

View Larger Map

The Complete Guide to Central Park

Central Park: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rain City Bikes

Not your average bike

The thing with bikes and the city is that it can be hard to haul things. Just because you live in the city and things are all pretty close doesn’t make having to carry ten bags, boxes, or some other packet of things home easy. But a company called Rain City Bikes in Vancouver has a solution to that: The Bakfiet or box bike. This puppy is a cargo bike designed to help you move whatever you need to move be it your kids, bricks, or your groceries. The bike has a low stand over and its center of gravity is very low to the ground. With a better ride than a trike and easier pedaling, they are great for lugging anything you need to around.

The bike

• alluminum alloy rims and spokes
• front and rear roller breaks
• a heavy duty rear parcel rack
• built in Axa lock
• internally geared hubs
• a springy gel seat
• a front dynamo powered light
• rear read lights
• a removable box with bench and harnesses
• a cargo cover
• a load capacty of 70kg in the front
• 30 kg capcity in the back

This bike is the answer to how to haul all your stuff around town–in the summer at least.

It Even Comes with a Fancy Cover!

The Bicycle Vault

New Urbanists, bike enthusiasts and pedestrians would love to see more and more of us switching from private vehicle use to mass transportation and bicycles. In order to cut down on the pollution caused by cars and eliminate so many of the parking lot wastelands that are a part of our cities. One of the problems that can come with this is where do we put all these bikes. Anyone who has walked around a major Japanese city, or even Amsterdam can understand that these multitudes of bicycles can be a bit of a jumble to wade through. Well leave it to the Japanese to come up with a high tech way of dealing with them.

Meet the computerised bicycle storage vault, you drop off your bike at the computer valet station and it whisks your bike away until you come back to retrieve it. While definitely not practical for North America where we have way more space, it could be the shape of things to come.

The Toronto Waterfront Viaduct

Viaduct Concept

Sweeping elevated highways and expressways are reminders of the modernist era with its dreams of speedy transportation from area to area on elevated right of ways. Le Corbusier and the modern movement glorified automobiles and gave them their own monumental structures upon which to travel so as not to be encumbered by the minor cross streets and other obstacles below. The modernist movement and Le Corbusier himself have in the years following been criticized for their legacy and these elevated freeways and expressways have gone from being glorious examples of the industrial prowess of man to giant eye sores and physiological barriers pretty much universally disliked by all and expensive to maintain. Toronto and Montreal both have extensive elevated systems and both are experiencing major structural issues. In Toronto there has been much debate over what to do about the Gardiner Expressway as many feel that it is a barrier to the successful redevelopment of the waterfront and no longer able to meet the demands placed upon it in terms of carrying capacity. There have been many proposals to deal with the issue of the Gardiner, however, due to both the prohibitive price tags and the question of what to do with existing traffic while these proposals are carried out has stalled the process.

The Viaduct

Jose Gutierrez of Seneca College has come up with a new idea the Toronto Waterfront Viaduct, first the idea of a 6km long cable stayed bridge seems ridiculous, however on further consideration it has some advantages that outweigh other proposals; its aesthetic appeal, the freeing up of land currently occupied by the expressway, and lack of interference with the existing expressway while under construction. Its 1.65 billion dollar price tag is also comparable with other proposals for the expressway.

“I thought about utilizing the existing Lakeshore rail corridor, and merging the Expressway and the rail tracks into one major transportation corridor,” Gutierrez says. “The cable-stayed idea came from the need to provide as few obstacles as possible for train movement and street level traffic (either pedestrian, bicycles, transit or car traffic).” source

Gutierrez’s proposal has simply the basic plan for the elevated viaduct and also add ons that could be used to either increase the diversity of uses for the viaduct or even offset the cost of building it. I find the proposal very exciting and it has the potential to integrate well into other projects such as the union station redevelopment and assorted waterfront projects.

Inside Concept

Click here to see his proposal in depth.

Links
http://spacing.ca/wire/?page_id=1244
http://www.toviaduct.com/