vic.gedris.org Never mind the blogs, here's the website.

Everyone knows the Pacific Coast stereotype; its a cyclists dream-land where cities make decisions with cyclists in mind and it never snows. With this in mind, Giacomo of the Monday Morning Special Blend on CKCU FM talks with Jonathan Maus, editor of (roughly) our equivalent website in Portland Org. It is worth watching to see how a city similar to Ottawa in size deals with issues such as cycling.

Here the interview and watch the video here.

It is city budget time in Ottawa: an annual event where everything is seemingly threatened with cuts, fistfights erupt in coffee shops over whether individual taxpayers should pay 11 bucks a household to fund arts programs, and no one is entirely clear what will be offered next year until the damn thing is actually passed. It is pretty incovenient for residents, but I can only imagine how trying it must be for the city staff and individual groups who don’t know if they will be employed or exist next year.

This blog, ofcourse, is paying particular attention to the budgets cycling commitments. I’m still working through the budget, but Citizens for Safe Cycling has prepared a useful breakdown of the budgets cycling commitments (PDF). The focus is, ofcourse, the Ottawa Cycling Plan. To implement it in 5 years as the city has committed would mean a commitment of around $5 million from the city this year;there is actually about $700,000. As we said at the time, the real test of commitment will be how much funding they are willing to designate.

Check out Spacing Toronto’s time lapse video of the pedestrian scramble crossing at Yonge & Dundas (which I wrote about previously):

[Scramble from Sam Javanrouh on Vimeo.]

Elsewhere in Toronto, John Barber writes in the Globe about a bike lane battle where a city councillor says a lane would be bad for ward, but his constituents’ submissions say otherwise. Apparently Toronto “has declared ‘war on the car’.” We could only hope.

Streetsblog reports that New York City has seen an incredible 35% increase in cycling between 2007 and 2008. A response to rising gas prices? To increased commuting times in a congest city? Pure bike fever? I don’t know, but that is an impressive stat. Let’s hope Canadian cities are seeing similar surges in cycling popularity.

As a side note, this blog is now one year old. Thanks for reading, and keep the comments coming!

Citizens for Safe Cycling will be holding its Annual General Meeting this Thursday at the McNabb Community Centre. There’s a social event at 6PM; the meeting itself starts at 7PM, where they will elect a number of board positions. You have to be a CfSC member to vote or stand for election. Full details here (PDF).

CfSC does a tremendous amount of work, so if you are around you should check it out. I think that I’ll make an appearance, if only because McNabb is essentially next to my house.

I was catching up on some RSS feeds and discovered that MEC is apparently going to start selling bikes in the near future. This is good news, not so much that I am in need of a new bicycle, but because I think it is a natural fit for MEC, who usually do a really good job at balancing sustainability/ethical concerns with those of price. Decat, which is a french sports chain which seems roughly equivalent to MEC (but I presume is for profit), sells bicycles and you can see them pretty much everywhere.

But this paragraph really frustrated me:

MEC is launching bikes stores and a full bike line soon. This is controversial not because of the manner in which the bikes are made but rather in how MEC’s service and pricing model may potentially undercut local dealers.

This speaks to my usual frustration with the Ethical Sourcing blog, which too often seems too nice for its own good. MEC should not apologizing for offering a superior service at a better price, especially if all it proves is that you can do the right thing and still keep prices low.

Besides, while MEC will undoubtedly steal sales in midrange bikes from some smaller stores, I suspect that if people need to buy something more elaborate, they will still go to a traditional bikeshop. Where MEC has the real potential of stealing sales is from the Wal-Mart’s and Canadian Tire’s of the world: places which sell lots of bikes, usually of dismal quality, for not too much money. The challenge for the co-op will be to compete with them, overcoming their advertising and brand advantages, matching or  beating the chains on price and beating them in service and product.

Part two of this two-part post on why Belgium does it better has to do with bike paths.  Or, rather, what we in Canada call bike paths.  In Belgium it’s more like a expansive network of exclusive bike roads linking all of the Flemish-speaking region.

Last weekend, my girlfriend and I took off from Brussels for a two day bike trip through part of the Flemish region, taking the train back to Brussels on Sunday evening.  I had heard that bike touring was good in Belgium, but coming from some experience bike touring in Canada, I assumed that this meant that there were plenty of country roads and generally polite drivers.

But, no, that’s only the beginning.  In fact, in the Flemish region, there is a huge network of bike-exclusive roads, which you navigate by going from one numbered checkpoint to another.  Actually, to be clear, the routes alternate between bike-exclusive paths and shared use as a minor road, which hardly differed from the bike-exclusive paths.  The entire network is in a fantastic state of maintenance, and extremely well sign-posted.

I’ll give a brief photo journey of the trip.  Coming out of Brussels, we went through the Foret de la Soigne, just outside the Brussels city centre, which boasts great scenery and a comprehensive set of trails for walking, running and cycling.  It suffered a little bit on the sign-posting front, but made up for it in beauty.

From there, we connected onto the Flemish network, which largely passed through the country-side.  There, we probably saw more apple orchards in harvest than cars.

So, why is it possible for Belgium to maintain this system over Canada?  There’s no doubt that it benefits from the proximity of one town to another.  However, there are certainly areas of Canada that have the same layout, and we don’t see a similar system.

More importantly, it benefits from the culture in Belgium.  People bike here.  They bike to work (although that is somewhat less the case in Brussels itself given how crowded the city is with cars).  They bike for recreation.  They bike to get groceries.  They bike as families, as couples or alone.  On Sunday morning, we saw at least a dozen bike teams, in matching jerseys, biking around the Flemish region.  Some appeared to be quite competitive, others didn’t.

There simply isn’t the same barrier here to bicycling as a mode of transport.  It’s done recreationally on a much wider scale than in Canada, but bicycles are also used for practical purposes on a routine basis, which probably in turn fosters their recreational use.

It’s this culture of bicycling in Belgium that allows them to sustain such an impressive system of bike routes.  It’s this culture that explains why Belgium does it so much better.

This will be part one of my two-part post on why Belgium does it better.  As a quick backgrounder, I’m spending 5 months in Brussels on exchange from my studies at the University of Ottawa.  This post is about Car Free Day, and really it’s not just Belgium that does this better, it’s most of Europe.

While in Canada, Car Free Day amounts to little more than an appeal to voluntarily use another method of transportation or the closing of a few blocks for a form of street fair, in Brussels, they shut down the entire urban centre, amounting to 160 km2.  Granted, this was done on a Sunday, so they weren’t quite willing to impede regular commuting traffic.  However, in a city of over 1 million residents, with an ordinarily crowded, bustling centre (to a degree that isn’t even comparable to Ottawa), this was still a very big undertaking.

The effect was nothing short of dramatic.  Immediately below, I’ve got a split-screen photo of General Jacques, a major commuting road near my apartment.  On the left is a photo of General Jacques that I took yesterday afternoon at about 4pm, at the beginning of the commuter rush.  On the right is a photo of the street on Car Free Day.

Car Free Day in Brussels was incredible no because of what there was, but because of what there wasn’t: unpleasant smells, offensive noises and a general feeling of unease from the overwhelming domination of cars in our cities.  This last one I don’t even notice on a day to day basis, but it’s absence was palpable.  For that matter, I don’t notice many of the effects of cars on a given day of walking around the city, but when they were gone, there was an almost eerie calm, despite the fact that you were surrounded by dozens or hundreds of people.

Simply put, Brussels without cars was a much nicer, healthier and safer place to be.  Experiencing that was both inspiring and depressing, a sentiment which I’m sure I was sharing with thousands of other people in the city that day.

I’ll finish this post simply by showing a few more photos of the city.  All of the photos below were taken on major streets in Brussels, which are usually crowded with cars.

Wired, as part of its ongoing “how-to” wikis, looks at playing bike polo. We’ve previously talked about bike-polo in Ottawa.

I particularly enjoy the hipster/non-hipster gear requirements.

A teenage cyclist in Ottawa’s west end is seriously injured after being hit by a cab. There isn’t really much more to say other than hopefully the injuries aren’t permanent and that she recoveres quickly.

What I do find interesting is that the focus of the entire article is on the fact that she was’t wearing a helmet. Should she have been? Certainly however that doesn’t discount all other details in the story. The injuries to her leg and hip would have happened regardless. Also nothing about the accident is recorded, was the cab speeding, did (s)he run a red light and so on.

It seems to me to be a temptation to simply blame the cyclist for a lack of judgement and end the story at that.

I can’t find a source, but I recall reading predictions from early in the summer of an increase in bicycle accidents due to high oil prices increasing ridership. That seemed plausible enough, but a study from the University of New South Wales concludes that the opposite is true:

“It’s a virtuous cycle,” says Dr Julie Hatfield. “The likelihood that an individual cyclist will be struck by a motorist falls with increasing rate of bicycling in a community. And the safer cycling is perceived to be, the more people are prepared to cycle.”

The researchers say studies in several countries have shown the incidence of motorists colliding with cyclists or pedestrians actually declines as more people ride or walk. The reason, they say, is simple — the more cyclists motorists see, the more aware they are of cyclists in general and more safely they drive. Rising cycling rates mean motorists are more likely to be cyclists, and therefore be more conscious of, and sympathetic towards, cyclists.

The findings run counter to conventional thinking, which holds that more cyclists means more chances for collisions. While the numbers do increase in absolute terms, a city that doubles its cycling numbers can expect a one-third drop in the per-cyclist frequency of a crash.

Those original predictions still fit with these conclusions, of course, since they were referring to absolute accident numbers, but it’s very encouraging to know that any individual cyclist’s odds of collision go down as ridership goes up.

I’m sure that this will be the first in a series.

The Citizen has a story today highlighting the results of contract arbitration between the city and the firefighters union. I won’t comment on the merits of it because I don’t really have any point of comparison as to whether or not it is reasonable (nor do I think that is really an relevant issue within the contexts of this site), but do think that it is worth pointing out that the $5 million annual cost of the “recognition” awards roughly corresponds to the annual implementation cost of the first stage of the cycling plan.

Now, obviously the introduction of one does not mean the death of another, but this arbitration agreement does mean that the city will be facing an even deeper budget shortfall, and this is one that council is not able to move away from. Moreover, this isn’t likely to be the last unexpected expense as the budget process moves forward (even if it is, hopefully, going to be the largest.) What it reinforces is that the cycling community needs to continue to be on the ball to make sure that the cycling plan remains fully funded in the budget process - remember that it is only 1% of the city’s annual capital budget - and that the inevitable distractions don’t hold back its implementation any further.

(I’ve been travelling overseas for the past few weeks, by the way, and do have stories to tell. I’ll start a series of posts on this blog and at mikepowell.ca this weekend.)

Lock up your bikes. While this may seem obvious, bike theft in Ottawa is up by 49% so its worth being a little extra vigilant.

I’m in Halifax for a wedding: look what I found outside of a (closed) bike shop. Why pay 25 cents at a gas station when people give it away for free?