Less Car

Category: Bike

  • Restoring the Heart of the Suburbs

    Restoring the Heart of the Suburbs

    Today, I’d like to share an idea with you. This might be something you have never thought about before, and in fact it may be a lot of work up front to convince you that thinking about this is even worth your time. If you’ve felt at one time or another – over the last 5, 10, or even 20 years perhaps – like something fundamental is missing from your community, come along for this ride with me. And if you *don’t* have or haven’t ever had this feeling, I hope you will hear me out, and I’m curious if you find yourself nodding along. It may be a winding road, but I think there is a lot of value to following it.

    Obviously, anybody reading this is bringing with them their own life experiences and unique history. Some of our human experiences are shared by almost everyone, while others are quite rare and won’t be relatable to as many people. I can only really speak from my own experiences, so you may have to either put yourself in my shoes or map your own life to my history to really understand what makes me feel this way.

    The Community You’re Raised With

    I was raised in a central urban community mostly in the 90s and early 2000s in Calgary. While I was in that situation, as a kid, I wouldn’t say I cherished the experience, but I certainly made the most of it. The furthest I ever had to go to get to school was 3.5 km to get to high school, and it was a calm, quiet ~15-minute bike ride. I would frequently walk to school as well, and I could get anywhere I needed to go in the city on bike or by public transit.

    I didn’t realize it at the time, but growing up in this environment, self-sufficient without a car in a community that had other good options, prepared me very well for not needing a car as an adult either. My first job was within easy walking distance, and every job I had in Calgary was close enough that I could walk, bike, or take the bus/train. I got my learner’s driving permit at 14 (as was/is? the legal age in Alberta), but I didn’t actually get my full driver’s license (nor did I need it) until my mid/late 20s because I didn’t need to drive anywhere, and I had other good options to get around. For example, Calgary built an LRT for the 1988 Winter Olympics and has continued to extend and improve it over the decades.

    Even when I moved to Ottawa in 2006 for university, I lived in at least a half dozen residences and apartments before moving into a condo with my wife in 2014. All of these places before the condo were within a 10-20 minute walk to university campus and to the places I worked. I didn’t have a car, and I certainly wasn’t going to buy one without a license or a need for it. Even when I did move out near the Montfort hospital to the condo, I would take the bus to work on the worst weather days, and still most of the year I would bike or even rollerblade downtown. I would drive in occasionally (we’re talking 1-2 times a year at most when I needed to bring something heavy or awkward to the office), but in my entire life I have never routinely commuted anywhere by car.

    What Changed?

    In 2019, my wife and our 1-year-old daughter moved to Convent Glen North. It was a major change in my life, but it was always pitched as the ‘endgame’ of city life to buy a house and move to the suburbs. You have so much space for yourself and your family, and the suburbs are littered with shopping centres and “main streets” with all the amenities that seem like they’re trying their best to feel a little like the ones downtown, as long as you don’t look that closely.

    Fast forward to 2024, and I have a stable job and have fully settled into suburban routine. The pandemic helped a lot with that settling process, as our home became the office, as well as the daycare for quite a while. We are now a family of 5 starting to attend the school we can walk to while only crossing our own street and the park, which really makes it feel quite urban most days. We have a lot of space that feels like it is truly just ours, but over the last year or two, the whole rest of my life experience I described earlier has been sitting in the back of my mind, brewing up thoughts and feelings.

    When I said earlier that I can only speak from my own experiences, here is where those experiences shape my feelings about this pocket of the suburbs. If I had to describe the feeling in a single word, I would call it isolating. I’m a strong introvert, so it’s not like I want to be friends with and talk to everybody all the time, but actually meeting and chatting with your neighbours feels like an anomaly more than how it is supposed to work. I have some of my own feelings about the reasons why this is the way it feels, and I’d like to try to break it down now.

    Why The Suburbs Feel Isolating

    I think calling human interaction in the suburbs an ‘anomaly’ is sort of the perfect way to describe it. It’s not that you can’t see people who live near you, because you totally can, but it is almost deliberately outside the norm. Interactions with your neighbours only happen through coincidence or through direct and deliberate action. Living in the suburbs, where effectively everyone has at least one car, and some families have at least two or three, most of what you do to get places involves getting in your car (maybe even from inside your garage) and going somewhere that isn’t anywhere near your home, or even in your neighbourhood. Compare that to a condo subdivision or apartment complex, where there is shared space and sidewalks and elevators where you will definitely see and interact with people as a matter of course going about your daily life.

    The way most suburban neighbourhoods are set up is very obfuscating to your sense of direction, with almost exclusively single-family homes clustered together in large, loopy patterns with no or very few higher-density housing options. If you want to go somewhere or do something, by default, you get in the car, because almost nothing is within walking distance. Compared to the grid that serves as the root system for older urban neighbourhoods, wayfinding by feel in a suburb requires repetitive trips and experience to learn how to get around or relying on GPS navigation. Between that and the cookie cutter approach to home design, many suburbs literally feel like a maze, relying on individual homeowners to make distinctive changes to their properties to give the neighbourhood any character at all. While this maze-like road design does tend to make walks for adventure and exercise more interesting than a grid layout, walking for transportation is inefficient and can be downright dangerous. Our suburbs, for example, don’t have any sidewalks at all on most local streets, and often have only one sidewalk on collector roads.

    This winding and branching structure of suburban neighbourhoods has another detrimental side effect that makes cars seem like the obvious or only choice for transportation. Sending buses or any public transit through these communities is a massive logistical challenge, because the population density along any route is quite low, and there are no efficient straight-line roads for buses. It is possible to plan routes through these neighbourhoods, of course, but sending full-size buses through the neighbourhood every 30-60 minutes during peak times (like we do now) is not a recipe for people using the transit system for anything other than their commute, at best. For a transit system to really make sense as a funnel to get people to nearby business hubs (like St. Joseph) or connect to other transit (like the LRT to get downtown), something like a compact 16-24 seat community shuttle running every 10-15 minutes makes far more sense.

    You will never be able to beat a car 1 to 1 on the basis of convenience getting almost anywhere in a city, if you already have a car and you don’t take into account that the decision to drive is not made in a vacuum. However, if you play that out in reality with a whole population, traffic drastically changes the equation, and suddenly your trip time can double or even triple just by leaving for your destination at a different time. Driving a car is wildly less convenient if you plan around a 10-15 minute commute to go downtown, and it ends up taking you over an hour because of traffic, a crash on the highway, and spending 10-15 minutes circling the block looking for parking.

    The reason I feel compelled to describe the bait and switch convenience a car promises in this story is that transportation efficiency isn’t the only consideration you’re making when choosing how to get where you need to go. By getting into a car, you are (possibly without realising it) choosing to isolate yourself from society and the world around you. When a whole community (and their kids, mind you) choose to pile in to their individual cars every day to run errands, attend events, pick up dinner at the drive thru, commute to work and school, and do anything else you might want to do, it means absolutely no chance of incidental casual conversations with people in your immediate vicinity.

    By getting in your car in the garage or driveway, rolling up to your faraway destination in a closed box, and seeing other people who’ve done the same, you end up having very little connection to the place you live. Not your house, but the immediate surroundings, the 10-20 closest neighbours. In contrast, when you choose to bike to your destination, or walk to the bus and wait at the stop, or do anything other than jump in the car, the opportunities for face-to-face time with people in your community multiply rapidly and almost instantly.

    The ability to flip an ignition switch and get literally anywhere within a 50km radius in under an hour (rush hour notwithstanding) is nothing short of magical when you need it. But this magical power is not without its tradeoffs, and I think this is having a meaningful impact on quality of life in the suburbs, even if it is very hard to see unless you’re looking for it. When you are going about your life outside of a car, you are interacting with other human beings in your surroundings. If you need help, someone to talk to, friendship, entertainment, or any other personal connection, the people that are just out in the world can actually connect and be that for you, or just be there for you. In a car, you are completely isolated, without any way to interact with anybody. All your interactions are mediated by car horns, wheel turning, and maybe hand signals or facial expressions if you are within a few feet of another car. We have become much less likely to give affordances to machines on the roads than we are to people on the roads. I think sometimes we’re actually starting to treat cyclists and pedestrians outside our cars more like mechanical objects than fellow human beings, in ways we would never do if a vehicle wasn’t mediating our interactions.

    What This All Means For a Sense of Community

    With the incredible and lightning-fast changes to our society brought about by new and improving technologies, it’s easy to attribute a change in the feeling of community to things like the internet or mobile phones. The rise in phenomena like online dating over meeting in person and job interviews taking place online only and mostly via algorithms seem like they are entirely products of the internet. But I think a big part of why the online versions of these things are so much harder now than their real-life equivalents is that we’re so used to being in our own social bubbles and getting very little exposure to people we aren’t already in contact with. It’s not to say there aren’t both pros and cons to hiring and dating online (obviously, there are pros as well), but there are real tangible benefits to having options to do those things in person as well.

    Over the last few decades, we have changed from a society that would mainly interact face to face and with people who lived within 2-3 city blocks of us. There would certainly be occasions where people travelled longer distances, but it was unusual that people would traverse a whole major city on a regular basis as a matter of normal routine. Now, with the ease of being able to jump in the car and get anything or see anyone, our social circles today are much less likely to include people who live near us. Coupling this with the exclusionary residential zoning typical especially of suburban communities, and it’s easy to see how it’s much harder to meet new people and run into people you know.

    The places where people spend their downtime have a massive overwhelming impact on our lives, who they know, and the kinds of things they can do. For a large portion of people, kids or adults, outside of our homes work or school are the only places we spend any meaningful amount of time relaxing. It is very hard to form relationships or get to know people better when this is all you see of them, and it is almost impossible to do this if two people or groups don’t even share a workplace or school.

    What About Solutions?

    One big thing that can help this phenomenon of a loss of regular community social interaction is new considerations for what sociologists call ‘Third Places’. These are social places in the heart of a community where people feel comfortable just existing and spending time with others. These can be community centres, cafes, bars or pubs, libraries, or any other manner of public spaces that can be used either free of charge or for very little cost. It is possible for individual private homes to become third places, but this is usually temporary for events like birthdays or holidays. In a suburb which is almost exclusively only allowed to legally contain single-family homes, third places have now generally become a destination with a high energy barrier to access. I spent my university years as a chemist, so in case that chemistry metaphor doesn’t track, I’ll try to put it in plain English.

    Going to the local coffee shop, a restaurant, the gym, kids’ activities, your job, the grocery store, the library, etc., etc., etc. all require piling in to the car, driving for some non-trivial number of minutes, and finally arriving at your destination to do the thing you want or need to do. We tend not to think about it as such but visiting a place where you feel comfortable and can relax outside your home like this requires a tremendous amount of energy output. This is probably because the car is the thing actually outputting the energy to get you there. However, the end result is that for most people, they tend to just stay in and not try to expend that large amount of energy to get somewhere unless they really decide it’s worth their while.

    In case you don’t believe me, just try to imagine doing one day worth of moving around centered in your suburb WITHOUT a vehicle. Suddenly, the energy required comes into stark focus. If all or many of the things you needed to get to on an average day were within a 10–15-minute low energy walk, you might find you don’t even need a gym membership, much less a second car or even a car at all the majority of the time. The old joke about routinely driving to the gym and then taking the escalator up to get your workout in is actually a call to better urbanism in disguise.

    Wrapping Up

    I believe the solution to reconstituting the heart of our community is to actually spend time thinking about the neighbourhoods we live in as a destination, not as a starting point. Building better local places so it is more interesting to spend time in them benefits all of us and is almost certainly good for our mental health. The typical suburb has just a TON of space in it, and a lot of it at the moment is designed to hold and move as many cars as possible (seriously, look at a map and just think about the space set aside for highways, roads, parking lots, driveways, and garages). These places don’t have a lot of space for people to move around and exist comfortably.

    It doesn’t have to be this way, and investing more in mixed-use zoning, pedestrian or walkable spaces, a well maintained and separated path network for walking and cycling, public transportation, and public community spaces is the way to transform our community into a space we can all be proud to call home. Such a system is also much better at paying for itself from an economic standpoint, and doing this at the community level can rescue the city’s finances and help us contribute positively to the tax base rather than being a drain on it.

  • A Weekend in the Suburbs With No Car

    A Weekend in the Suburbs With No Car

    For many suburban parents, reading the title of this article might send shivers down your spine. For a lot of families, one car per adult in the household is pretty typical, unless a car is in the shop or out of commission for some other reason. In my case, one of the reasons we are a one-vehicle household (a minivan, which is great by the way), is to accommodate our financial priorities. We would rather spend our money elsewhere rather than finance a second car for the rare occasion we are doing two things at once that require one. We are a family of 5 with one income at the moment, and not looking to change that.

    The Setup

    When my wife got the opportunity to visit some friends in Toronto, she felt incredibly guilty taking our van on the trip, and in fact almost took the train with our youngest just to leave me the vehicle. It turns out the train is VERY expensive unless you book weeks in advance. However, from my perspective, as someone who has never commuted to work by car and doesn’t particularly enjoy or want to drive very much, this past weekend was a great opportunity to demonstrate that I was perfectly capable of getting around the suburbs with kids (who are 6 and nearly 4), with just my long-tail cargo bike.

    I encouraged my wife to drive because the train was so expensive, which meant that for 3 days (Friday being a PD Day), I was going to be a solo parent for a whole weekend for the first time, and I would not have a car. I know that some parents (and some people without kids) in this situation would accept this reality and just decide they were going to stay very close to home for the weekend. However, I wanted my kids to have a fun weekend, and we had commitments and activities on the calendar that none of us wanted to miss, including swimming lessons and a birthday party, along with Orleans Family Fun Day on Saturday.

    I didn’t do this because I thought it would be a fun experiment (though I did think it would be one). I did it because I knew that I could, and because I wanted to prove to myself that it was not only possible, but actually a positive experience and one I would seek to replicate whenever possible.

    Downtown by Transit

    On Friday, I packed a bag with snacks and water, and the three of us made our way downtown by bus and then train. The kids get very excited every time we get to take public transportation, and my son is an especially big fan of what he calls the ‘double wrecker bus’ (hopefully you can figure that one out). We went to the Rideau Centre and visited the canal locks, and then made our way back home after a few hours, and the kids had a great time.

    Transit service gets talked about a lot in Ottawa, and it would have been easier for us if the network had more frequent service, but all considered it was totally fine, and we didn’t have to pay for gas or parking and got some exercise. We had to walk from Convent Glen North up to the highway at Jeanne d’Arc, about a 10-minute walk, and the 30 came almost immediately. Trains off-peak are now at 10-minute headways, so we had an 8-minute wait for a train, and both the bus and train were quite full the whole way (suggesting perhaps people are actually using the network and maybe funding it would be a good idea after all). One thing we didn’t encounter the entire weekend was more than 1-2 minutes of traffic on the bus at the very end of our journey.

    Swimming Lessons

    Getting to swimming lessons is pretty straightforward in comparison. We probably could have just walked to Bob Macquarrie Rec Complex from Convent Glen North, but given the kids preference for the bike, that was an easy choice for me to save some time. The construction on Jeanne d’Arc at the highway makes that a little more stressful, but the pylons blocking off one lane make for a pretty nice, protected bike lane on weekends when there are no trucks there. And honestly, the cramped lanes navigating the roundabout construction are downright spacious on even the biggest bicycle. It is a little over 1 km for me to get to Bob Macquarrie, and I am certain the percentage of people who (justifiably, mind you) drive there for activities is well over 80%, despite most people having very short trips.

    Orleans Family Fun Day (Barrington Park)

    Orleans Family Fun Day is a bit of a longer trek, but still well within easy biking distance (the event was at Barrington Park next to the Orleans library branch). The toughest part of that trip is the unfriendliness of Orleans Blvd to any form of transportation that isn’t a car, but with a little creativity and a few minutes of steeled nerves and hoping for patient and friendly drivers to get across the highway overpass which is down to one lane with construction. After spending 3 lovely hours at Family Fun Day, we ended up stopping to run a couple of errands at Innes Road, and then headed back to the Convent Glen Metro near our house to pick up some groceries for dinner and the rest of the weekend (the front basket is excellent for groceries when the kids are with me).

    Birthday Party / Museum

    The other major outing we did on the weekend involved a typical suburban parent experience, one kid has a birthday party to attend, the other wants to do something with you. The party was for 2 hours down off Montreal Road, across the Greenbelt at Canotek. On this particular occasion though, I had an ace up my sleeve since on weekends into October, the Parkway is open exclusively for active transportation. I packed the gift, the three of us hopped onto my bike, and after a short trip along the River Pathway, we joined up with the Parkway and made quick work of the trip to Shefford. The entire ~3 km trip we had almost no interactions with motor vehicles, as residential streets and the industrial park were both essentially empty on the weekend.

    After dropping my daughter off at the party, I brought my son to the Aviation and Space Museum (another nearly 7 km) for a little over an hour (we have an annual pass), which he always appreciates. Another ~7 kms back, we were picking my daughter up from the party, and we were making our way home. Finally, we had made plans to walk to their grandparents for dinner, so we wrapped up the weekend with a nice 10 minute walk through the path system bisecting Vineyard and Voyageur. Wrapping up the math of the weekend, I spent a total of less than a dollar on electricity to charge my bike, biked over 35 km over 2 days, and spent 2 OC Transpo fares to go downtown and back. In exchange, we got to spend good quality time with many friends and acquaintances over the weekend days, many of whom we saw or spent time with in the community. I spent about $60 on groceries and picked up a few fun things for the kids too. We also got to see lots of people that live around us just by walking or biking past or seeing them in passing, something that happens so rarely when we’re all just jetting around in cars.

    Wrapping Up

    To just explicitly make the point I’ve been making implicitly while telling this story, it is extremely possible to get around your community without getting in and out of a car all day, and I can promise you it is way more fun (especially for kids) and I encountered literally zero traffic on any street or path I was on.

    A couple of other things here are also true. The suburbs have some work to do to make forms of transportation other than cars safe enough for the average person to feel very comfortable getting anywhere in their neighborhood on a bicycle (with or without kids). But most places are quite accessible very easily now, even if you do have to go a little out of your way.

    Public transit also needs some work, especially in the suburbs. A lot of people either don’t trust it, feel they are above it, or feel it isn’t good enough in comparison to their car to get them where they need to go when they need to get there. And in many cases right now, that’s true. OC Transpo needs more funding, more ridership, or some combination of the two, to be more reliable, more accessible, and more resilient. However, there are lots of new stations coming online in the next few years, and I believe OC Transpo truly believes in the mission of improving service, pulling the system out of the death spiral that has been threatening over the last 5 years.

    The system is not perfect, but these options, walking, cycling, and public transit, are going to be key to Ottawa’s Official Plan and the Orleans Corridor Secondary Plan. The more we can use these other options, the better for the climate, traffic, and our combined sense of community.

  • In Ontario Transportation Hobby News

    In Ontario Transportation Hobby News

  • Bike Commute and Errands – August 7, 2024

    Bike Commute and Errands – August 7, 2024

    In a single, normal day, I biked over 41 km on my ebike. Starting in Orleans, I went downtown for work, then from downtown to the Ottawa Hospital (main campus), and finally from the hospital home.

    This trip was absolutely made possible (and was much cheaper and less physically demanding) by my ebike. And the trip itself was actually pretty good overall. It would be even better if the city was less concerned with making sure cars have the red carpet rolled out city wide while the rest fight for space off the side of the road.

    I’ve owned an electric cargo bike for about 2-3 months now, and a few things about these trip(s) on Wednesday have stuck with me:

    • Without the electric assist, it would have SUUUUCKED to cover that distance. The battery made it a breeze and my legs still felt it plenty.
    • There is actually a lot of reasonable and even good bike infrastructure in the city, and unfortunately also a lot of “bike infrastructure” that actively makes people who try to use it less safe, despite what are probably good intentions.
    • There are a TON of gaps in safe infrastructure and even in unsafe infrastructure that serve as barriers to people using this network. The most notable one that seems to just be something that is “finished” but is just terrible is the connection between the ‘back’ side of the hospital ring road and the neighbourhood to the north. Looking at the maps after the fact it seems like intentional and proper connections do exist, but Google Maps cycling directions routed me towards dirt and desire paths. This is presumably intended to save time, but often a better route would have been seconds longer. If the city doesn’t want to invest in filling in these dirt and desire paths with actual pathway connections, better signage for wayfinding would go a long way. Right now, people who haven’t done these trips every day will have a really hard time navigating.
    • Having room for storing cargo on a bike is a game changer! Not having to take a backpack and having that backpack limit what you can have with you is incredible and makes sweat much less of an issue (combined of course with the battery which makes hauling cargo much easier as well).
    • Parking safely is a huge liability. When you pull your car into a parking space (especially somewhere with a massive parking garage that is monitored 24/7) you can be reasonably certain in most places that it will be fine while you’re running errands. Nothing happened, but I was very worried about my bike and have invested in a massive chain lock (6′), an AirTag and a motion alarm that will beep obnoxiously loudly.
    • The best part of all this, as someone who really doesn’t enjoy or get anything out of driving, is that it was FUN doing this.
    • It’s really too bad that my round trip from home, office, routine medical care, and back home required over 40 km of travel. We all make choices (like where to live and my place of work) and these are choices I’ve made (before getting orange-pilled, mind you), but honestly doing more to make services and work accessible to people without needing to cross the city (RTO I’m looking at you) will continue to make our cities more sustainable and will push the next marginal trip to one that is more accessible on foot, by bike, or by transit.

    More on the Gaps in Infrastructure

    Also, I had to look it up because it seems criminal, but there is supposed to be an officially sanctioned bike route the whole length of the LRT, to the point that they are currently working on extending a real bike route out to Trim from Blair… Buuuuuut the literal only connection between St. Laurent and Blair on bike includes driving down the middle of Ogilvie Road literal inches away from traffic at 60kph, with major intersections/lights every few minutes at most (every 30 seconds in a car).

    Hilariously (or at least it would be hilarious if it wasn’t so dangerous), every Google Street View image of this road it’s this empty. Rush hour capacity is not long.

    This shouldn’t be a bike route and in fact I’d argue it isn’t one. I can do it, as a person who is willing and experienced with vehicular cycling (out of necessity), but it is a travesty and I mostly see people on Ogilvie by the Gloucester Centre on the sidewalk, and they are 100% making the right choice. The painted lane on the right side of the street on Ogilvie from the St Laurent mall down to den Haag is bad enough, but being stuck in the middle of traffic, completely hung out to dry by the city, is just unforgiveable. It’s a nightmare.

    Now I’m just venting but my route home also includes this beauty at Wellington and Lyon:

    Street View of Wellington and Lyon
    Bird’s Eye View of Wellington and Lyon

    There is accommodation (painted mostly) for bikes on either side of this intersection, but with 2 right turn lanes, if you want to not die you have to somehow safely merge in usually heavy traffic across 2 lanes to get across the intersection safely.

    At this exact stop trying to make this merge last week, I had a bus that was in the left lane drive right up to me honking and needlessly close, while I was just trying to get across here… Pretty much the only way to do it while staying sane is to know it’s coming and get over in to the left lane (fully taking the lane) way before you get to the intersection, which means going up a hill on a bike in a lane fully meant for cars where just EVERYBODY is going to be mad at you.

    By the way, I can’t know for sure, but I feel like that bus fully saw me and only honked and drove too close to me because he was annoyed, there’s no way he didn’t see me trying to get across safely.

    There are maybe 3 places I can think of in the whole city with this double right turn configuration that aren’t on the highway, where Elgin meets Rideau right down the street there is another, and by the post office off Industrial is the third I can think of, and they are all terrible for not-cars.

    Final Thoughts

    Overall, I was very pleased with the way I was able to get around the city on my bike. The city has absolutely made progress in terms of separate and at least sometimes protected infrastructure, but there are very obvious and needless gaps that will hopefully continue to be addressed.

    I will say though, it is actually very easy to see where these gaps are, all you have to do is get on a bike and try to go somewhere, the rough spots and issues jump off the road and try to knock you over all the time.

  • Orleans Blvd Overpass Design

    Orleans Blvd Overpass Design

    I am writing today about the Orleans Blvd overpass design updates (Stage 2 LRT Station Connectivity Enhancement Study | Convent Glen Station (Orléans Boulevard)) which sort of came and went quietly since last year (and I was even trying to pay attention!). I understand that the solution proposed last year had its issues (namely conflict spots between buses letting off passengers and cyclists), and I agree the design clearly needed more thought.

    The last design I saw last year.

    However, it appears that thought was skipped by the planners, and instead the road will be returned basically to its state before the renovation (plus a pair of bus stops and room for people driving to the train stop, and bike parking is a great addition too).

    This seems like a failure of imagination at the very least.

    It’s my understanding that at this point (not sure exactly when this was posted on the City website, but it can’t have been that long ago) the actual design in terms of what’s being built is fully locked in, which is a shame but you literally can’t change the past. However, it does seem like there is at least an opportunity to take what infrastructure is set and mould it to be a little more environmentally friendly (not to mention safer).

    Specifically, what I’m talking about is the possibility of the outer lanes of the overpass being reserved for bus and bike traffic. I have been getting to work on bike via Rideau Street through downtown where the road has the same setup (4 lanes, 2 reserved for buses) and even at rush hour it’s fine.

    The last 2(+?) years with the overpass down to 1 lane has proved (in my opinion) that car traffic volume doesn’t support the need for 4 lanes, even at rush hour this isn’t really a concern that needs to be factored in (and are we really building for the 10-15 minutes a road is the absolute busiest, which is already a choice many drivers make?).

    If the overpass ISN’T given lanes with bus/bike priority, and traffic comes anywhere close to slowing down or stopping over the overpass, I’d argue this is bad for everybody, as it means buses and bikes will get stuck in that, and when buses stop, cars will get annoyed and be unhappy anyways. It’s fairly easy for a bike to wait for a bus if necessary (obviously not ideal, but the space is what it is), and the lanes are wide enough when the bus is stopped that a bike can probably easily pass safely if they feel comfortable.

    The only thing I haven’t really considered above so far is the passenger pickup/dropoff spaces, but I think cars actually dropping off or picking up using the lane would be fine to do that (outside the flow of traffic) and then merge back in.

    All of this obviously only considers the absolute busiest times on this road, the other ~98% of the time it’s just obvious that having dedicated infrastructure like this makes sense in terms of public transit flow and bike safety, there is no way there is enough traffic the rest of the time for 4 lanes to be anywhere close to necessary for cars.

    I feel very strongly that we dedicate far too much road space for cars, I am definitely biased in that direction, but I also feel that it lines up with the priorities of the community and the city to make mobility and transportation network decisions thinking in this way. I’d really be interested to hear if any conversation like this (basically using different paint/signs on this road while keeping the actual built infrastructure as designed) has taken place.

    I really look forward to the day when all of Orleans Blvd is a complete street accessible in this way by all road users, but for now this seems like an easy win, and will make it easier for people north of the highway to access St. Joseph and the Heart of Orleans without getting into their cars.

  • What My Kids See and Do Aboard My Ebike

    What My Kids See and Do Aboard My Ebike

    My older kids are 6 and 3 (coming up on 4 now), and they absolutely love spending time on the back of my cargo ebike. In past years, we would go for rides together, but they were in a trailer behind my hybrid bike, and it wasn’t really a family ride since my wife didn’t have a bike to join us. It was also much less convenient to run errands like groceries with a bike trailer with 2 kids and no additional storage on my bike.

    This year, since I’ve had my ebike for right around 2 months now, my kids are eager and excited to hop on the back of my bike, and we have done excursions and run errands together multiple times, especially since they’ve been off school, and I just wrapped up 4 weeks of parental leave. I love the fact that my kids are so excited to spend time on the bike, and it’s clear to me that they are making all kinds of observations about the world from their vantage point behind me.

    What the Kids See and Do

    The first thing worth mentioning that I observed from them on the back of my bike was that my daughter (6) said unprompted “biking to Metro is more fun than the car” while we were on the way to the grocery store. They both agreed that taking the bike was more fun, and I completely agree. Being out in the open and riding through it on a bike is a completely different experience compared to what feels more like floating through or even overtop of the community when you’re in a car. There is absolutely no connection to the rest of the world, you’re just in a sealed-off little bubble only interacting with the other little bubbles that are the other cars.

    In the Neighbourhood

    We’ve gone for a few longer rides now since that one, including visiting the library and going to Petrie Island (which is about a 15-20km round trip). On the library trip, we had to take a couple of less busy streets to avoid fast-moving cars on the main roads, and so we ended up passing by at least 4-5 different little parks and playgrounds. Since the kids weren’t trapped in the car bubble, and we weren’t floating around at 40-60 kph, they could spend longer actually seeing what the world around them looks like. On the way home, we picked one of the playgrounds to stop and play at for a bit, and this is a playground we never would have even known about without this trip. Now, the kids know where this park is and can even see it from the nearest main road (Jeanne d’Arc Blvd), so they’re even able to get a better sense of direction and context for the layout of their neighbourhood no matter how they’re getting around.

    Being Friendly

    Finally, the kids have started doing an absolutely incredible thing since our trip to Petrie Island. When they were on the back of the bike, every time we would pass someone on the paths, both of them started jubilantly calling ‘Hello!’ to people. It was so cute when they first started doing that and seeing that people were responding, not just saying hi or hello back, but waving, and smiling big smiles back. It’s not typical that you get such a greeting when you’re out walking or biking (people in Orleans will say hi or nod as you pass, but usually not a fun hello like that). I could watch peoples’ neutral faces absolutely light up when they were greeting, and basically everybody responded with a smile and a wave.

    They’ve done this every bike ride or errand trip since, and the most interesting thing I observed was that my son (3) tried to say Hello to an SUV while we were crossing a street, and my daughter (6) reminded him that they couldn’t hear us in the car. The fact that she picked up on that right away and they both agreed wordlessly that saying it to vehicles was useless really struck me, and just makes me want to do more and more with them on bike.

    Cycling and walking in your neighbourhood/community is super important for social development, whether you’re a small child or an adult, and I really think it’s a great way to stay connected to the people around you, not to mention it can make someone’s day.

  • Bike Trip to the Library – July 17, 2024

    Bike Trip to the Library – July 17, 2024

    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.

  • My First Ebike (~2 months in)

    My First Ebike (~2 months in)

    Before I get too far into specific ideas and thoughts on this site, I wanted to spend a little time talking about my current thoughts and feelings about ebikes, about two months in to owning my first one. My thoughts will almost certainly evolve on this topic as time goes on, but here’s how I feel summer 2024.

    Back in May of this year, I finally made the commitment to purchasing an electric bike. This is something I had wanted to do for years, but starting a family and living through the early days of the pandemic, I wasn’t realistically biking anywhere. There was no strong incentive to buy any bike, much less a more expensive electric one.

    My Ebike

    The bike I ended up landing on is by Rad Power Bikes, and I went for versatility above all else. My other bike is a minivan (the Honda Odyssey), and so it shouldn’t surprise anybody who knows me that I went for the bike equivalent of that, the RadWagon 4. I would describe the aesthetics of this bike to be similar in feeling to a minivan, in that it’s not universally loved, but I have a deep appreciation for its function over form. This is true to the point that both the Odyssey and the RadWagon have rewired my brain to find their particular visual qualities attractive.

    Slight tangent here, I REALLY hate the way SUVs look and their overall design, inside and out. I’ve always preferred the design of minivans, which are much better suited to families and for almost any trip you’d use such a vehicle for. I wish minivans caught on more in North America rather than SUVs, which are basically big and heavy for no reason. It’s almost impossible to get a ‘deal’ on a minivan, they’re never on sale, but the plus side of that is that they keep their value REALLY well. I’m pretty convinced we could sell our 5-year-old 2019 Odyssey for basically the same as we paid for it new.

    Anyhow, back to the RadWagon, so we’re all on the same page, context-wise, here is a photo of the stock configuration of my bike:

    For those of you who are less familiar (as I was when I first started shopping) with the language and structure of cargo bikes, this is called a longtail bike, for reasons that should be fairly obvious. This bike rides fairly low to the ground, and it has tons of places where accessories can be bolted on to achieve various extra uses and functions. My favourite feature of this bike is the cargo space on the rear rack, which is incredibly versatile and just massive for a bike.

    Accessories

    The other great thing (which I won’t call my favourite feature since I just said that about the rear rack), is the infinite configurability of the bike. I have added several customizations and accessories to really make this a tool I can use to do almost anything and get anywhere. My accessories include:

    • A ‘Caboose’, an aluminum ‘cage’ to enable kids to ride on the rear rack without worrying about them falling off (you can also get a formal mounted bike seat for really young kids). This hardware also serves as a handy set of mounting points for securing bigger cargo pieces with tie-downs.
    • A set of cheap deck pads, cushions to make it a little more comfy to sit on the rear rack (visible in the image above, Amazon sells many varieties of these, and Rad sells their own that are probably better quality and more comfortable, but they are at least 4x the price).
    • Running boards, these are an optional (but pretty important) accessory to allow passengers on the back to rest their feet and stay balanced (also in the picture above).
    • A massive front basket with a liner inside to keep things like groceries from bouncing around too much.
    • A couple of ratcheting tie-downs to secure cargo
    • A water bottle and holder
    • A top tube storage bag with a phone holder so you can see and use your screen inside
    • A motion sensor/alarm that will sound a VERY loud series of beeps if the bike is moved, and if that movement doesn’t stop quickly, it will start again and continue to beep for 90 seconds. I also have a hidden AirPod on the frame so if someone makes it past the alarm I’ll see where the bike went if it’s taken.
    • A tall metal wire, fabric-lined basket (technically a laundry basket) that I can tie down to the rear rack to store extra groceries or taller cargo when I need it
    • A duffel bag/backpack that can easily fit in the basket or on the back rack
    • Finally, I am a couple of days away from having a large (16 inch long, 6 inch tall, 12 inch wide) basket made of thick metal that I can strap down to the rear rack to carry extra cargo or extra stuff for my work commute when I need it.

    The really nice thing about this bike is that it can accommodate 2 extra riders (plus an extra 2 kids if I want to hitch the trailer), or at least 100 pounds of cargo (plus more in the trailer if I need it, OR some combination of both, depending on what I’ve got going on on a particular day. And because I am a pretty strong bike rider on my own, with the aid of the 500 W motor, it doesn’t really matter how much the bike (and me) and cargo weighs, I can bike around at will pretty much as fast as I want without being substantially slowed down.

    My Future with Ebikes

    I do feel as though I’m just scratching the surface of the uses for this bike, I’ve commuted to work 2-3 times on it so far, plus one trip most of the way across the city for a staff BBQ, and it has performed magnificently in every task I’ve given it. I’m sure I’ll have more and more to say about this bike as I use it more and for more things.

    I have no regrets about this purchase, and not only will I replace lots of car trips with this transportation, but I have already started choosing trips to closer destinations because it means I can bike instead of needing to drive. Add to this that I love basically everything about biking, including the exercise I do still get maxing out the speed of the bike. All this while avoiding sweating almost all of the time even if I have a long way to go and it’s very hot out.

    It’s clear to me that the future of transportation is small, flexible purpose electric vehicles like this, and the biggest thing holding back this revolution in places like Ottawa is the transportation network is designed around cars, which rightfully scares off lots of people who are currently in cars from considering any other mode of transport.