When good is not enough – extending the bicycle’s reach in The Netherlands

Also published at Resilience.org

The Netherlands has a worldwide reputation as a bicycle-loving country – but bikes account for only a small proportion of kilometers travelled.

While the Dutch have given far greater official support to bicycling than other industrialized countries have, the dominance of car culture is still a fact of life in The Netherlands.

The government publication Transport and Mobility 2016 includes the section heading “The Dutch and their sacred cow” – and the authors aren’t referring to the bicycle. Rather, they note that over half of the adult population, and 71% of households, owns a car. This proportion rises to 84% of rural households, and 90% of high-income households.

Using figures from 2014, the publication states that 28% of trips made are by bicycle and 18% are by foot –  but these trips tend to be short. Overall, 73% of kilometers traveled within the country are by car, with 9% by bike, 9% by train, 3% by other land-based public transport, and 3% on foot.

What are the most promising ways to shift a significant portion of this travel to carbon-emissions-free or low-carbon modes? Trips for education only account for 7% of kilometers traveled, and 80% of Dutch students under 15 already bike to school, so additional improvement in that category will be hard to achieve.

Commuting is the biggest single category of kilometers traveled. In common with other countries, the Dutch spend a disproportionate amount on roadways to accommodate more cars. But unlike most other countries, the Dutch are also investing substantially in infrastructure that makes it possible for more people to get to work without getting into a car.

Steel wheels and rubber tires

Building the Cycling City, published by Island Press, August 2018

In their excellent work Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality, Melissa and Chris Bruntlett discuss two areas of focus in efforts to increase bicycles’ modal share. (See the first part of a look at this book here.)

Cycling is the most common form of transportation in the country for short trips – 3 to 5 km – but most commutes are significantly longer than that. Fortunately, the country has also maintained a highly effective train network, and trains and bikes are now working symbiotically.

The Bruntletts note that “the nationwide [rail] system serves over 1.2 million passengers each and every day, half of whom bookend their train travel with bicycle rides.” (Building the Cycling City, page 140)

A small infrastructure program has been essential in promoting bike-train trips. Because the train system is already well used, there is no room on trains for bikes at rush hour. Therefore people are encouraged to keep one bike at home to ride to the local train station, and another one on the other end to pedal from the train station to the workplace. (That’s one reason the country now counts more bicycles than people.)

To be secure in this practice, people need safe bike parking adjacent to all train stations. Thus you can now find bike parking facilities at every train station – for hundreds of bikes in smaller towns, thousands of bikes in small cities, or tens of thousands of bikes in bigger cities.

This covered bike-parking facility is in the northern city of Groningen, adjacent to the train station.

The most impressive of these efforts is in the southern city of Utrecht. A large university town just a short train ride away from Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Leiden and Den Haag, Utrecht boasts the country’s busiest train station. To ensure that many of the rail passengers don’t need to rely on motorized transportation to get to or from the station, the station is now the site of the world’s largest bike garage, in a complex which holds 22,000 bikes and will hold 32,000 when completed.1

A state-of-the-art bike parking garage in downtown Utrecht. Gently sloping ramps wind from the street up through the three levels of parking, and electronic signs at the ends of aisles tell cyclists where free spaces are located.

The largest of the facilities holds 12,500 bikes of standard or close-to-standard sizes, while a separate facility can accommodate delivery bikes and bakfiets – long bikes with a large box that can hold up to three children. The garages are fully sheltered from weather, are constantly monitored, and most are open 24 hours a day while some sections are open “only” from 6 am to midnight. With so many cyclists using the facilities, it also makes sense to have a service and repair shop on site.

This attention to the needs of people with bikes may sound expensive. But clearly a 12,000-bike parking facility is far less expensive in both Euros and land area than a comparable-capacity car parking garage, or the kind of bus terminal that would be required to get all those people in and out of the train station by bus. And making the bike-train combo safe and convenient pays big dividends: Transport and Mobility 2016 notes that “An inhabitant of Utrecht differs from the inhabitants of the other provinces in making the most trips as well as the most kilometres by bicycle and train.”2 (Emphasis mine.)

Electrification

During my first week in The Netherlands, I was bent over the handlebars fighting a fierce wind when an elderly woman, sitting bolt-upright in the breeze, passed me with little apparent effort. I thought, “Wow, these Dutch people are really fit!” After the same thing had happened several more times, I caught on and learned to recognize electric-assist bikes3 by their characteristic battery location.

The Bruntletts note that

“Despite its mostly flat terrain, the Netherlands has emerged as the world’s largest pedelec market per capita, with electric bikes making up almost a third of new bicycle sales in 2016. Denmark is a close second ….” (Building the Cycling City, page 50)

There is a very good reason that The Netherlands and Denmark are such good markets for electric-assist bikes: they have the infrastructure that allows safe riding on an extensive network of protected bike lanes. Citing European Cyclists Federation development director Kevin Mayne, the Bruntletts say “the places with the best bike infrastructure are the ones that sell the most pedelecs, and the global e-bike market won’t fulfill its potential without great places to ride.” (Building the Cycling City, page 87)

But with safe infrastructure and traffic conditions in place, pedelecs have the potential to get people out of cars for longer commutes, not just short rides.

Within the city of Groningen where distances are small, cycling already has a 61 percent modal share, which the city hopes to increase to 67 percent. The Bruntletts write

“What would be more impressive would be to increase the current 12 percent of people arriving by bike from outside the city …. E-bikes will play a crucial role in any such increase by lengthening the average commute distance from eight kilometres to twenty kilometres with very little additional effort from riders.” (Building the Cycling City, page 64)

Elsewhere in the country, a small network of snelfietsroutes (“fast cycling routes”) are being built between major residential and commercial centers. Designed not for scenic appeal but with the straight-forward goal of promoting efficient bike commuting from city to city, these routes also appeal to cyclists who may not be up to an athletic workout five days a week, but would still like to bike their long-ish commutes. Electric-assist bikes have already proven very popular on these inter-city routes.

In general there is no need for specific public infrastructure to support pedelecs, if there is already a comprehensive network of safe lanes for ordinary bikes. Yet the presence of charging stations could make even longer rides practical – for example, the kind of rides that would use most of the battery power on a one-way trip, requiring a re-charge before the return trip. Some employers are now providing charging stations in bike garages at work, and I spotted this station outside a popular restaurant along a well-used cycling route.4

Public bike-charging station in Stellendam, South Holland

As with parking garages, charging stations for bikes take up much less space than charging stations for an equivalent number of cars. And since e-bikes consume far less energy than e-cars, charging infrastructure is far less technically demanding and far less expensive. (Pedelec batteries are rated in Watt Hours while electric car batteries are rated in KiloWatt Hours.)

Post-script: follow the red-brick road?

As Melissa and Chris Bruntlett so engagingly document, The Netherlands has done far more than other industrialized countries to safely integrate bicycles into their overall transportation system, with great results for public health and for the vitality of their cities. One result of the national habit of cycling is that the transportation sector in The Netherlands is accountable for just one-fifth of the country’s carbon emissions, compared to one-third in the US.

While the Dutch have a commanding lead when it comes to effective promotion of everyday cycling, they have achieved this in the context of a transport system where cars remain dominant. Most households own cars, most kilometers are traveled by car, and many features of daily life and of the national landscape will be entirely familiar to people living in other car cultures.

Outside the core urban areas, a hierarchy of speed rules just as it does in many other countries – the spacing is just tighter. The US Library of Congress report “National Funding of Road Infrastructure: Netherlands” states

“According to European statistical sources, the highest motorway density in Europe is found in the Netherlands (78 km per 1000 km² on average in 2009), Luxembourg (59), and Belgium (58).”5

Motorway interchange near Schiphol airport

As noted earlier, more affluent citizens are more likely to own and use cars for their commutes, and they also tend to commute longer distances. For a small, densely populated country which clearly values its farmland, the motorways take up a surprising amount of space in rural areas. Furthermore, dedicated high-speed car-and-truck lanes also impose their geometry on slower-speed travellers. While cycling through the countryside, for example, you need to find the infrequent roads that cross the motorways, where you may bike up and over the dedicated high-speed transport lanes. Likewise if you’re pedaling a bikeway alongside an expressway, you need to take a detour each time you come to an interchange, with a wide curve around the sprawling clover-leaf interchanges. These impositions on cyclists and other low-speed travellers are deemed necessary to allow uninterrupted high-speed travel on the expressways.

But what if, as a world community, we finally embark on the serious kind of energy and lifestyle revolution that is needed to adequately reduce carbon emissions? Or – a more likely scenario in our current political scene – what if we run short of cheap fossil fuels without finding a technological miracle to allow our high-energy lifestyles to continue with low-intensity fuels such as solar and wind-power? What sort of challenges will we face in transforming our transportation infrastructures?

The Netherlands will clearly have a head start in such a transition. Yet as I cycled through the countryside, it often struck me that there too, the road system is astonishingly overbuilt. Frequently I found myself biking on a dedicated bike path, beside a two-lane service road, beside a multi-lane expressway, with another service road and bike path on the other side.

A generation or a few from now, when our descendants have through choice or necessity transitioned to a low-energy, and therefore low speed, transportation system, will they still need or want to devote such wide swaths of countryside to transportation? And if not, how will they repurpose some of those thousands of hectares of heavy-duty pavement?

In my first few days biking through The Netherlands I wasn’t always happy that many bike lanes are routed along old, somewhat rough brick roads – the surface just wasn’t as smooth, fast or  comfortable to bike on as a well-maintained asphalt surface.

But then I reflected on the almost endless repairability and reusability of those brick roads. From my own work experience I know that “recycling” asphalt and concrete pavements demands large amounts of high-intensity energy resources. But in The Netherlands I saw workers with simple hand tools re-laying old bricks and re-creating good-as-new roads.

I won’t be around to see it, but in the long term my guess would be that the centuries-old red brick roads of The Netherlands will be the ones that are renewed for centuries to come.

Centuries-old street in centre of Haarlem.

Next week: a look at new cycling infrastructure in Valencia, Paris and London in light of the infrastructure in The Netherlands.

 

Top photo: covered bike-parking facility next to train station in Groningen.

Footnotes

1 “A third big bicycle parking garage for Utrecht”, 17 April 2018, Bicycle Dutch website

2 Transport and Mobility 2016, Statistics Netherlands, page 19

3 While the “electric bikes” now seen in North America most often don’t require the rider to pedal at all, the variety common in The Netherlands has a motor which only kicks in while the rider is pedaling. These electric-assist or pedelec bikes thus amplify a rider’s strength, but don’t allow completely effort-free riding.

4 On the downside, ubiquitous availability of charging stations could lead more people to rely on the battery-assist mode almost exclusively, resulting in a steep drop-off in the exercise levels and health benefits of e-bike converts. See discussion of a recent European study at “Riding e-bikes does not lead to health benefits”, on A view from the cycling path, September 12, 2018

5 National Funding of Road Infrastructure: Netherlands”, US Library of Congress

A modest investment with major dividends: cycling culture in the Netherlands

Also published at Resilience.org

How would you describe the process in which a small country builds a 35,000 kilometer network of fully separated bike infrastructure – and traffic-calms 75 per cent of their urban streets to a speeds of 30 km/h (19 mph) or less?

Building the Cycling City, published by Island Press, August 2018

One apt analogy is “picking the low-hanging fruit”. While Dutch cycling policy has required only modest annual investment, it has resulted in cities where bikes are used for most short trips – five kilometers or less – which can be pedaled by ordinary citizens from age 8 to 80 with no great effort. Furthermore this policy has helped preserve historic urban centers by removing the need for intra-city expressways or vast parking lots, while also promoting a fit and healthy population.

These are some of the themes that come through in a recent book by Melissa and Chris Bruntlett. Building The Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality provides an excellent overview of the different ways that transportation policy has developed in five Dutch cities. The book also shows how lessons learned there are now benefitting other cities including New York, Calgary, Vancouver, and San Antonio.

This article is based on the Bruntletts’ excellent work, as well as on my own four-week bike tour of the Netherlands in September and October.

Giving priority to the most vulnerable road users, not the least vulnerable

In cities throughout the industrial world in the 20th century, the lion’s share of public space became the domain of people engaged in a dangerous and polluting activity – driving cars. The Netherlands was no exception to this trend.

But by the mid-1970s, spurred in part by a growing number of traffic fatalities and in part by the OPEC oil embargo, a strong reaction to auto-dominance took hold in several Dutch cities.

In the northern city of Groningen, a plan to build big new roads through historic neighbourhoods prompted 24-year-old Max Van den Berg to get into municipal politics. Just seven years later, the city implemented a transportation policy promoted by Van den Berg and allied councillors. Their Traffic Circulation Plan

“proposed dividing the city center to four parts and forbidding cars to cross between those quarters. This made the inner city practically impenetrable with a car, leaving cycling and walking the best ways to get around. The plan didn’t completely remove motor vehicles from the equation – as public buses and delivery vans would retain limited access to parts of the core – but it came remarkably close.” (Building the Cycling City, page 53-54)

One result 40 years later is that distracted walking or cycling is not a capital crime in Dutch cities. Even at rush hour in Groningen, one can walk or pedal through the central city while engrossed in conversation, while focusing on a smart phone, or while writing the next great novel in your head – without fear of being squashed by a car.

The same pattern holds true in many other small- and mid-sized Dutch cities where the urban core is mostly free of the noise, pollution and danger posed by cars. While some cars and delivery vehicles creep through these districts, the drivers know that foot-powered residents have the right of way – not just at crosswalks or traffic lights but all along the length of narrow historic streets.

Above, a “scramble” in Groningen at rush hour, where cyclists going every direction smoothly negotiate their way through the intersection. Below, an intersection in the core of Leeuwarden, the capital city of the province of Friesland.

Today, Groningen’s traffic planning embodies a very basic principle: “pedestrians over cyclists, cyclists over public transportation, and public transportation over cars. Essentially, the most vulnerable users of the city have priority over the least ….” (Building the Cycling City, page 61)

The important but limited role of separated bike lanes

The Netherlands is justly famous for its vast network of protected bike lanes, not only along arterial roads within cities, but also throughout the countryside connecting every village, town and city.

The rules for when, where and how cycle lanes are built are now well defined. Basically, in areas where it is not practical to slow cars so that they travel at close to the speeds of bicycles, separated paths must be installed. In cities, this often means a street-side lane with a curb separating the bike traffic from car traffic. In most cases these cycle lanes run on both sides of the streets. Critically, the urban bike lanes are not carved out of the sidewalks – the realm of pedestrians, who are also to be protected and encouraged – but are achieved by narrowing or removing car lanes.

“Bicycle street. Autos are guests.”

On rural roads with moderately fast cars but low traffic volumes, separate bike lanes are not always installed but cars are expected to – and do, in my experience – pass bikes carefully and courteously, yielding to bikes whenever oncoming traffic makes it impossible to pass safely.

Alongside busier roads with traffic of 50–60 km/hr or faster, there are fully separated bike lanes. Often these run right beside the roads, but there are also many cases where the bike paths diverge from the roads significantly, providing a quieter ride and cleaner air for people on bikes.

A significant component of the system is the system of signage. Bicycle routes are marked by signs at nearly every intersection, with signs that are visually distinct from the directional signs for motorists. This makes it easy for a bike rider to navigate through new areas, without pulling out either a smart phone or a paper map. There are also hundreds of maps on metal signposts showing local cycling routes, with each province maintaining its own set of local route maps.

Above, a roadside sign showing local cycling routes in the northern province of Friesland. Below, a popular cycling route on the coast in the southern province of Zeeland.

 

All this infrastructure, of course, costs money – but is it expensive? That’s a matter of perspective, and the Dutch do spend more money on cycling infrastructure than other nations. Melissa and Chris Bruntlett write,

“The Dutch cycle because their government spends an astonishing €30 ($35 US) per person per year on bike infrastructure – fifteen times the amount invested in nearby England.” (Building The Cycling City, page 15)

Yet this €30 per person is a very small fraction of what the Dutch – and other nations – spend on auto infrastructure. According to official figures from 2015, “The Dutch government spends a total of 15 billion euros on traffic and transport” each year – meaning the cycling infrastructure expense is a bit more than 3% of the government transport and traffic budget.

For this €30 per capita, the Dutch have been able to preserve the character of their central cities, keep carbon emissions lower than in neighboring countries, and enjoy some of the best health in the world due to an active population and cleaner air. Given the cost of health care alone, the €30 per capita spent by the Dutch government to promote cycling is an astonishing bargain.

While infrastructure such as separated cycle paths is an important component of the cycle strategy, it is important to keep in mind that the Dutch did not immediately launch a major building program when they began to focus on cycling in the 1970s. Furthermore, even today about 75 percent of their roads do not have separate cycle lanes.

In their chapter on Amsterdam, Melissa and Chris Bruntlett explain,

“This cycling utopia was built on traffic-calming rather than bike lanes. Instead of constructing separated cycle tracks on every street, officials started with speed-limit reductions, parking restrictions, through-traffic limitations, and lane narrowing and removals.” (Building the Cycling City, page 93)

Cycle lanes are great, but you’ve got to get from home or office or school to the cycle lane, and that route must be safe before most urban residents will want to bike on a regular basis. If the route to and from a dedicated cycle path remains dangerous and nerve-wracking, only the daring folks who are already cycling are likely to get onto the cycle path.

Traffic-calming on most or all non-arterial roads, therefore, plays a crucial role in laying the groundwork for widespread use of separated bike lanes along major routes. Fortuitously, the cost of traffic-calming methods is generally very low, meaning that is an obvious place to start in a long-term strategy to boost active transportation.

In the next installment, I will look at ways the Dutch are extending the humble bicycle’s reach through an intentional symbiosis with their train network, and through the rapid uptake of electric-assist bikes. A third installment in this series will look at cycling promotion efforts in Valencia, Paris and London, in light of the Dutch example.

In the historic centre of Middelburg, province of Zeeland.

Top photo: mural and bikes in downtown Leeuwarden, Friesland

3 cheers for A2Bism: a review of ‘Copenhagenize’

Also published at Resilience.org.

How do we get beyond the dependency-inducing trap of car culture? After 100 years in which auto-oriented infrastructure has dominated public works spending and reshaped civic life, how can we make our streets safe and healthy spaces?

Copenhagenize:
The Definitive Guide to Global Bicycle Urbanism (200 colour illustrations, 296 pages), March 2018, Island Press

These questions were suggested in discussion with a reader following my last post, Speeding Down a Dead End Road. There are many ways to approach this subject – and one of the best is to read Copenhagenize: The Definitive Guide to Global Bicycle Urbanism, a just-released book by Mikael Colville-Andersen which fortuitously landed in my inbox last week.

Colville-Andersen is a Canadian-Danish designer who started photographing people on bicycles in Copenhagen in 2006. This pastime quickly became the popular Cycle Chic blog, and then grew into Copenhagenize Design Co., which has now helped scores of cities improve their urban transportation mix. Copenhagenize, the book, is a great summary not only of the lessons learned by Copenhagen over the past forty years, but also the lessons learned by Colville-Andersen and his associates in many cities over the past 10 years.

First a brief word about what is both the book’s major limitation and its great strength: this is a guide to “bicycle urbanism” – it doesn’t pretend to cover cycling in rural or small-town areas.

In a move away from car culture, urban cycling is definitely the low-hanging fruit. Short trips under about 7 km make up a large proportion of trips within cities. Furthermore, the many costs of car culture – especially air pollution, and crashes that kill and maim – are readily evident in cities, while much-touted benefits such as speed and convenience are typically negated by gridlock. So it should be easy to persuade many average citizens to get out of cars and take to the streets on bicycle – if those streets can be made convenient and safe for human-powered transportation.

Let’s start with “convenient”.
 

A simple motivation

Extensive surveys have found that most Copenhagen cyclists are not motivated primarily by health concerns, or a concern for the environment, or a desire to save money – they ride bike because it’s the most convenient way to get around their city. This leads Colville-Andersen to stress a basic principle:

“I know exactly what you want. It’s the same thing that I want. Indeed, it’s what every homo sapien who has ever lived wants: a direct line from A to B when we’re transporting ourselves. … This is the most basic principle in transport planning. I call it A2Bism.” (Copenhagenize, pg 146)

Taking the most direct line is especially important when we’re getting around under our own steam. Yet for seventy-five years traffic planners concentrated on giving the best routes to cars, while introducing detours for foot-powered residents. Colville-Andersen sums up both this history of mistakes, and the simple solution, in these simple “traffic planning guide” graphics.

The two graphics on the left summarize the rupture of an ancient pattern of city life  by car culture – including, he emphasizes, in cities such as Copenhagen and Amsterdam.

On the right is the guide used by bicycle-friendly cities in recent decades. While cities in Denmark and the Netherlands have seen tremendous growth in cycling since they adopted this approach in the 1970s, a significant uptick in active transportation has also begun in many other cities, including a few in North America.

All too often in North America, however, new bike routes are added in out-of-the-way locations where they, predictably, serve few riders going about daily tasks like getting to and from work.1 If we were serious about encouraging rather than discouraging cyclists, we would allocate safe space for them on the most direct routes.

The Copenhagenize approach is illustrated at the right side of the graphic above: safe and healthy modes of active transportation are given direct routing, while polluting and dangerous cars and trucks get the frequent jogs and detours.
 

Safe space

Cycle-friendly planning isn’t quite as simple as drawing lines on a map or on the streets. While Colville-Andersen emphasizes that good urban cycling infrastructure is far cheaper than what we routinely spend on car infrastructure, we do need to budget for something besides a little paint:

“Hastily painted pictograms in the middle of car lanes are not infrastructure. They are the awkward watermark of lazy politicians and lazier transport professionals.” (Copenhagenize, pg 77)

Where streets must be shared by pedestrians, cyclists, and cars, trucks and buses, and motorized traffic will move more than 40 km/h, mere painted bike lanes will not provide an adequate measure of safety – some sort of physical separation is required. Having a row of parked cars between the cycle lane and the moving traffic is one good strategy. (In North America, however, the order is often reversed, with cycle lanes between the parked cars and moving traffic, precisely in the “door zone” where a driver opening the door of a parked car might knock a cyclist directly into the passing traffic.)

If Copenhagen now illustrates everything in Colville-Andersen’s chapter “Best Practice Design and Infrastructure”, it’s not because the Danes have always got it right. In fact, he says, all the cycle-planning mistakes frequently being made in other jurisdictions have also been made in Copenhagen. Other cities can save a lot of time and money if they don’t try to “reinvent the wheel”.

Waiting at a signalized intersection on a bike lane in Almetyevsk, Republic of Tatarstan

Colville-Andersen gives advice on many specifics: what is the minimum width for separated bike lanes, and when is it time to widen them further; what kind of intersection spacing works to keep cyclists safe from right-turning cars; under what circumstances is a bi-directional cycle lane a good option; how can cycle lanes be safely routed past bus stops. Yet the basic typology for bike lanes is based on just two data points: how many cars does a road carry, and what is the speed. Based on these two issues, he says, there are a grand total of four basic designs:

“Four. There are only four basic designs in Danish bicycle planning. One of these four fits every street in the Danish Kingdom and, indeed, every street in every city in the world.” (Copenhagenize, page 176)

In North America, in spite of a resurgence in urban cycling over the past ten years, no major city yet enjoys a bicycle “mode-share” of 10%. In Copenhagen and in Dutch cities such as Groningen, meanwhile that mode-share is now more than 40% – with the remainder split between buses, trains, cars, and walking.

Colville-Andersen emphasises, however, that “Copenhagen wasn’t always Copenhagen …. This city was as car-clogged as anywhere else on the planet through the 1950s and 1960s.” (Copenhagenize, page 64)

The growth of cycling culture there required massive public demonstrations in the 1970s, decades of work, and leadership by municipal officials with real vision. A key barrier is to get beyond the idea that we shouldn’t invest in cycling, because only a few people are willing to ride bike in our current urban environments:

“That misconception that a city has to build infrastructure for the people cycling now, as opposed to the 20-25 percent of the population that could be cycling, still reigns supreme.” (Copenhagenize, page 199)

 
 

Perfect synergy

Copenhagenize is a superb manual on all the important details of bike infrastructure design and operation. It’s a great ‘how-to’ guide for making cities safe and convenient for active transportation. Indeed, it’s a great book on the factors that, in the millennia before the destructive onset of car culture, made cities very attractive places to live:

“We have been living together in cities for more than 7,000 years. By and large, we used those seven millennia to hammer out some serious best-practices about cohabitation in the urban theater and the importance of social fabric. We threw most of that knowledge under the wheels of the automobile shortly after we invented it ….” (Copenhagenize, page 13)

In the struggle to redemocratize our streets, he says, the bicycle will play a key role: “This most human form of transport represents the perfect synergy between technology and the human desire to move. It is the most perfect vehicle for urban living ever invented.”


photos and illustrations by Mikael Colville-Andersen courtesy of Island Press

1A recent example in my area is the stalled plan to shrink car lanes and add bicycle lanes on a section of Toronto’s main through street, Yonge Street. The mayor and many councillors want instead to send local cyclists on a detour to the west, while preserving the direct route for motorists.

An enthusiastic embrace of a mysterious planet

Also published at Resilience.org.

Let’s face it, most of us don’t love the environment most of the time. More often than not, the environment is too cold, too hot, too buggy, too dry or too wet, and we try to keep it safely on the far side of a window or a TV screen.

Bicycle travel has a way of breaking us out of that narrow band of comfort. When we ride for more than a few days in one direction, it’s almost certain to rain or to snow, the wind will blow in the wrong direction, or perhaps it will get still and sultry and we’ll complain that there’s no wind at all. We either give up cycle touring, or we expand our appreciation beyond “nice” weather.

Lands of Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Road, by Kate Harris, 2018, Knopf Canada, 300 pages

Yet few travelling cyclists will embrace the environment, in all its moods, with the eagerness shown by Kate Harris. That enthusiasm is just one of the qualities that makes Lands of Lost Borders so inspirational. Her book is one of the finest bike-trip travelogues ever written – but the wide-ranging reflections spurred by long hours on the road make her memoir a great read even for people with no interest in cycling.

Ironically, Harris’ deep dive in this earthly environment – via a months-long ride on the Silk Road and through Tibet – resulted from her growing disenchantment with an extra-terrestrial itinerary. A childhood dream of becoming a Mars-bound astronaut led to a stellar academic career, with a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford and admission to a PhD program at MIT.

It wasn’t the difficulty or the danger of a Mars mission that put her off. Rather, a summer-long Mars simulation exercise in the Utah desert brought an unbearable sense of separation:

As four crewmates and I trundled around Utah in canvas spacesuits, I found myself disconcerted by the fact that when I gazed at a mountain, I saw a veneer of Plexiglas. When I reached out to touch canyon walls the colour of embers, I felt the synthetic fabric of my glove instead of the smooth, sun-warmed sandstone. As all kinds of weather howled outside my spacesuit, I heard either radio static or my percussive panting amplified in the plastic helmet, like I was breathing down my own neck.”

Giving up the dream of going to Mars wasn’t easy. “The first sign of doubt is a renewed fanaticism,” she observes, and she threw herself into preparatory work doing a master’s degree at Oxford followed by graduate work in windowless labs at MIT. Eventually, though, she could not resist the urge to clear her head by going for a bike ride with her long-time friend Melissa – a 10,000 km ride, from Turkey to Tibet, through snowstorms, days of winter rains, against fierce winds on plateaus higher than any mountain peak in North America, across baking deserts and into teeming cities.

Her book would be superb if it merely catalogued the adventures of the road, or if it merely described her gradual coming to terms with the flaws and limitations of childhood heroes such as Marco Polo and Charles Darwin. But she also allows readers to share her sense of wonder at the lands she is visiting:

Deserts have long been landscapes of revelation, as though the clean-bitten clarity of so much space heightens receptivity to frequencies otherwise missed in the white noise of normal life. This was especially true just before dawn on the Ustyurt Plateau, when the horizon glowed and shimmered like something about to happen. As the sun rose it tugged gold out of the ground and tossed it everywhere, letting the land’s innate wealth loose from a disguise of dust. The air smelled of baked dirt spiced with dew and sage. Our bicycles cast long cool shadows that grew and shrank with the desert’s rise and fall, its contours so subtle we needed those shadows to see them. The severity of the land, the softness of the light – where opposites meet is magic.”

Blizzards, sandstorms, endless mud, these are challenges to be relished – but borders are insufferable. In spite of her success in sneaking across border checkpoints for unauthorized rides across Tibet – not once but twice – some of the borders are non-negotiable, causing long delays and major changes in route. With enough time for reflection, however, even these borders help her to deeper understandings:

Whether buttressed with dirt roads or red tape, barbed wire or bribes, the various walls of the world have one aspect in common: they all posture as righteous and necessary parts of the landscape. That we live on a planet drawn and quartered is a fact most Canadians have the luxury of ignoring, for our passports open doors everywhere – with the notable exception of Central Asia, where North Americans face the kind of suspicion and resistance would-be tourists from Uzbekistan get from Canada ….”

Is there a recipe for a successful bike trip across a remote continent? Kate Harris would likely say that’s the wrong question. It doesn’t matter how far away, how exotic, how difficult or how long your journey is, it only matters that you throw yourself into the experience:

Departure is simple: you step out the door, onto your bike, into the wind of your life. What’s hard is not looking back, not measuring gain or loss by lapsed time, or aching legs, or the leering kilometre markers of ambition. You are on your way when you decipher the pounding of rain as Morse code for making progress. You are getting closer when you recognize doubt as the heaviest burden on your bike and toss it aside, for when it comes to exploring, any direction will do. You have finally arrived when you realize that persistent creak you’ve been hearing all this time is not your wheels, not your mind, but the sound of the planet turning.”

 

Illustration at top adapted from “Lands of Lost Borders Highlights Reel” video, viewed via kateharris.ca.

Taking the lane, and making our cities safe for all

“Vehicular cycling” and the Slow Bicycle Movement

Also published at Resilience.org.

The “vehicular cycling” approach promoted by John Forester can be a great help to all of us who have to ride on busy streets dominated by cars. Yet I think there are good reasons why this approach has always had limited appeal.

In this second installment of a two-part essay I compare the vehicular cycling approach to what is arguably a much stronger social force – the Slow Bicycling movement.1 (Part one of the essay is here.)

When I took up urban cycling in Toronto at the beginning of the 1980s, Forester’s insights were just what I needed to hear. I had quickly come to the conclusion that a bicycle was a beautifully appropriate technology for getting around in cities, and I’d be damned if I would accept that most streets should be ceded to cars and trucks.

In his book Effective Cycling2 Forester called his approach “vehicular cycling”, and he helped me to understand that a cyclist in motor traffic is generally safest when behaving like a driver and asserting the rights of a driver.

Take The Lane

Several basic ideas are key. First, an urban cyclist is safer riding on the road than on the sidewalk. That is because at the many intersections – both driveways and cross streets – drivers are not habituated to looking at sidewalks for anything faster than a pedestrian, and they may well turn right into a fast-moving cyclist. When the cyclist stays out in the road, right in the normal line of vision of motorists, the cyclist is seen early enough for the driver to slow down.

Second, a cyclist should not hug the curb, but should take and hold a place well out into the lane. Again, the cyclist should be in the normal line of vision of drivers, and in addition should avoid near-curb hazards such as sewer grates, road-edge potholes, and debris in gutters. It’s particularly important not to weave in and out between parked cars.

When a lane is too narrow to allow a car to safely pass a cyclist within that lane, the cyclist should move right into the middle of the lane, so that a driver will slow down until it is safe to pull around in the next lane.

An extension of the “take the lane” idea is that cyclists should take the appropriate lane. For example, when coming to an intersection with a right-hand turn lane, a cyclist going straight through should move out of that lane into the through lane. When approaching an intersection with a left turn lane, urban cyclists can often safely move right across the roadway into the left turn lane. (These examples assume North American driving conventions; cyclists in Britain would follow the same principles adjusted for left-side driving.)

These lane changes depend on a procedure Forester terms “negotiation”. He urged cyclists to practice turning their heads to make eye contact with overtaking drivers, and in so doing, signaling intent while also verifying that the driver had seen the cyclist. I quickly adopted this practice and found it very helpful, which is partly why to this day I have never got used to using a rear-view mirror on a bike.

There’s a problem with this “vehicular cycling”, however, that goes to the heart of this essay. A successful “negotiation” for a lane depends on the cyclist maintaining a speed fairly close to the speed of the cars and trucks. If you’re riding at 15 kph, you can’t make meaningful eye contact with a driver coming up behind you at 60 kph. Forester recognized this:

“When the traffic is moving more than 15 mph faster than you, negotiation is impossible ….”3

To Forester this wasn’t a big problem – he pitched his ideas to fit and active cyclists – and it wasn’t a big problem for me, 40 years ago, either. Although I have never been athletic, I was in the prime of life, very enthused about cycling, and I could generally keep close to or surpass the speed of city traffic. I didn’t stop to worry about letting motorcars basically set the pace for almost all of the cycling I did.

What’s the risk?

Humans don’t generally like the feeling that they could be crushed at any moment; we’re funny that way. So even though the risk of riding in traffic in most cities is much less than the health risk of being sedentary4, vehicular cycling didn’t catch on all that well, and cyclists’ ranks in North America grew slowly.

As for me, I quickly concluded that the risk of cycling in traffic was relatively low compared to many other common activities.

But I always knew that one careless move – either by a driver or by me – could result in my instant demise. I knew, too, that most of the time when we make the kind of mistakes all humans make on the roads, there are no consequences; just once in a while, there is a confluence of circumstances that gives a particular mistake a deadly outcome.

We can take reasonable precautions to reduce our risks, and then get on with life without worrying a lot about the risks that always, inevitably, remain. For me those reasonable precautions included riding by the principles of “effective cycling”.

When I first heard discussion of having separated bike lanes alongside city streets, I didn’t like the idea. It struck me as a declaration of surrender, a formal ceding of streets to motor traffic. Besides, I thought, a separated bike lane will soon get crowded if indeed it attracts many more people to cycling – and then we’ll all have to ride at the speed of the slowest cyclists. (Much later, I learned that Forester was also a determined opponent of separate cycling infrastructure, for similar reasons.)

For three reasons, my thinking on this took a 180 degree turn – but the turn took years.

First, over the past twenty years it became apparent that separated bike lanes were very popular among cyclists, especially new cyclists. As cities like Toronto, Vancouver, New York and Minneapolis started their modest developments of cycling lanes, the ranks of cyclists, and their effective influence in urban planning, started to grow at a rate that gave real hope for sane transportation systems. In this respect we remain several decades behind cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam, but we are finally moving in the same direction.

Second, as luck would have it, I got old. (Or at least, much older than I ever intended to get, back when I was a callow youth of 30.) And as I got old I got slower, especially once I’d passed the half-century mark.

My personal experience, I now realize, was opening me to the views of the “8-80” movement. Popularized by Guillermo Penalosa, 8 80 Cities advocates for urban environments that are safe and pleasant for 8-year-olds, 80-year-olds, and everyone in between.

The vehicular cycling approach, by contrast, is clearly targeted to fit adults in the prime of life. In a recent online discussion with a determined opponent of dedicated cycling infrastructure, for example, I was told that real cyclists “inevitably get in good enough shape to cruise (maybe not average) in the 15-20 mph range.” I had to respond that the days when I cruise at 20 mph are already in life’s rear-view mirror – but I hope to be a “real cyclist” for a good many years, during which I will happily roll ever more slowly.

The final factor in my conversion came while cycle touring, when I took my first long ride on a rail-to-trail route. Though I had never worried much about traffic while biking, after a few days away from all motor traffic I realized how blissfully quiet, peaceful and stress-free the ride had been.

A healthy compromise

For all the above reasons, I am now happy to consider myself part of the Slow Bicycling movement. Does that mean I no longer appreciate the ideas of vehicular cycling? Not at all.

Most of the places I want to go on bike still don’t have dedicated cycling facilities, so I still need to ride in traffic much of the time. When and where I am able to ride at an adequate pace, following “effective cycling” principles makes my rides reasonably pleasant and safe.

Furthermore, I don’t think either the “Vehicular Cycling” or the “Slow Bicycling” approaches are fully adequate to our present predicament.

There is a widespread attitude in North America, energetically promoted by the motor industry generations ago, that cars belong on streets, and bikes don’t. Effective Cycling says that both cars and bikes belong on those streets. I believe that bikes and pedestrians belong on streets, and inherently dangerous cars do not. But I know that I’m unlikely to live to see the day when streets are returned to bikes and pedestrians, when streets are no longer the site of mortal vehicular peril.

In the meantime I think the Slow Bicycling movement, with its push for widespread, convenient and safe cycling lanes for people of all ages, is going to help us grow toward sustainable urban lifestyles, as tens of millions of North American city dwellers feel comfortable in getting out of cars, getting on bikes, and enjoying the outdoors as they move about their cities under their own power and at their own pace.


Photo at top: Toronto cyclists gather at Bloor & Spadina in May, 2009 for a Critical Mass ride. The ride celebrated the approval of bike lanes on a busy downtown route, Jarvis Street. These lanes proved short-lived, as the administration of the next mayor, the late Rob Ford, returned that precious pavement to motorists.

References

1Though there is no official definition of the Slow Bicycling movement, the Slow Bicycle Movement group on Facebook is a good introduction. Founded by Copenhagen-based urban planner Mikael Colville-Andersen, this group includes in its statement of purpose, “This group/movement is a celebration of cycling, formed as an alternative to the perception of cycling as a hardcore endurance sport/recreational activity. … The bicycle takes us places. It’s those places and getting to them that sums up this group’s spirit.

2Forester, John. Effective Cycling, first edition 1976, most recent edition 2012.

3Forester, John, (1994). Bicycle transportation: A Handbook for cycling transportation engineers (2nd ed.). Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Quoted in Listening to Bike Lanes, by Jeffrey A. Hiles.

4For example, see the article “Do the Health Benefits of Cycling Outweigh the Risks?”, Environmental Health Perspectives, August 2010, which concludes “On average, the estimated health benefits of cycling were substantially larger than the risks relative to car driving for individuals shifting their mode of transport.”

 

Where the rubber hits the road: biking in all seasons

Also published at Resilience.org.

The fifth annual Winter Cycling Congress, held February 8–10 in Montréal, brought together 375 participants from nine countries and included dozens of presentations and workshops.

It would be impossible to cover the whole Congress in one blog post, but one way to summarize the progress of winter biking would be with this, only partly tongue-in-cheek, exhortation:

“Take heart, stalwart cyclists – The Suits have arrived!”

While the momentum of all-season cycling has been building slowly for decades, progress has accelerated greatly in the past ten years. One result is that city governments across the northern hemisphere are working not only to add new cycling infrastructure, but to keep the bike lanes cleared and safe through the winter.

The Winter Cycling Congress included presentations by several professional consulting firms who design cycling infrastructure in northern cities, villages and rural areas, addresses by big city mayors and members of Parliament, plus input from maintenance experts with experience in widely varying climates.

Can you ride through the winter? Yes, you can.

While bikes have obvious appeal as healthy, low-energy, sustainable transportation tools, in many countries the bicycle’s positive impact will remain limited if people feel they can’t ride in the winter months. If city planners try to build adequate infrastructure for large numbers of cyclists in summer, but still need to accommodate all residents via alternate transport methods in winter, then our overall transport systems will remain costly and inefficient.

What are the main barriers to wider adoption of winter cycling? First, let’s deal with a common, silly objection: people can’t ride when it’s cold. This is absurd because people happily do many other activities outside in winter: ice skating, hockey, snowboarding and skiing, for example. Furthermore, all preceding generations up until about 100 years ago managed to get around in winter without being chauffeured in heated canisters. Dressing for the weather is not rocket science – our Neanderthal forebears were able to figure it out.

So when the cheap gas and diesel run out and there is no choice but to adapt to a low-energy transport system, humans will once again rise to the challenge of putting on long underwear and warm hats, without considering themselves heroes for doing so.

Today there are planning consultants gathering data in many cities, asking what are the major factors that keep people biking in the winter, and what factors make them stop.

Tony Desnick of Alta Planning discussed the results of an international survey. When respondents were asked why they decided to ride in the winter, the most common response was “I started biking and I didn’t want to stop.” (That certainly rang true with me. When I started riding a bike in Toronto in the summer of 1979, I had no expectation of riding all year. But as the months rolled by I liked biking more and more. Soon a whole winter had gone by – and now it’s 38 winters.)

When summer-only cyclists were asked “What will take you off your bike?” sixty per cent cited poorly maintained infrastructure, said Desnick.

While cities around the world are learning that provision of protected bike lanes results in immediate boosts in cycling, winter cities are also learning that a substantial share of cyclists will happily ride through the winter, as long as bike lanes are maintained.

Thus cities such as Minneapolis and Montréal now regularly clear at least some bike lanes promptly after snowfalls, with bike-lane plows going out even before most streets are cleared.

The downtown Montréal neighbourhood of Villeray is home to many cyclists, and now has a protected, well maintained bikeway on Rue Boyer, shown at right. (Click image for larger view)

The leader in taking care of winter cycling facilities is the small city of Oulu, Finland, which hosted the first Winter Cycling Congress in 2013. Though the city is just 150 km south of the Arctic Circle, about 42% of its 200,000 residents keep cycling through the winter, said Winter Cycling Federation vice-president Pekka Tahkola.

The steadily cold winter actually makes cycling and path-maintenance easy, said Tahkola. Maintenance crews leave a thin layer of snow on the paths, this quickly becomes well packed, and cyclists have good traction even without using studded tires. With few thaw-freeze episodes, there is no reason to use road salt so paths and bikes stay clean.

Most temperate-zone cities face tougher challenges, exemplified by the freezing rain which turned to slush and then bumpy ice throughout Montréal during the conference – conditions that are increasingly common due to global warming.

Yet federal politicians, municipal staff, and planning firms from cities such as Calgary, Winnipeg and Copenhagen are helping to ensure that bike infrastructure is not forgotten when winter maintenance programs are designed – and winter ridership is increasing as a result.

Clockwise from left: British Columbia MP Gord Johns has introduced a private member’s bill calling for a National Cycling Strategy in Canada. Anders Swanson of Winnipeg promotes the annual Bike to Work in Winter Day. Mikael Colville-Anderson of Copenhagenize Design Company discussed a major cycling infrastructure initiative in the Russian city of Almetyevsk. (click image for larger view)

Though city governments and planners play a crucial role in these efforts, often it is the activism of determined cyclists which prompts action. Becca Wolfson of the Boston Cyclists Union told the story of the city staffer who wrote that cyclists who want to bike in winter “are living in the wrong city”, and they only represent “.05% of the people” anyway. The response was a well organized campaign on Twitter, with pictures of the winter bike commuters holding signs saying “I am the .05%” or simply “#WinterBiker”. This year Boston is making it a high priority to clear major bikeways of snow.

Nadezda Zherebina discusses the growth of cycling in Russia which has resulted in regular bicycle parades in Moscow, including one in January 2017 when the temperature was –28°C. At the conclusion of the conference, it was announced that Moscow will host the 2018 Winter Cycling Congress. (Photo by Anne Williams, courtesy of Winter Cycling Congress Facebook page).

From downtown cores to the suburbs and beyond

Nor have winter bike activities been confined to major cities. Darnel Harris discussed a program to boost cycling in Toronto’s far-flung suburbs. These areas now tend to have lower housing costs than downtown, and are home to many people who can’t afford either condos or cars. Yet these areas also present major barriers to mobility and accessibility, with high-speed arterial roads, infrequent buses, and schools and stores that are too far from homes for walking to be a practical mode of transport. Among these communities, Harris said, cargo bikes have a particular appeal.

Other presentations dealt with a state-funded program to design biking infrastructure in rural Montana, and a project to connect two small villages in Finland with a safe and attractive bikeway.

Thank God It’s Friday!

But enough of traffic statistics and commuting modal share trends. Some of us also bike in the winter for pure fun, and the week ended with a special treat.

Though the conference officially closed at noon on Friday, about 25 lucky souls from at least five countries took a bus out of town to the great cycling facilities in Bromont. Here we were fitted with fat bikes before heading out on the snow-covered trails. Though we bundled up to stay warm in the –15°C temperature and stiff breeze, most of us soon started shedding layers as we pedaled up hills, slid around hairpin curves and dodged trees. As a conference finale, this was hard to beat.

 

Top photo: Although Montréal’s bike-share system, Bixi, does not operate in winter, conference organizers from Vélo Quebec made arrangements for participants to use Bixis in a variety of outdoor workshops. Here a group leaves the conference venue for a tour of Montréal’s maintained winter bikeways. (Photo by Anne Williams, courtesy of Winter Cycling Congress Facebook page).

St Marys Underground Expansion: A whole lotta truckin goin on

St Marys mine – Article Index

Can the current Waverly Road/Highway 401 interchange handle a doubling of truck traffic to and from the St Marys Cement quarry?

Given that the Waterfront Trail shares the road in this section with the St Marys traffic plus the Highway 401 on/off traffic, can the Waterfront Trail be promoted as a safe and healthy recreational feature?

What mitigation measures will St Marys Cement propose to compensate for a large increase in heavy truck traffic which will affect commuters as well as recreational cyclists?

These are key questions raised by the Project Description for the Bowmanville Expansion Project.

A previous post (Special Delivery: Moving 4,000,000 Tonnes) provided rough estimates for the number of shiploads or truckloads of limestone aggregate the project would move each year.

The Project Description says that the aggregate will be moved “using existing road, rail and/or dock infrastructure”. But at the project’s Public Information Centre in Bowmanville on December 5, St Marys representative David Hanratty made clear that for the foreseeable future, the aggregate would go out by truck, not by ship or rail, primarily to customers on the east side of the Greater Toronto Area.

It is simply not cost-effective to load the aggregate onto ship, then load it again onto trucks enroute to construction projects, Hanratty said. Rail freight is now too expensive for a low-cost product like limestone aggregate, he added, in addition to the problem of needing to reload the material onto trucks for the “last mile” in any case.

So the 4,000,000 tonnes of limestone will all go out by truck. At 20 tonnes per truck, that would mean 200,000 truckloads per year, or 770 truckloads per day if the aggregate is hauled five days/week.

(Put another way, truck traffic in and out of St Marys is likely to more than double. While the current quarry extracts a similar amount of limestone as the underground expansion is projected to add, much of the current output is in the form of cement clinkers shipped out on the Capt. Henry Jackman. With a capacity of 30,000 tonnes, this ship can carry the equivalent of 1500 20-tonne truckloads each time it leaves port. But the aggregate shipments from the new underground mine will all go by truck.)

The timing of shipments to market will also affect traffic volume. If buyers are not prepared to stockpile aggregate through the winter, the hauling might be concentrated in the summer construction season – meaning the impact on the Waverly Road/Highway 401 interchange, and on the Waterfront Trail, could be especially heavy during summer.

The current Highway 401 on- and off-ramps in this location are far from ideal. On the south side, traffic coming off the eastbound 401 has to get past two stop signs before making it onto Waverly Road. The left turn onto Waverly Road will be more difficult when several hundred more trucks per day are heading north on Waverly.

Traffic getting off the eastbound 401 faces two stop signs before turning onto Waverly Road (red Xs), causing frequent back-ups along the off-ramp. Assuming most of the loads of aggregate from St Marys will go to the eastern GTA, the loaded trucks will travel north along Waverly Road (red arrow) to the 401 westbound ramp, making it more difficult for Bowmanville-bound traffic to turn onto Waverly Road from Energy Drive. The volume of traffic on the eastbound off-ramp will also be increased, due to empty aggregate trucks returning from GTA markets via the eastbound 401. (Image from Google Maps, December 13, 2016)

Perhaps this interchange can be re-engineered to handle the new traffic load. Is St Marys prepared to fund this reconstruction as part of its impact mitigation efforts?

As for the Waterfront Trail, the addition of several hundred more trucks per day to the section of shared Trail/roadway will make the Trail less attractive and less safe. Two changes might be made to mitigate this impact.

First, perhaps the Trail could be rerouted here to eliminate the sharing of congested roadway on Waverly Road and Energy Drive. Ironically, Google Maps currently shows an incorrect routing for the Waterfront Trail as shown below; could this route become reality in the future?

Although the Waterfront Trail is currently routed on Waverly Road and then along Energy Drive (as shown by the red arrows), Google Maps incorrectly shows a routing along the north edge of the St Marys property (the solid blue line). Could this route become reality in the future? (Image from maps.google.ca, December 13, 2016) click for larger view

Second, there is no safe and attractive route between the Waterfront Trail and most of the populated areas of Bowmanville. Cyclists from the north side of the 401 have two choices, both poor, for routes across the 401 to the Waterfront Trail (see Getting across the 401). One of these routes is Waverly Road, which will be more dangerous for cyclists if there is a major increase in truck traffic without an appropriate “complete streets” redesign.

Perhaps St Marys can mitigate the expansion project’s negative impact on the Waterfront Trail by funding a separate walking/cycling overpass or underpass at the 401. Such a routing would be a significant improvement to Bowmanville’s recreational trails, which currently offer no safe connection to the Waterfront Trail.

Top photo: Bumper-to-bumper traffic on off-ramp to Waverly Road from eastbound 401, December 13, 2016

Special Delivery: Moving 4,000,000 Tonnes

St Marys mine – Article Index

The St Marys Cement Underground Expansion Project envisions extracting 4 million tonnes of limestone each year from a new mine beneath Lake Ontario on the south side of Bowmanville.

To understand the scope of the project and its possible environmental effects, it helps to look at the logistics: how much transport capacity does it take to move 4 million tonnes per year?

St Marys says that the limestone will be shipped out as aggregate “using existing road, rail and/or dock infrastructure.” These three shipment methods have very different environmental effects, and presumably there will be further detail on the likely mix of shipping modes in the Environmental Assessment.

In coming to terms with the quantities involved, however, marine shipping is the easiest to picture. The bulk carrier Capt. Henry Jackman is a frequent visitor to the St Marys dock. It carries up to 30,550 tons of cargo (source: boatnerd.com) or 27,715 tonnes. To haul away 4 million tonnes, the Capt. Henry Jackman (or similar-sized ship) would need to make 144 trips. This would equal about 4 trips per week during an eight-month shipping season.

Since outgoing shipments of aggregate would be in addition to all the current in- and out-going shipments at the St Marys dock, one key question is: how many boatloads of aggregate could be shipped out each year assuming there are no significant changes to the docking infrastructure?

While marine transport is by far the most efficient in terms of fuel consumed per tonne per kilometer, the market for aggregate may not favour bulk port-to-port shipment. If most of the limestone aggregate is destined for construction projects scattered all around the Greater Toronto Area, then trucking will be the most cost-effective shipping method.

Suppose all the aggregate were trucked to market. Using a round figure of 20 tonnes per truck load, the 4 million tonnes would be 200,000 truckloads per year – about 770 loads each day if the hauling is done five days/week, or about 550 loads per day if hauling continues every day of the week.

There is a wide variance in truck capacity, from tri-axle dump trucks, to dump trucks with secondary trailers, to full-length tractor-trailers. However, unless most of the aggregate is sent by some combination of marine transport and rail, there will be hundreds of truckloads per day of aggregate exiting the quarry, in addition to the current shipments of cement.

The connection between the St Marys quarry and the road network is shown on the Google Maps image below.

waterfront-trail-waverly-annotated2

Drivers who frequently use the Waverly Road/Highway 401 interchange just north of the quarry will attest that traffic frequently backs up at the on/off ramps for eastbound traffic (on the south side of the 401). What effect would a few hundred extra trucks/day have on this traffic?

A major recreational feature, the Waterfront Trail, would also be impacted by the additional traffic. The Waterfront Trail is routed along Waverly Road and Energy Drive just north of the quarry:

Looking west on Waterfront Trail, at junction with Waverly Road.

Looking west on Waterfront Trail, at junction with Waverly Road.

Users of the Waterfront Trail share the road with traffic entering and exiting the 401 in this interchange:

Looking west from Waverly Road along Energy Drive, with on/off ramps for 401 eastbound traffic.

Looking west from Waverly Road along Energy Drive, with on/off ramps for 401 eastbound traffic.

Truck traffic going north on Waverly Road and County Road 57, or going to the westbound 401, will use the narrow bridge over the 401:

Waverly Road bridge over Highway 401 to Bowmanville and to westbound 401 access ramp.

Waverly Road bridge over Highway 401 to Bowmanville and to westbound 401 access ramp.

This bridge is part of one of the two current cycling routes between Bowmanville and the Waterfront Trail (see Getting Across the 401). The combination of a narrow bridge with merging and turning traffic on either side of the bridge makes this a dangerous passage for cyclists, even without adding several hundred more heavy trucks each day.

The transport of 4,000,000 tonnes of limestone aggregate may have significant implications re traffic congestion and danger to vulnerable road users. When coupled with the wear and tear on roads and the emissions from diesel engines, the impact of transportation will be an important part of the Environmental Assessment of this project.

 

Top photo: the Capt. Henry Jackman approaching the St Marys dock, August 2016.

The Kettle Valley Trail: Myra Canyon

October 1, 2016

over-the-hill-toc
The sun was close to the horizon as the eastern reaches of Kelowna came into view far down the slopes. The sky carried both the threat of rain and the promise of a beautiful sunset, depending on which way the clouds might move. And just ahead were the Myra Canyon trestles – eighteen famous wooden bridges which conducted the Kettle Valley Railway trains around the rim of the Myra Canyon, which now make this the most spectacular and most visited section of southern British Columbia’s rail trail system.

Satellite map showing approach to Myra Canyon from the east, and road down to Kelowna at the west end of Myra Canyon.

Satellite map showing approach to Myra Canyon from the east, and road down to Kelowna at the west end of Myra Canyon.

I still had 37 kilometers to ride if I chose to make it to downtown Kelowna that night. But it was easy to see that a good part of the trip would be downhill.

View from Kettle Valley Rail Trail of eastern outskirts of Kelowna, including airport.

View from Kettle Valley Rail Trail of eastern outskirts of Kelowna, including airport.

It wasn’t long before I arrived at the eastern trailhead for the Myra Canyon trail – a busy parking lot full of hikers and bikers packing into cars and SUVs for the ride home. As I continued towards the first trestle I noticed that the trail surface here was smooth and well-maintained, and that there were still lots of other bikers and walkers in spite of the late-afternoon hour.

An unfortunate fact is that all eighteen trestles are located in one 18-kilometer stretch of trail, so that this ride seemed to fly by in a flash. Or, a fortunate fact is that all eighteen trestles are located in one 18-kilometer stretch of trail, so that I was able to ride to the trailhead at the far side of the canyon in the last hour of sunlight.

If I lived in the Kelowna area, no doubt I would ride this trail many times. But since I’m unlikely to have the chance to visit more than once, I’m glad to have this slideshow from my ride (accompanied here by an excerpt from “Everybody Slides” by the late great dobro player Mike Auldridge).

Now Kelowna and Okanagan Lake were clearly in view, but there was no way of knowing how easy it might be to find my way to downtown in failing light.

Twilight view of Kelowna from Kettle Valley Rail Trail.

Twilight view of Kelowna from Kettle Valley Rail Trail.

Little White Service Road was my route from the west end of Myra Canyon to Kelowna – and though this is a two-lane road open to cars and trucks it’s a very rough ride. In a little over 4 kilometers before Little White Service Road meets pavement at June Springs Road, you drop over 400 meters at a 9% grade. On smooth pavement with wide-radius curves this grade would mean you could fly along at 50 or 60 kph. But on a rough gravel road with many sharp turns, it means you get off the saddle and put all your weight on the pedals so your legs can act as shock-absorbers, thrust your butt back over the rear wheel to keep balance, and squeeze the brake levers as hard as you can, roughly every five seconds, to keep your speed under control.

But soon enough I was cruising down the pavement through orchard country, sniffing the scent of ripe apples in the moist late evening air.

It was well after dark when I reach the shore of Okanagan Lake and found a motel near Okanagan College. I had a real surprise when I got off my bike: my left ankle was swollen and throbbing and I could hardly walk. Apparently that ankle had suffered some damage when I fell on a rocky section of the Kettle Valley Trail a few hours earlier. But through the past 40 kilometers – the most thrilling 40 kilometers of riding since I crossed the Continental Divide in Glacier National Park – I had been quite oblivious to the detail of a small sprain.

Ah well, I had a first-aid kit in my pack, and now I had the satisfaction of knowing I hadn’t carried that first-aid kit along for nothing. As soon as I wrapped the ankle snugly in an elastic wrap it started to feel better, and most of the pain was gone by morning.

Sunday morning, October 2nd was sunny and calm, and it warmed my heart to know that my bike ride was over, and there was nothing more pressing than exploring the flat neighbourhoods of downtown Kelowna and gazing across the lake at mountains I did not intend to climb.

Looking west across Okanagan Lake from a small waterfront park in Kelowna

Looking west across Okanagan Lake from a small waterfront park in Kelowna

Top photo: a view across Myra Canyon from one of the eighteen trestles in this section of the Kettle Valley Rail Trail.

The Kettle Valley Trail: Carmi to McCulloch

September 30 – October 1, 2016

over-the-hill-tocWhen I began to plan my trip the Kettle Valley Rail Tail was the prime item on my itinerary, and now that I had arrived at Mile 0 of the trail, I had also decided that the KVRT would be the last leg of my ride.

Having heard from several experienced riders about the trail conditions, and having ridden a good chunk of the adjoining Columbia & Western trail, I was content to travel only a small portion of the 600 kilometers of rail trail in this part of BC.

These trails can be slow going with a fully-loaded touring bike. In addition, for a rider like me who grew up in the prairies, the trails’ frequently constricted field of view, with a wall of new-growth trees on either side, often felt claustrophobic.

But I didn’t want to miss one spectacular stretch of the Kettle Valley Trail just outside of Kelowna, where the trail crosses 18 trestles as it makes its way around the rim of Myra Canyon.

So I set out from Midway – Mile 0 of the Kettle Valley Rail and right on the US/Canada border – on Friday September 30, headed northwest towards Kelowna. The plan was to ride west on BC 3 (the Crowsnest Highway), turn north on BC 33, and switch over to the Kettle Valley Trail soon after.

From Rock Creek north to Carmi, both the Kettle Valley Trail and BC Highway 33 stay close to the Kettle River.

From Rock Creek north to Carmi, both the Kettle Valley Trail and BC Highway 33 stay close to the Kettle River.

That was the plan, but the wind blew. Not just any wind, but a tail-wind. The day was sunny and warm, I was riding straight north, and the wind was straight out of the south – the best tail-wind I’d had for the whole trip. So I stayed on the pavement until early afternoon, by which time I’d ridden 80 km to Carmi and spotted a roadside restaurant where I could enjoy a late lunch.

Sign marking the former Carmi station and trailhead.

Sign marking the former Carmi station and trailhead.

Just north of Carmi the Kettle Valley Rail Trail takes a sharp turn away from the highway, starting the long slow climb up to the rim of Myra Canyon. The sun was still warm as I made my way up this trail, adjusting to the very different pace required to dodge rocks and loose sand after cruising on the highway with the wind at my back all morning.

krv-north-of-carmi

I stopped to make camp when my odometer read 98 km for the day. I would have liked to make it an even 100, but I had seen very few flat spots big enough to pitch a tent and lay out my air mattress. So when I came to this wide spot on the trail I figured I’d better settle down for the night.

Campsite along Kettle Valley Rail Trail north of Carmi.

Campsite along Kettle Valley Rail Trail north of Carmi.

The sky had clouded over as the sun sank low, and soon after dark a light rain started. It was the first time on the trip that my tent was tested by steady rain, so I tossed and turned nervously until I was sure no seams were leaking. Once I was confident I would stay dry the patter of soft rain became a perfect lullaby.

After breakfast and coffee in the morning I set off, hoping I would find a water source soon. This countryside was very dry, so when I came to a pond I filled a couple of water bottles just in case I didn’t find anything better. The pond’s resident Castor Canadensis made sure I didn’t forget about the possibility of beaver fever (Giardiasis), and I was glad I had a stove to boil water, plus chemicals to treat the water.

Castor Canadensis

Castor Canadensis

Within the hour I came to a much more convenient water source. The Arlington Lakes campground is right along the trail. The lake water there still needed to be treated to be safe for drinking, but it was much less murky than the water from the beaver pond, and there was a picnic table to sit at while I boiled water and enjoyed a second breakfast.

The campsite was waking up by then and a veritable symphony of internal combustion instruments filled the air. Each resident family appeared to have at least one four-wheel drive pickup, a camping trailer, a four-wheel all-terrain vehicle, a dirt bike, and a gas-powered generator. The crew that built the rail line 110 years ago could only have dreamt of the horsepower that was present in that one campground.

For the rest of the day I rode northwest along the trail, glancing often at the heavy clouds moving around the sky. It was my plan to camp for another night along the trail before riding the Myra Canyon leg and then down the mountain into Kelowna.

This timber retaining wall is all that stands between the trail and a steep upward slope.

This timber retaining wall is all that stands between the trail and a steep upward slope.

Just past Hydraulic Lake, my attention lapsed as I tried to ride through one of the many patches of loose rock and gravel – a spot where it would have been wiser to walk. My front wheel slid out and I went down hard on my left side. As I picked myself up I was pleasantly surprised to find that I hadn’t injured my hand or wrist, and the only really sore spot seemed to be a big bruise on one calf.

One of those frequent but short stretches of the trail where it makes sense to walk rather than ride.

One of those frequent but short stretches of the trail where it makes sense to walk rather than ride.

This first fall of the trip might have indicated I was getting tired and should stop for the night. But I could catch glimpses of Kelowna in the distance far below. Heavy clouds still filled half the sky but the sun was shining just ahead, and the first of the Myra Canyon trestles was only a few kilometers away.

The late afternoon light would make for a great view of the Canyon – perhaps better than anything I’d enjoy in the morning – and I might make it down the hill into the city before it got really dark. After one last look at the map, I got back on the bike and headed for Kelowna.

Hydraulic Lake near McCulloch Station

Hydraulic Lake near McCulloch Station

Top photo: the late afternoon sun breaks through the clouds between Carmi and Myra Canyon.