h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I wish this little news piece from Scientific American were available in full online: http://www.sciamdigital.com/index.cfm?fa=Products.ViewIssuePreview&ARTICLEID_CHAR=C850EC85-237D-9F22-E8743D0E8893930E

It's wonderful to see a major mainstream publication taking up the issue of making North American cities friendly to cyclists. Interestingly, women cyclists are now being seen as the indicator of what needs to be done. Of course, what needs to be done is obvious: make routes that get cyclists safely to a practical destination: work, school, shopping.

Where I live, there is an enviable linear distance of bike trails, but *none* of them actually have a practical destination. Recently, the City Council has agreed to a plan to start making dedicated bike lanes on our streets, which are wider than usual for North American cities. Unfortunately, they've decided to get around to painting lines over the course of the next *ten years*! In the mean time, for the last week I've been pretty much unable to leave my little neighborhood (tucked between the forest of the Mill Creek Ravine and the main thoroughfares of Whyte Avenue and 99th Street.) due to happy spending of Federal Infrastructure money on the unnecessary resurfacing of Whyte Avenue. As a sidenote, my neighborhood has one small park with one small playground -- here it is on googlemaps: http://maps.google.ca/maps?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&q=9703%2088%20ave%20edmonton&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wl -- and for decades parents in the neighborhood have been lobbying City Hall for even a single sidewalk running north-south on one of the two streets that run through the neighborhood, so that children could get to the playground without having to walk on the streets. Still hasn't happened. But the old Edmonton, Yukon and Pacific rail line through the Mill Creek Ravine has been paved for years and is a wonderful pathway for cyclists, runners and walkers who don't actually have a place to go.

Recently I had the good fortune to have bestowed upon me the use of a small Spanish-made motor scooter for two months. Although I easily and comfortably scoot along at the speed of urban traffic, I find myself, like the cyclists in the Scientific American piece, detouring into quieter residential streets, adding distance and time to my trip, in exactly the same way I do on my bicycle. I've now spent time traveling about town by automobile, but bus, by bicycle, on foot and on a motor scooter, and I'm more convinced than ever that not only should we be making our cities more friendly to non-car modes of travel, we should be actively discouraging car-trips.

I pedaled my way to and from work for years when I lived in Van.

My 'to' route included an initial fairly serious hill-climb, up Royal Oak in Burnaby, followed by a peaceful glide through Central Park, then along a variety of residential streets to my office on Kingsway.

I always avoided the main streets, with their insanely speeding autos and huge trucks, despite some being laughably designated as 'bike routes'

The highways should be made more bicycle friendly, also. Out here much of the main highway is far too narrow for safe cycling