The presentation begins at 7:30 p.m. Click here for POSTER.

The agenda for the evening is:

• 7:00 – 7:30  Informal open house to preview the presentation boards and network maps
• 7:30 – 7:45  welcome and overview of the project
• 7:45- 8:15  presentation of the draft cycling master plan
• 8:15 – 8:30  Q&A
• 8:30 – 8:50 Turning point questions
• 8: 50 – 9:00 Closing remarks and next steps

Click for the Draft Cycling Master Plan documents on the City’s webpage.

City of Mississauga, Press Release (April 7, 2010): Draft Cycling Master Plan Public Information Session.
Excerpt:
“‘We developed the draft plan by taking into account international best practices as well as relevant legislation and guidelines.  Most importantly though, over 1,000 Mississauga citizens have already provided their input,’ said Anne Farrell, planner, Community Services.  ‘We are returning to the public after the consultation process to show how their recommendations have helped shape the final plan.’”

BACKGROUND

The Draft Report (Volume 1), of the new Cycling Master Plan for Mississauga was presented for information at the General Committee of Council on March 24, 2010 (link to the Minutes will be provided here when available) and went to Council for Approval on March 31, 2010.

NOTE: Ward 2 Councillor Pat Mullin moved a Resolution (click to view), as requested by the Mississauga Cycling Advisory Committee (MCAC), for staff to provide Council with financial scenarios to accelerate the implementation of the Master Plan from 20 years to as soon as 5 years.  The Resolution passed unanimously at General Committee on March 24th and was adopted by Council on March 31, 2010.

Mississauga News article (March 25, 2010): City plans expanded bike system.  Excerpt: “Although Mullin hails the new plan as a ‘major shift’ in philosophy, from seeing cycling as primarily a recreational activity to an alternative form of transportation, she’d like to speed things up.  ‘It’s got to be now, not in 20 years…it’s doable if the political will is there.’  Currently, only about 0.3 per cent of vehicles on Mississauga roads are bicycles; the City hopes to boost that to 10 per cent. The new plan, which aims to put 95 per cent of residents within one kilometre of a major cycling route, would also include parking facilities at transit hubs and City facilities.”

Volume 2 of the Master Plan: Cycling Implementation Strategy, will be prepared in April and May and incorporated into the Final Master Plan Report which will go to Council for approval in June 2010.

The Cycling Master Plan, two years in process starting in 2008, has been informed by significant public and stakeholder engagement and by collaboration with the Mississauga Cycling Advisory Committee (MCAC), which is an advisory committee to Council with twelve (12) volunteer citizen members from every Ward in the City.

As the city puts the finishing touches on its Cycling Master Plan, cyclists are holding their collective breath in anticipation. Through public consultations held over the past year, the citizens of Mississauga have consistently identified one cycling priority above all others: connectivity. Basically, people want to be able to ride their bike to and from various destinations, in a way that is both safe and easy to navigate.

Various cities around the world are taking tremendous strides in accommodating cyclists, and have reaped substantial benefits for doing so. Riding a bicycle instead of driving a car reduces traffic congestion, emits no pollution, and it is in the health interests of the riders themselves.

Montreal appears to not only provide a well-connected cycling route system, but also have reserved some road spots for bicycle parking at popular destinations. Photo courtesy www.streetsblog.org

In Chicago, Toronto, Montreal and New York, bikes are given dedicated lanes on major roads – often protected by concrete barriers – which extend directly through their most dense and built-up areas. Where available space is scarce already, these cities are handing it over to cyclists and pedestrians. Why?

Once cyclists have a safe and direct route from one part of a city to another, the result is an immediate increase in the number of people cycling instead of driving. Rather than waiting for large numbers of people to start cycling before building the necessary infrastructure, the opposite appears to work far more effectively. To paraphrase Field of Dreams, “if you build it, they will ride.”

However, there is much debate over how to integrate safe and direct cycling routes into a city which until now has been designed with automobiles primarily in mind.

Many voices in the city, notably VIVA Port Credit and Smart Commute, advocate for marked and/or dedicated cycling routes on nearly every major road, arguing that people will cycle on roads at any rate, and cyclist safety must be given priority. Several cyclists have been killed or injured by cars in Mississauga in the past few years, so this is a valid point.

City planners counter that major roadways are the last place cyclists should be under any circumstances. Until recently, the overwhelming bulk of Mississauga’s cycling trails have been built off-road, usually in parkland and along waterways. This may have been done originally to protect cyclists from traffic hazards, but the result is a fragmented and unconnected system of pathways. Cyclists can be seen with their bikes on their cars, driving to a park instead of riding to it, simply because there is no way to get safely from one trail system to another.

If the Master Plan aims to prioritize safety and connectivity, it will have to find a way to accommodate cyclists on the city’s streets, or some other way for bikes to get around.

One possible alternative is to use old rail and hydro transmission corridors for direct cycling routes, as the city of Mississauga is hesitantly doing by building two pathways through the hydro transmission corridors parallel to The Queensway and Speakman Drive. This is actually the same corridor, but is being planned as two projects because no effort is being made to bridge the Credit River. Thus, although these routes will safely remove cyclists from traffic, it is questionable whether they will provide the level of direct connectivity that is required to convince people to trade their car for a bike.

If bike routes are isolated and tucked away from major areas, and do not provide convenient access to a variety of destinations, they will simply not succeed in attracting large numbers of cyclists. The evidence from other cities speaks for itself. A bold cycling vision can pay off by drawing people out of their cars, which in turn creates a more human and livable city.

Andrew Hamilton-Smith has lived in Mississauga for 25 years and is a member of the Mississauga Cycling Advisory Committee. The opinions expressed in this article are his own.

The study aims to discover what the defining characteristics will be of the corridor and how it will evolve over time. As the City of Mississauga has been discovering, it is more difficult to retrofit anything into an established street as compared to either building it in right away or including room for its evolution over time. Mississauga Cycling is commited to show that cycling is an important part of the overall equation. Whether the target is better mobility, economic, environmental, health or social outcomes, cycling meets those goals; and it meets them well.

We want to encourage you to take time from your busy schedules to attend these Public Information Centres. Showing a ground-swell of public support is the best way to see cycling become an integral role in these new exciting plans and not just an after-thought that would take many more years to retrofit into the infrastructure.

MCAC hopes to see you out there; maybe even coming out there on your bicycles?

For more information on the Hurontario / Main Street Study, visit their web site at www.hurontario-main.ca

If you are not able to make it out to these sessions, consider showing your support by posting your comments on the official Hurontario / Main Street Facebook page.

Mississauga

Wednesday, June 10
5:00 – 9:00 p.m.
Mississauga Civic Centre, Great Hall
200 City Centre Drive

Brampton

Wednesday, June 17
6:00 – 9:00 p.m.
City Hall Atrium
2 Wellington Street West

 More and more people are waking up to the fact that bicycles are a favoured and most efficient form of human transportation. These same people are adopting cycling as an alternate form of transportation, particularly for commuting to and from work – RUSH HOUR. Now is the time for serious thought not only on how to keep cyclists safe on our busy streets, but also how to keep everyone safe on multi-use trails and shared paths. As more and more people climb aboard bicycles, it is also time to consider how to avoid accidents and injury on our sidewalks and multi-use trails.

Bicycles are classified as vehicles and subject to the same rules of the road as motorists. In addition, Mississauga by-laws, for example 555-00 43(4), state other bicycle-specific regulations. There have been plenty of cyclists who have been injured, sometimes fatally, as a result of contact with moving automobiles. Subsequently, cyclists are well aware of the importance of riding safely and for the most part ride cautiously. Not because a by-law tells them to, but because they understand the danger should a car make contact – helmet or no helmet. As for pedestrians, they too have a right to safe movement. Subsequently, the city has given them their own safe havens: The sidewalk. There are “shared trails” for both pedestrians and cyclists, however, the sidewalk is currently defined as being for the use of pedestrians.

So the motorists don’t want cyclists on “their” streets and pedestrians don’t want cyclists on their sidewalks…Where do we go from here? 

On many multi-use paths, pedestrians have now been assigned the weaker-than status along with their dogs and strollers. Some cyclists on those trails have now adopted a fast-moving king-of-the-road status. Most have seen the “Cyclists Yield to Pedestrians” signs yet choose to ignore them. They think that it hardly seems fair that a cyclist on a trail white-knuckles their handlebars, clinging as closely to the edge as they can to avoid pedestrians, yet that is exactly what cyclists have to do when they ride on road amid the onslaught of fast moving vehicles. Bike lanes and sharrows are an oasis in that arid desert, but Mississauga cyclists still find those hard to come by. There are solutions. Courtesy and consideration are the most obvious ones, however, proactive and insightful options do exist and there are evidence of them everywhere.

Bike freeway in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland

So the motorists don’t want cyclists on “their” streets, pedestrians don’t want cyclists on their sidewalks, and some people don’t want to share park trails with cyclists. If truth be known, cyclists don’t want to be on the sidewalks either. Families with children naturally choose sidewalks in consideration of “safety”. Cyclists would prefer to ride on well marked, well signed, “shared” roadways, however, even for experienced cyclists the “safe” route on the sidewalk is the common sense choice. So, where do we go from here?  

As one MCAC member recalls, “Once on a bike trail I ran over a dog’s paw because the dog moved the wrong way, and another time nearly hit a little kid who darted out in front of me — had I hit them head-on I might have killed them and I was very shaken up. I try to go slow on the trails when there are people, but always feel the risk — my bell gets a lot of use”.

No doubt the trail systems are a good place for leisure and novice cyclists to get around. However, regular cyclists who have a destination in mind will need to be given lane priority on the streets just as pedestrians must be yielded to on the multi-use trails. The most straighforward, and logical, place to begin was communicated to Council and city staff by hundreds of citizens in February 2008. Put sharrows on the streets to start and then build up the cycling infrastructure on the streets according to schedule. Sharrows aren’t a final answer, but they are a constant reminder to motorists that bicycles are vehicles that have equal right to the road. There are plenty of over-built roads in Mississauga that would be much better off having two of their lanes reserved for bicycles and transit stops. Our honourable Mayor McCallion set a precident on Car Free Day 2008 when she stated, “every time we reconstruct a road we put a bicycle path along it.” We can trust that also applies to any new roads. The Confederation Bridge and Mclaughlin Road project is an exciting example of this prededent where the roads and newly constructed bridges will sport bike lanes.

Commuter cyclists travel across the city on the streets, not poking along the park trails slaloming among walkers and strollers. Now is the time to designate the streets of Mississauga for cyclists as well as cars. Keep it simple with signs and sharrows and then aggressively make the major infrastrucure changes over time. The existing pavement needs to be equitably allocated to accomodate cycling – the near-zero-emissions mode of transportation that is actually sustainable for the long-term with immediate gains such as healthy lifestyle and environmental benefits.

The impetus for this article was triggered by a YouTube video called “My Peaceful Bike Ride” by a guy named Keith (ksmackvolleyball) in Mississauga. Keith’s main mode of transportation around the whole city is by bicycle. He admits that the video is all in fun, but he added, “I do find it frustrating to bike through the parks on weekends as they are always full of people who tend to walk out in front of you. People do not realize they sometimes (present an obstacle on) the paths when a biker may be coming up fast behind them.”

Enjoy the video embedded below and please share your comments. The Mississauga Cycling Advisory Committee values the opinions of Mississauga citizens in order to best represent the cycling needs of the city.

[youtube KXE0bp5bN68]

On June 23, 2008 the Canadian Urban Institute held this International Symposium on Transportation Innovation. See the Canadian Urban Institute for a list of presentors and a copy of their presentations on how cities around the world, including Toronto and Hamilton, are changing how they think about transportation.

The presentation emphasizes the bringing together of both the public sector and businesses to cooperate and create consensus. This demands effective governance and will result in a “win-win” mentality between the partnering groups.

Mississauga is right in the sweetspot of transportation development between Hamilton and Toronto. To their credit, cooperation is being developed between key transportation initiates such as Metrolinx and the Mississauga Cycling Master Plan. Mississauga has also made moves in re-thinking the old mall layouts and planning to convert them into “retail nodes” with street level access that is friendlier to walkers, cyclists, and public transportation. Building higher density residential accomodations around these nodes give them an attractive and warmer community feel. See here and here for news on Mississauga’s move to smarter urban development and their proposed “de-malling” strategy.

The Mississauga Cycling Advisory Committee is asking that these plans acknowledge cycling as a key factor in the multi-mode structures. This would involve some of the following considerations:

• Routes for bicycles to both the retail nodes and public transportation stops
• Main feeder routes for bicycles to public transportation
• Public transportation allowing facilities for bicycles at both the stations and on the buses or trains
• Safe places for bicycles to travel in areas with high pedestrian density

The typical reaction of people is, “that sounds great – just not in my neighborhood!” What fear causes a knee-jerk resitance to a beautiful and peaceful blossoming of their community? I can say as a Mississaugan that the #1 concern is that I would need to get rid of one of my 2 vehicles and park it further away from my residence. Don’t worry, bike boulevards still allow cars. You just may have a slower speed limit. In addition, car drivers using it as a shortcut to shave a minute off their commute would be diverted to the roads designed for a safer high speed commute. Oh, and did I mention your property value is likely to go up? Come to think of it, who wouldn’t want their street turned into a bicycle boulevard?

Watch this 3 minute video about bicycle boulevards in Portland and consider the possibilities. We want to hear your opinions. Vote in the poll. Use the form to send us your opinions of the bicycle boulevard concept. Where in Mississauga do you think would be the ideal candidate for a bicycle boulevard?

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.