The key quote:

“When I first started in the winter, occasionally I would see bike tracks in the snow on the bridge, so I would know there is somebody out there sometimes. And then just gradually I started to see more and more people on bicycles, and now, I don’t go a day, no matter how bad the weather, without seeing at least one other bicycle, and usually like five to 10 bicycles,” said Hickey.

This more or less reflects my thoughts on winter biking. Now, I don’t actually bike in the winter because the added hassle of bundling up offsets the time that I’d save over walking to work. But if I lived much farther away, I’d totally invest in a winter bike because it seems eminently doable. Mostly, I really don’t like the bus, but at least part of me just wants to say that I winter bike. Oh, authenticity: you haunt me still.

Doucet, quoted in the CBC:

“I hope to see Ottawa becoming much safer,” Doucet said Wednesday. “We’ll hopefully have an east-west dedicated lane through the centre of the city, which we don’t have now. I mean talk to my staff, who come to work down Gladstone and have to share the lane with a bus — pretty scary.”

Now, I bike down Gladstone all the time and have never really felt unsafe given the volume of traffic. But I also bike 9 months of the year and contribute to a cycling blog, so I’m probably not the best judge of average. A full set of city-wide cycling lanes designed for commuting would certainly be nice, and would probably help to get more people onto bikes. I know I’d certainly appreciate something a bit more dedicated in the downtown core, given that Queen St., and the risk of door prizes and people making blind right turns, represents that most dangerous couple minutes of my day.

These lanes require dedicated funding for cycling projects, which have been something that the city has not always been great about finding. Also, while it doesn’t seem to be in either of the links above, I seem to recall staff mentioning somewhere else that in most of the areas where we’ve seen accidents segregated lanes are not really feasible.

These now go onto full council for further discussion, so emailing your councilor support would be handy.

Finally, I recently bought a print subscription to Spacing, and despite the high price, it’s definitely worth it. Given the huge amount of content these folks create covering urban issues in a variety of cities, I’m happy to support them.

According to the employees I spoke with on Tuesday, MEC has started selling bicycles at it’s locations in downtown Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, and Longeuil. These are all bigger stores in bigger markets, so have the extra space needed to setup a bike retail area/shop. At this point it sounds like it is still a pilot project, and it doesn’t look like we’ll see them added to the Ottawa store in the near future. At this point, apparently they are not even shipping to the non-pilot markets.

I just dropped by the MEC downtown Toronto and… I see the bikes! They have some really nice models, I like what I see. (I’m liking the hub gear ones and they even have fixie.) Based on the prices and the models I saw, they are competing with mid to high-end small bike shops, like the local bikes shops that sell nicer Trek, Devinci, or nicer Norcos.

Anyone else seen them?

I’m planning on stopping at Ottawa’s MEC tonight, so we’ll see if they have anything. I’d previously been given the impression by someone that works at the retail level of MEC that they were a couple of years out. In any case, I tend not to buy the noise about the evils of MEC (MEC as Wal-Mart? Please.), so welcome anything that helps people have better access to good bicycles. When people can buy a better bike, it means that they are more likely to keep using it. That’s good for all of us.

As a biker, my wish would be for police to crack down on more dangerous behavior, such as riding at night without a light or tearing the wrong way down a one-way street. Yes, I committed the latter crime just yesterday, and I admit I was in the wrong. If cops started handing out more tickets for one-way infractions, bikers like me would probably clean up their most-outrageous behaviors. Once that happens, maybe all of us—cyclists and car people and activists and cops—could agree to leave the rolling stop alone.

I’ll try to poke by but, alas, suspect that work might get in the way.

Anyway, Marcus Gee over at the Globe takes the time to offer a more serious and detailed reason why bicycle licensing is a silly idea. The key part, emphasis mine:

That is the key objection to Mr. Walker’s proposal. There is no proof that licensing would persuade wayward cyclists to pay any more heed to the traffic laws. They already fall under the very same laws that motorists do and police can charge them accordingly. In one safe-cycling drive this summer, Toronto police handed out 1,373 tickets to cyclists for infractions from running red lights to failing to yield to pedestrians. Police can stop an unlicensed cyclist as easily as they could a licensed one.

Nor is there any proof that a testing regime would make cyclists more aware of the rules of the road. Many of them are motorists as well as cyclists and all of them are pedestrians when they’re not mounted up. They know what a red sign saying “stop” means. They just choose to ignore it. The best way to address that is through education, not licensing.

Luckily, only about 1/4 of people are wrong.

Update: Incorrect is now up to 48%.

The public art bike racks reflect the unique identity and character of the neighbourhood and exhibit the talent and diversity of Ottawa’s artists. As a series, they encourage cycling and movement up and down the street as people explore and discover the clever and exceptional designs and make connections to the vibrant community.

I’ll spare you a snippy comment about “unique identity” of that stretch of Bank, but I think we can all be happy that there will be more places to lock up your bike. Now, let’s all look forward to when the current phase of reconstruction is finished and Bank becomes usable all through Centretown!