Mark (he/him)
@markedwardson
Just another engineer who fell down the urbanism rabbit hole Vancouver/Victoria
As a side note, this is an example where Vancouver urbanism is unambiguously worse than Calgary: trail networks in the suburbs here are much more discontinuous and often consist of adding a shared-use sign to a sidewalk
likewise, despite its reputation amongst urbanism circles as sprawl-hell, Calgary's trail network is genuinely quite impressive and continues to get built out alongside new subdivisions (dark blue = trails/protected bike lanes)
Royal Bay in Colwood, BC comes to mind as an example of a developer that tried to do bike-friendly (and generally much nicer) sprawl and (imo) mostly succeeded
this was a compelling piece right until it argued that expropriating property from lumber barons is illegitimate
A BC example of how a genuine design competition opened the floor to younger, smaller design firms and yielded a novel solution: (from David Stouck's biography of Arthur Erickson)
Don't worry though! The latest edition excludes data from before 1990
Biked out to the Barnston Island inland ferry, a truly delightful experience
I am maybe old school - and I haven't tried _that_ many systems, including bixi - but my favorite bikeshare program I've ever used was Antwerp, where the bikes were light, nimble, and extremely reliable
Spending my day off messing around with the USGS LIDAR model for Mt Baker, something I wish the Province would collect for some mountains in BC
There's a neat project coming to Oak Bay council tomorrow: it's a historic revitalization of the old Lawson Residence at 960 Foul Bay combined with a large townhouse project to fund the revitalization work. Here's staff's *supportive* recommendation of a project that's been in the works for years:
visited Whytecliff Park for the first time neat little place, if somewhat undercut by the fact that some great views are obstructed by mansions
Unfortunately Vancouver's addiction to mini traffic circles makes a fair comparison impossible (afaik OSM doesn't distinguish between traffic circles and full-on roundabouts)
Building on this thread with a visual to show how much more uncommon roundabouts are in the Netherlands than many people assume (it sure surprised me when I visited!)
Not sure about Canada as a whole. In British Columbia (inc. Victoria and its suburbs) the 'standard' new curb is a 150mm barrier curb. But there seems to just be a ton of different legacy stuff out there
Your threads got me thinking about this; I've noticed a surprising number of rollover curb sidewalks in suburbs in the Canadian PNW, and a few that are recently-ish built (subdivisions built in the 70s or so). Definitely atypical, 150mm is very much standard, but not unheard of
traffic circles make for good stump speeches (this was very fun, learned a ton)
However! Their Vancouver office is... here: maps.app.goo.gl/shReHNg3nPzy...
Never really sunk in that the city of vancouver expects people to bike between general traffic on the left and buses on the right Seems safe
Now, to be fair, concerns about tree loss aren't _entirely_ unfounded here, but blaming it on Bill 44 multiplex development is disingenuous when the typical development on this street is a single-family home. No need to drag 'plexes into this debate!