Ways to break the law

We all break the law, but there's different ways.

1. Carelessly
This is most of the problems. Drivers know the rules, but just aren't looking. A classic problem is for a driver to not do a shoulder check before taking a right and cutting off a cyclist.

2. Unknowingly
Many drivers just don't know the rules. A typical rule is the cyclist's right to occupy the entire lane when required to be safe. The behaviour that comes next is to try to drive aggressively because he genuinely believes the bike is taking a lane intended only for cars.

3. Intentionally
This is rare, but some cars will honk to scare cyclists, yell at them, throw things, etc. to make a point that they own the road.

All of these things make cycling less attractive to all but the most determined cyclists. Which is too bad... if there were more cyclists, there'd be fewer cars.

Cyclists, too, break laws in different ways.

1. Safely
If I ride the shoulder on a stretch of Carling, it provides greater separation between cars and bikes. And if a car needs to use the lane for an emergency as it is intended, it'd be more dangerous if I were on the road anyway. Cyclists also roll through stop signs in empty intersections. Biking on empty sidewalks. Things like that.

2. With the best of intentions
Sometimes, it seems like riding a sidewalk or biking through a crosswalk seems like a good idea. But it can confuse drivers and endanger pedestrians.

3. Recklessly
Not having lights for the dark or weaving in and out of traffic. But the ultimate has to be cyclists that whip through red lights, forcing cars to stop which endangers everyone.

Cyclists do not always understand these differences.

The most frustrating part of the cyclists' sins is that people lump them together. Not stopping completely at an empty stop sign is not the same as cutting off traffic. And it makes us all look bad.

It would be good if the police could ticket the intentional and reckless law breakers.

NCC pathways and commuting

Reality check: the NCC pathways are not always ideal for commuting by bicycle.

Here are the problems with them:

• the path to nowhere: there's often little or no connection between NCC paths and bike lanes provided by the city. I'll talk lots about that on this blog.

• the speed limit: very few cyclists who commute a significant distance want to deal with a 20km/hr speed limit. It is actually a recommended maximum.

• sharing the path: The nicest days for biking are usually the nicest days for wandering pedestrian families. Families taking up both lanes or behaving erratically is dangerous

• surface: road crossings often have high curbs and the surface of some paths is worse than the road next to it.

When the path is going somewhere you want to go and it is empty enough, the paths can really be very nice. But it isn't always the panacea that is sold.

Biking to the Kanata Research Park

Today, I'd like to write about biking routes to nothern Kanata when coming from points east.

Ottawa has a lot of high tech companies., and a lot of it is based in northern Kanata. The offices are spread across some 3 or 4 story buildings, and Alcatel-Lucent has some high rises. There's a luxury hotel, The Brookstreet, and a golf course.

So how do all these people get to work? You can tell in this satellite view that most of this land is allocated to parking lots. I do see quite a few cyclists too, but the biking infrastructure doesn't reflect that.

A lot of staff probably commute from nearby communities like parts of northern Kanata (Morgan's Grant, Kanata Lakes) and southern Kanata. I'll talk about those routes in other articles.

If you're coming from Bell's corners, Barrhaven, Centrepoint, Westboro, downtown or anywhere in else in the cities formerly known as Nepean and Ottawa, there are two transit points you end up biking through:

Bell's corners

This will get you to Barrhaven, Bell's Corners and other places in south western Ottawa

View How to get to Kanata's office park in a larger map

There's two routes that are possible:

• along Timm Road, then north on Eagleson and March. I don't know what Timm is like; the overpass over the 417 is narrow and dangerous. There is a bike lane along March (where five cyclists were strick last weekend).
• north on Moodie, west along the NCC Watts Creek bike path, get off at Burke and down the rest of Carling. Moodie is busy and the 417 overpass is rough. The bike path is really very nice, but being dumped onto the western part of Carling terribly paved. I'll talk more about that in another post.

Often, it makes sense to take a different route depending on the direction. Crossing major roads (like Carling) is very dangerous.

Andrew Hayden Park

This is a connection point for other parts of Ottawa like Westboro and downtown. It hooks up with some other bike routes.

It, too, has two major routes to get to Kanata north:

• straight west down Carling. This starts by being on the 60km/hr road to Moodie, then it is a nicely paved shoulder, although along a 80km/hr stretch. Then it gets bad; there's a CN train bridge (worth a few more articles) and again the nasty western stretch of Carling.
• along Corkstown (a residential, 40km/hr road), and along the Greenbelt bike path. Then north along Burke to Carling, over that nasty stretch mentioned above.

How to figure this out

The only way to know these things is to bike the route many times and do some detours on some trips to figure out what the alternatives are.

The City of Ottawa bike maps don't tell you enough. They don't point out the major obstacles (like the Carling train bridge), tell you where the paved shoulders.

The signage is really poor. Take the photo below... this is the turnoff needed to get from Carling through Burke to the Greenbelt bike path. This is an exceptionally useful connection, but it is uninviting (the barking dogs 100m in don't help either). You'd never know this was such a convenient connection!

What we can do

The thing we all want is to get bike paths that connect actually common source and destinations. This will be difficult.

Something else is to address the hazards along the way (pave some shoulders, actually draw bike lanes on them). I hope this is something we can get in city budgets.

Signage, I'd think, would be easiest to address. Add some signs that indicate common locations. You see some of these on some NCC paths, but never on City of Ottawa roads.

Information is something else. Figuring out the above took me several months, and most of it was by word of mouth.

I think we can do a lot better at at making major bicycle commuting routes more friendly.

Pothole on Carling west of Forest St.

This pothole is on the south side of Carling just west of Forest St. I didn't measure, but I'd estimate that it is 6" deep and would destroy most front wheels. There's some faded orange paint that encircles it and its smaller offspring. It isn't clear if that's a warning or for instruction of some future repair. It is hard to estimate its depth if it is full of rain water. I think has been there for more than two weeks but probably longer.

Carling is two somewhat narrow lanes at that point, and in rush hour they tend to both be full and there are quite a few large busses like the 85.

Why it is dangerous for cyclists: Your choices are a) swerve into traffic b) go through the pothole, break your wheel, fall over the handlebars and maybe into traffic c) balance your bike over the 2" of somewhat level pavement or d) get off your bike, walk on the sidewalk, then remount. if you're paying attention to the busy surrounding traffic, you may need to make this decision very quickly.

Why it is dangerous for drivers: A cyclist may behave erratically or swerve into your path. This can't be good for your suspension either, but presumably you're far enough away from the curb to not land in the crater.

I took the above photo yesterday evening. It is poor quality because of the rain and the quality of photos of my Blackberry.

I emailed 311@ottawa.ca with a description of its location. They got back to me almost right away with a tracking number.

Update on July 26, 2009: The city has filled the potholes, probably on the same day I reported it.

View reported pot holes in a larger map

The start of this blog

In a year, I spend about 200 hours sitting on my bicycle. Quite a bit of this is spent considering the state of cycling where I am. Sometimes, I have a bad ride... a driver yells at me to get off the road, there's a large curb, an unfilled pothole, you name it. I'm frustrated when I get to my destination, and it gets worse when I read about cyclists being killed, confusion over driving laws, lack of government funding, etc.

Most of my ideas to deal with this so far have been totally unreasonable: post photos of bad drivers, run for office, midnight pothole filling or writing educational messages on a whiteboard on the back of my bike.

I think the biggest problem is a lack of information. I'm convinced that cyclists, drivers, politicians and voters don't all understand:

• traffic laws
• the low priority we give to biking in urban planning
• how cycling affects non-cyclists
• the investment that the city of Ottawa actually makes in cycling
• that it doesn't have to be this way

One goal I have is to not let this degenerate into random complaining. There's enough of this on the comments sections of news web pages. I'd like the information here to be fact-based and in support of improving the situation.

The hardest part of blogging is keeping them going. Let's see how I do.