Cycling in Waterloo Region

[danbrotherston]

Bid for the installation of the cycling lane pilot infrastructure is now up for bid on the RoW website.

Separated Cycling Lane Pilot City of Waterloo

https://regionofwaterloo.bidsandtenders....4d55cdd4f3

Excitingly, this is the first time I've gotten to see the engineering plans.

Edit: Couple of preliminary thoughts:

Design is more or less what I expected, certainly a huge improvement over what is there. Intersections are weak, and bus stops crossing the bike lane are unfortunate (but expected).

King St. south of University is included in the plan, and protections including planters will be tried.

The best designed portion appears to be Erb St., which despite the idiocy of the curb placement near Caroline (why is there parking on a arterial through street!) looks well designed.

However there are still challenges, lanes that are unnecessarily wide, with narrow bike lanes (Page 8: 1.2 meter bike lanes, with 3.7 meter car lanes at Hazel and University), Albert has 1.5 meter bike lanes with 3.75 meter car lanes. And the King/University intersection as well as the UW Plaza entrance appear to be especially poorly designed. Some of that is necessitated by turn lanes, some is just the region.

But I think this will be such a huge improvement over the previous situation, that I doubt these weaknesses will threaten the success of the project. It's a temporary project so there's plenty of opportunity to make small improvements, but most importantly it can be a change in the region's thinking.