As some of you may know, the Ontario Coroner has launched an investigation into cycling deaths in Ontario. The public is invited to comment by November 30th.

One of the other hats that I where is Chair of the city’s Roads and Cycling Advisory Committee. We believe that there is merit in getting cyclists from the Ottawa area together to discuss safety issues, with the intent to generating a list of recommendations that we can submit to the coroner as part of his study. As background, the announcement for the current study is here; a 1998 Toronto Coroner’s report on cycling safety is available here.

To that end, we will be hosting a Cycling Safety Brainstorming Session on Saturday November 26th. All are encouraged to attend. So if you bike recreationally, as a commuter, or in races, please consider coming out. Similarly, if you’d like to bike more, but have safety concerns, please also come out. Details are as follows:

What: Cycling Safety Brainstorming Session

Why: To generate a list of reccomendations for the Ontario Coroner’s cycling death study, but also to get the community together to talk about what needs to be done.

Who: You! Me! Anyone else that has an interest in cycling in the city and region.

Where: Colonel By Room, City Hall

When: 10:00AM to 12:00 PM, Saturday November 26th.

I’d like to have a sense of numbers, so if you plan to attend, please RSVP to cycling.committee@gmail.com

For those unable to attend,  we’ve set up a brief online survey, available here.

Update: The Toronto municipal bureaucracy, however, does keep hope alive with a plan to add bike boxes around five busy intersections, including the terrifying College & Spadina.

2. The New York Times’ ethics columnist goes for a bike ride around New York City and discusses cycling ethics.

3. The 2010 Bikeway Network Improvements pass Toronto City Council, but the high-profile plan for a segregated lane on University Avenue (which I was really looking forward to) fails due to an ostensible voting error by one councillor.

4. An NDP private member’s bill in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario would require drivers to leave 3 feet of space between their vehicles and cyclists; write your MPP.

With winter finally seeming to have been beaten, it’s time to take this blog out of its seasonal (albeit never planned) hibernation.

There’s been a lot of attention paid in the past few weeks to a pilot project that would see the city create a segregated cycling route through centretown on a trial basis. The Sun was the first to report on it on March 15th (though doesn’t have most of the details exactly right and is pretty slanted against), Centretown News followed up on the 26th (their details are right, but they managed to get some names wrong), and the Citizen has something published today. Note all stories talk about different events: the Sun followed the original presentation to the Roads and Cycling Advisory Committee (full disclosure: I’m chair of RCAC. I  write here as an individual), the latter follow Councillor Holmes’ stepping in to propose the creation of a different consultation mechanism.

I think that there’s lots to be optimistic about in this. Given that this will be a bit of a first for Ottawa (at least in the core). My impression, at least based on what RCAC was told, was that the plan was to begin meeting with other community and business groups. What is being proposed here is to make the consultation process more formal. That might slow things down a bit, but I’m not sure that we would have seen any changes this cycling season in any case. It’s more important that we do what is needed to make sure that everyone is comfortable with the process and is able to contribute as much as is possible: it’ll produce a better result, and it will help avoid infighting amongst various road users/business groups/residents.

Now, in The Citizen Holmes’ suggests that downtown was listed as an option, but the cycling plan calls for considerations of larger east-west routes, which is true. I think that the idea of a downtown route for the pilot has more to do with it being an area where there is a good concentration of places to go, local residents, and people commuting in. There’s also already a lot of bicycles. That’s a good mix for a first project, and is probably different than if it were farther from the core.

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.