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Calgary Bike Lanes and Bike Paths

We can all agree that pedestrian/cycle safety is important, and whether as a group here on SRC, or as a city overall we need to keep supporting improvements for that. When I look at pedestrian infrastructure, for the most part pedestrians are covered by infrastructure, but we have an issue with bad drivers. For example the intersection at 14th street and 10th ave has the necessary infrastructure - sidewalks and crosswalks, but drivers not paying attention when turning right (as mentioned by @Mountain Man as an example) is an issue that falls entirely on the driver. Driver training IMO is poor in this province, and probably the same for the rest of the country. As for cycling infrastructure, we need lots of upgrading. We have very little in the way of safe cycling infrastructure.
 
The biggest change we need to make in terms of pedestrian and cyclist safety, is more pedestrians and cyclists. Drivers get away with only looking for cars 99% of the time because we don't have that mass of pedestrians and cyclists in their face forcing them to look around. Better signal timing (advance turns or advance green for cyclists / pedestrians) and possibly eliminating turns on red should also help.
 
Mountain Man said:
The biggest change we need to make in terms of pedestrian and cyclist safety, is more pedestrians and cyclists. Drivers get away with only looking for cars 99% of the time because we don't have that mass of pedestrians and cyclists in their face forcing them to look around. Better signal timing (advance turns or advance green for cyclists / pedestrians) and possibly eliminating turns on red should also help.
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Eliminating right hand turns on red would help. Especially at intersections that have high traffic or cycle lanes.
 
I think we already do that in some spots were there are cycle lanes, e.g. Richmond Rd & 17 Ave SW, but not others, like 12 Ave turning right on to 11 St SW.
 
badc0ffee said:
I think we already do that in some spots were there are cycle lanes, e.g. Richmond Rd & 17 Ave SW, but not others, like 12 Ave turning right on to 11 St SW.
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Because the cycling on 12th ave is only on the north side they don’t need to worry about it for right hand turns. But yeah, from what I’ve seen they don’t do that for any of the cycle lanes if they’re painted only the ones with concrete barriers or dividers.
 
Surrealplaces said:
We can all agree that pedestrian/cycle safety is important, and whether as a group here on SRC, or as a city overall we need to keep supporting improvements for that. When I look at pedestrian infrastructure, for the most part pedestrians are covered by infrastructure, but we have an issue with bad drivers. For example the intersection at 14th street and 10th ave has the necessary infrastructure - sidewalks and crosswalks, but drivers not paying attention when turning right (as mentioned by @Mountain Man as an example) is an issue that falls entirely on the driver. Driver training IMO is poor in this province, and probably the same for the rest of the country. As for cycling infrastructure, we need lots of upgrading. We have very little in the way of safe cycling infrastructure.
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I disagree. Bad drivers are a symptom of the problem, but trying to solve it at that level is doomed to failure. "All we need to do to fix this is for every single one of a million different people to each individually increase their skill and effort just because it's the right thing to do" is a wish, not an answer. Better driver training is good, but unless you're into politically impossible territory, it will marginally improve the small subset of drivers who are newly licensed for a few years until they learn bad habits or get lazy.

I've really liked the recent Safe Systems Pyramid by Ederer and others which takes a public health approach to road deaths and injuries; the most effective measures are the ones that reduce travel entirely, followed by ones that work automatically on everybody, followed by ones that work for some people or semi-automatically on everybody, and so on until you get to measures that depend on every random person to do the right thing.
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Looking at 10th Ave / 14th St as an example, there already some positive socioeconomic factors happening (increasing housing in a location that supports less driving overall).

The built environment is interesting. The curve radius is not ridiculous. Raised crosswalks could keep vehicles back from the crosswalk; 14th St has unsafe excessive lane width, and that could be removed in the short term near the intersection with flex posts or a sidewalk widening (at least to the point where it becomes an underpass); in the long run you could add a bike lane to either side through the underpass, ideally by widening the sidewalk level. These would slow all the traffic in the area.

The big obvious change is on the latent safety factor side; ban right turns on red and probably have at least a leading interval for pedestrians. The ban is arguably an active safety measure -- if it's unenforced and specific to this location. If there's automated enforcement and/or the ban is systemwide, then it becomes more latent.
 
One thing I've noticed with the advance pedestrian signals is that we have a such a habit of turning right on red (or left if a one-way) that as soon as there is a break in traffic (in this case the change in light from green to yellow / red) drivers waiting to turn start to creep into the intersection. We don't really treat the advance signal as a do not turn until green. I feel we need both the advance pedestrian signal and a do not turn on red at these intersections
 
Mountain Man said:
The biggest change we need to make in terms of pedestrian and cyclist safety, is more pedestrians and cyclists. Drivers get away with only looking for cars 99% of the time because we don't have that mass of pedestrians and cyclists in their face forcing them to look around. Better signal timing (advance turns or advance green for cyclists / pedestrians) and possibly eliminating turns on red should also help.
Click to expand...
I'm sure most on here would agree, but to do that we need to make it easier to be a pedestrian. I had to take my car to the shop today, then walk home. What a frustrating experience. A few hundred meters of sidewalk, unplowed, then it abrubtly stops for no reason and I'm walking on compacted snow path from previous pedestrians for another few hundred meters, then a nice plowed sidewalk for about 100m, oh but it's on a condo building property and they maintain it... no wonder. Then back to no sidewalk at all, then over a pedestrian bridge, then on to a sidewalk next to a high school that still hasn't been cleared of snow. There is no bloody way somebody with mobility challenges could have gone the route I had to walk. Total joke that so much of the city is still like this. And I"m not out in some far flung suburb either. This is right by an LRT station and large condo development.

/rant
 
KrisYYC said:
I'm sure most on here would agree, but to do that we need to make it easier to be a pedestrian. I had to take my car to the shop today, then walk home. What a frustrating experience. A few hundred meters of sidewalk, unplowed, then it abrubtly stops for no reason and I'm walking on compacted snow path from previous pedestrians for another few hundred meters, then a nice plowed sidewalk for about 100m, oh but it's on a condo building property and they maintain it... no wonder. Then back to no sidewalk at all, then over a pedestrian bridge, then on to a sidewalk next to a high school that still hasn't been cleared of snow. There is no bloody way somebody with mobility challenges could have gone the route I had to walk. Total joke that so much of the city is still like this. And I"m not out in some far flung suburb either. This is right by an LRT station and large condo development.

/rant
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It seems like our plowing and snow clearing is worse this year than previous. Purely anecdotal but it appears people in my area are not even bothering to shovel snow off their sidewalks this year. Similar story when driving in the city I find my car scraping over tons of snow on main roads.
 
Snow removal in this city is a major issue, regardless of what piece of infrastructure you use. Bike lanes usually get cleared first, then all the sidewalks get cleared into the bike lanes, Half the roads in this city never even see a plow. This week should be a slop fest, but by the weekend I'd expect most should be good to go.
 
Mountain Man said:
Snow removal in this city is a major issue, regardless of what piece of infrastructure you use. Bike lanes usually get cleared first, then all the sidewalks get cleared into the bike lanes, Half the roads in this city never even see a plow. This week should be a slop fest, but by the weekend I'd expect most should be good to go.
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So much of this seems to depend on timing too. If it snows on the weekend and there's a bit of time before a rush hour to pack things down and ice things over, usually it's not that bad. If it dumps right before a rush hour, it's a multi-day disaster as the traffic creates it's own hazards through icing things over everywhere.

Pathways and bicycle lanes benefit from less packing down as the weights, speeds and volumes are lower. So plows are more usually effective whenever they show up - it's a smaller area too so easier to do a complete job. Their issue is the gaps between arbitrary plowing contracts. You'll see random windrows between two different pathways that are completely impassible because one contractor stopped and the other didn't close the gap.

Where we really screw up is sidewalks and crosswalks. Leaving that network to depend on the land owners doesn't and will never work: 10 - 25% of each block never shovels, shovels too late so it's already packed down and iced, or have inconsistent interpretations of where to shovel such as into the crosswalk or wheelchair ramp v. clearing those too. The result is predictably frustrating - there are few blocks, let alone corridors that are every fully clear until the spring. Further, mechanical snow clearing of sidewalks is not feasible or easy in many situations due to random poles and widths everywhere, meaning that implementing collective sidewalk clearing in the future either publicly or as a neighbourhood is really difficult and inefficient.
 
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