I’m wrapping up 4 weeks of parental leave from work (going back Monday), and so for the last few month I have been spending all day every day with kids. Since I got the new bike (which can carry the older two on the back), the kids have been wanting to run errands and do things on the bike instead of the car (which I love to hear of course as I feel the same way). This means that I have been thinking a lot about bike routes to certain places I’ve only imagined actually getting to with kids on the bike.
Getting to the Library
The library is one of the places I aim to go to more often with my kids, the local library was one of my favorite places to be growing up, and it was especially nice when I could make it there on my own on the bike. In Calgary where I grew up, the library wasn’t particularly easy to get to on a bike, but it wasn’t far and I am very comfortable on a bike, so from an early age I just biked in traffic, and this was the late-90s, early 2000s, so bike infrastructure definitely wasn’t a thing.
In setting out to do this, I got looking at maps to see that the most efficient several routes to get to the library were all just on the street. Some streets were less busy than others, but the stretch to get across the highway consists of two options, both of which are heavily under construction and each consist of 2-lane roads where you’re asked to ‘share the road’ single file.
Crossing the highway
I could only do that short stretch because I feel very comfortable taking the full lane, and because I’ve biked enough that I can travel about 30kph up the hill across the bridge to cross the highway. For those of you who don’t bike on the streets often, when you need to share the lane, every car behind you INSTANTLY feels the need to try to pass you at speed even if there is additional danger for them in doing that. This is obviously exacerbated by a larger speed difference between the speed limit and the speed of your bike, but even if I’m going 30 and the car traffic should be going 40, cars will typically exceed the speed limit temporarily just to get around you, sometimes a lot, because they won’t have to wait 30 seconds behind you.
I’m happy to note this particular stretch across the highway on the two nearby bridges (Jeanne d’Arc and Orleans Blvds) are being improved, and so both are partly under construction right now. There will be a pair of multi-use paths going in to cross these two bridges, which I expect will greatly improve the comfort and safety of getting across the highway. It has been under construction for over a year now, and cycling even alone hasn’t felt particularly safe for me at any point during that time, nor did it feel safe at any time before construction began.
Once we got across the highway, the road opens back up to 4 total lanes again, which for such a low volume route (with sections at both ends that bottleneck to 1 lane, by the way) basically means the outer two lanes function as bike lanes outside of the very short morning and afternoon rush (I’ve never witnessed this busy period to be honest, but there are people who swear traffic volume requires 2 lanes each way).
The Rest of the Way
Once I made it across the highway, I got some advice from a fellow bike parent that you could avoid some car traffic to do the last stretch of the route following basically back roads through the adjacent neighbourhoods. I had the map (below) in my head as an approximate route plan, but it basically involves winding through local streets and on to and off pathways. It’s kind of a maze but it does work, and with kids on the bike it does feel way safer than the alternative.
When I tried to bike to the library on my own in preparation for this trip (imagine ‘trying’ a trip alone in a car to make sure it’s safe to take a family later 😢), I attempted to use the logical efficient route (and the one suggested for bikes by Google Maps) and essentially follow Orleans Blvd for the entire last half of the route. On the map that would basically be replacing the whole last section weaving through the community with just following the obvious straight line path across the highway all the way up the hill to the library. It’s actually a very simple route in a car where you’re not worrying about these things.
Orleans Blvd
Orleans Blvd has TONS of space for wider sidewalks and cycle tracks (see this post for an example of the space there is in this right-of-way), but in its current form, it’s a 4-lane road with a speed limit of 60, and it is designed for cars to feel totally comfortable going MUCH faster than that. Even on an ebike going full tilt without passengers on my test run, I was going low 30s kph and being passed in the other lane by cars going 60-70. Again, the road volume doesn’t require 2 lanes each way, so cars typically wouldn’t need to close pass you in your lane, but they certainly would try if it came to saving a few seconds and there was another car next to them. Going up a hill in traffic is the worst, because as I said before it all comes down to the speed difference, I think cycle tracks on this route would probably be the most beneficial because it will enable less confident riders to feel comfortable taking this route, where I wouldn’t recommend its use today at all.
The one nice thing about the route we were required to take to feel safe (not to say this wouldn’t be possible if there was safe bike infrastructure) is that while taking back roads through the neighbourhood, we passed by at least 4-5 little parks and playgrounds, each of which the kids absolutely would have stopped and played at. On the way home, we did pick one of them to stop at, which really capped off the experience for the kiddos.
Conclusions
In summary, I think this ride is absolutely doable if you feel up for being hassled by cars as you cross the highway (it is literally 1-2 blocks of the whole trip), but with some consideration of this kind of bike traffic, this route could be SO MUCH BETTER. Given traffic volumes in the area, having this bridge be one lane is not a big deal (it’s been like this for a year!), and it would enable so many more people to get around outside of their cars.
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