You don’t use a car? You are not a citizen anymore.
“Powerful”
I mean, he’s not wrong that many of Halifax’s residents don’t care for bike lanes; it’s an inevitability of how Halifax is made up.
The Halifax Regional municipality is huge, clocking in at 5475.57 km^2. That’s almost 10% of the entire province of Nova Scotia by area. Here’s a street view picture of a random spot I picked in Halifax, this is what most of Halifax looks like:
(Of course, most of the population lives in the urban core. Density drops from around 1500 inhabitants per km^2 to just 64 when looking at the whole municipality)
This is just one of the many reasons urban amalgamations are a scam, one often proposed by conservatives to (among other reasons, like subsidizing suburbia) drown out progressive voices in cities that support things like bike lanes. Toronto is a great case study in this, where the surrounding suburbs have been choking the city proper and slowing progress since 1998.
It’s frankly ridiculous to entertain the notion that someone living in Tangier (location of the above street view) should have a say in how streets and neighbourhoods are organised in downtown Halifax. Let them decide what happens on the road in Tangier, and let the people who actually live in the neighbourhoods of downtown organise them to their wants and needs.
In conclusion, Tim Houston is an absolute fuckwit. And his coffee and doughnuts suck.
That random street photo you posted is exactly the type of place that you need bike lanes because there’s no safe place to ride a bike in that example.
No shoulder and single lanes means cars and cyclists will be in conflict.
I don’t disagree (I’d be in favour of bike lanes anywhere with a road or street) but I feel a lot more comfortable cycling in the lane on a low-traffic rural road than on a busy stroad in the city.
I’m in Ontario and ride on quite a few rural roads. Unfortunately, speed limits are pretty much ignored and nearly every vehicle that passes is a high-speed pickup truck, which sucks when there’s no shoulder. 😫
New Brunswick here, it’s much the same with the speeding and the huge pickups, but I’ve found drivers give me a lot more space when passing on a rural road than a busy city street. Like usually half a lane away from me at a minimum, if not an actual proper pass.
I’m assuming it helps that I don’t really “look like a cyclist”, at least in the eyes of motorists. I feel people might be more aggressive towards someone wearing lycra on a road bike, whereas my goofy ass riding a hybrid-cruiser-city bike and wearing a high-vis vest is novel enough on a rural road for them to take notice of me.
You grabbed the exact quote that really stuck out to me as well. It’s almost as if they can’t fathom someone relying on a bicycle to same extent they rely on their car.
