Advertising good, bikes bad [Dodgeville]

Enough has been written about these stupid info pillars elsewhere that I won’t bore you with another diatribe against their design or the questionable process that resulted in the city being saddled with them in the first place. This one is in front of Carrot Common on Danforth and in addition to looking ugly, replaced a perfectly good post and ring bike rack, as seen by Google Street View.

Toronto-Montreal Bixi comparison [Globe & Mail]

Excellent Infographic from the Globe and Mail comparing the first year of Montreal’s Bixi bikesharing program with the first 6 months of Toronto’s Bixi.  Toronto’s numbers are obviously lower due to the shortened time period, but are EXCELLENT considering we have one-fifth of Montreal’s Bixi bikes (1000 and 5000 bikes, respectively).

Trashy Bike Lane [The Urban Country]

The creator, Mike Lin, has made what I think is the best online bike map (it uses the City’s Open Data information) even better by adding directions.

You can punch in start and end points, and the app tells you the best way to get there. The app integrates with Bike Directions on Google Maps to accomplish this.

Give it a try (it’s free!) and let us know what you think.

Some screenshots of the App:

There’s a cool new map of all of our downtown bikelanes, coined the “BWN” after BikeWay Network.

You can really tell that the “network” needs a lot more… and the Jarvis bikelane isn’t on there.

Click the map for the full-size version (which still isn’t that big)

View 2010 Bikeway Network Projects in a larger map

Project photos include:

Harbord-Hoskin Bikeway: Dashed lines and chevrons have been used to help make the bike lane more continuous.

The reconstruction of Moore Avenue and installation of bike lanes from Bayview Avenue to Hudson Street was completed.

In Parkdale, the Dufferin Street Tunnel has been completed. The tunnel has been built at a width to include bike lanes, and it’s lighting has been designed with the needs of cyclists and pedestrians in mind.

Bike boxes have been added at the Spadina Avenue, St. George Street and Queen's Park Crescent intersections, along the Harbord Street – Hoskin Avenue corridor.

The City of Toronto is conducting this survey to learn about how people are using the Map, what works, and what could be improved.

Every year the City publishes and distributes 150,000 Cycling Maps free of charge.

Go by the site and leave your feedback.

Unfortunately it doesn’t ask for features that people would like added to the map, but only how often existing features are used currently.  Having said that, the map is extremely useful.  I always have one in the bottom of my panniers (yes, one in each) so that I can consult it if need be.

Google bike maps for Toronto launched in beta sometime earlier this afternoon, and I’ve been toying around with the route planner for the last half hour or so in an effort to evaluate its effectiveness. Unfortunately, based on this short little test, I can only give this initial version mixed reviews.

From the standpoint of route suggestions, it seems most things are in order — not only did I agree with almost all of Google’s recommendations, I was surprised by the sophistication of some of the alternatives to riding along busy streets it came up with.

To use the Bike Directions – make sure you go to http://maps.google.com (.ca does not seem to have the feature yet) and hit the “get directions” link.  You should then see little icons of a car, a subway train, a pedestrian, and a bike.

The online information giant announced Monday that it is introducing a Bike Directions feature to its popular Google Maps site, allowing users to highlight bike-friendly trails and roads across most major Canadian cities.

Google spokeswoman Wendy Rozeluk said the feature will be available countrywide, but more detailed route info will be available for nine major cities that shared their bike trail data with the company. The cities are Toronto, Ottawa, Gatineau, Que., Waterloo, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver and Kelowna, B.C. [The Star]

This is really fantastic news.  BikingToronto was the first one to map out Toronto’s Bikelanes almost 5 years ago… so we’re glad Google is finally catching up.   Just kidding… their information resources are tremendous… and this can only do great things for biking in Toronto.

Apparently, The Urban Repair Squad wants to help create social change through public awareness via non-violent urban gorilla actions – like using non-permanent, non-toxic water based paints to add “two-way sharrows” on the pavement of Mcdonnel Avenue. So, to popularize the action I made a Google Map

See the map on Michael Holloway’s Blog

Students and faculty at Ryerson University are very lucky to have one of the most exceptional examples of bicycle parking in all of Toronto. Ryerson’s campus features parking for roughly 1,000 bikes using racks, ring and posts, and an indoor parking facility.

Read the full post on Bikeroo in TO.

A few days ago we told you about Rocco Rossi’s Flip-Flop on bikelanes on major streets (he likes the idea now).

The Toronto Star has published a map (above) of where these physically-separate bikelanes would be.

Rossi’s proposed network includes east-west lanes on Richmond St. between Parliament and Bathurst Sts., and the existing Wellesley Ave.-Harbord St. lane separated from traffic between Parliament and Ossington Ave.

Cyclists travelling north-south would use the existing Sherbourne St. lane that would be separated from traffic between Elm Ave. and Queens Quay; or, to the west, the St. George St./Beverly St. lane extended to Queens Quay.

Rossi says building dedicated lanes in other cities has cost between $168,000 and $454,000 per kilometre.

His plan was quickly denounced as “a last-minute, half-baked idea” by Yvonne Bambrick, spokeswoman for the cyclists union.

“All he’s doing is tweaking (routes) that exist already,” and separating them from traffic, rather than proposing a true network that includes the suburbs, she said.

What do you think of Rossi’s new bikelane plan?