Cycling in Waterloo Region

[dtkvictim]

I've learned that a lot of people (both motorists and pedestrians) don't know the difference between a yellow (warning) and white (regulatory) pedestrian sign, so we have an uphill battle here.

A lot of drivers don't know the difference between a crosswalk and a pedestrian crossover, but the Ontario government provides enough information about them that drivers reasonably should know how to behave at them. Crossrides might as well not exist at the city, regional, and provincial levels, but there are hundreds of them on trails all over Waterloo Region. There's no ontario.ca page about cycling I can link to that explains crossrides, and they aren't covered in the HTA or driver's handbook. I don't expect people to slog through several pages of OTM Book 18 to understand what they are. I follow local driving groups on Facebook and constantly have to explain what a crossride is while people jeer at cyclists riding across them for "breaking the law". Many people simply won't accept that they exist because of the lack of information from official sources.

Well, there's a few things going on here. But as someone that likes browsing dashcam communities I can say that the people who comment in those places are perhaps the most consistently and confidently incorrect people on the internet. No surprise you are seeing that too, especially on a place like Facebook.

I disagree that Ontario provides adequate training and testing for things even as "basic" as a crosswalk vs pedestrian crossover. In the past we may have depended on a certain level of cultural osmosis to provide drivers education simply by growing up within the system. But as driving adults are increasingly not raised in the Canadian/Ontario/North American driving system, we can't depend on that. Just a couple of years ago I decided to do drivers ed before re-doing my license after letting my previous one expire. I came across an entire industry focused on getting new immigrants to pass the driving test, not on teaching them how to drive. My instructor was incorrect on a number of things (that you don't come across during the road tests), and didn't say a word of defensive driving. The written G1 test is a complete joke, and even then the people I was in a room with were openly cheating. The written test covers an extremely small portion of our road rules, is too forgiving, and all of the answers can easily be memorized without actually learning the rules. 

But Ontario also completely fails at keeping driver education up to date. A lot of people on the road have licenses that predate roundabouts and crossrides (not that either is covered in the testing anways), and we make 0 effort through retraining or education campaigns to keep existing drivers up to date.

Completely agree about the availability of information though. For what it's worth, crossrides aren't the only information missing from the Ontario governments website. I've tried looking up some basic rules and even basic signage before only to find it completely absent from the Ontario website.