Riding into danger

You’re driving south on Gordon just past K.L.O.. You’re in the right lane, going 50 or 60 kph, depending on how much of a time crunch you feel is pressing down on you. 

Suddenly there’s a bicycle in the lane with you, causing you to slow down to 25 kph. What is this? Isn’t there a bike lane the rider is supposed to be in?

A little dramatic, but it illustrates something that might not be obvious: The Motor Vehicle Act of 1996 put cars and bicycles on a level playing field. The law states that a cyclist must “ride as near as practicable to the right side of the highway.” The keyword is “practicable”, which, in this application, also encompasses the cyclist’s judgement on “safe”. 

If a car hits a bike we can assume the bike will lose, so why would a cyclist put themselves in the vehicle lane where a distracted driver might run them down? 

A cyclist will ride in the vehicle lane when the bike lane is not safe. In this case, the slice of roadway allocated for bicycles is full of dirt and gravel accumulated over the winter. 

The City of Kelowna currently sees the bike lane as “snow storage”, and doesn’t actively clean the lanes outside of the nicer weather season. The issue is more complicated than I’m stating, but let’s not get too sidetracked.

Imagine riding along on two wheels over a surface of loose sand and gravel, gravel that might be sharp enough to puncture a tire. By riding in the vehicle lane, at least the dangers are human driven, not left to unthinking chance. 

With a car’s large tires and stable four wheels you can drive over anything out there on the road. With two wheels balanced precariously by practice and a bit of gyroscopic effect, a rock the size of a quarter can lay you out. Therefore, it’s important to keep cycling infrastructure clean, especially when it runs adjacent to car traffic going 30 - 40 kph faster.

The “Spring Sweep” in Kelowna covers all kilometres of roadway and is important, but it’s run the same way every year, which means as the weather gets warmer, there are more cyclists riding in the vehicle lane, or worse, at risk by riding in the leftover muck in the bicycle lane.

The dirt and gravel layering the bike lanes with danger comes from the practice of sanding the roads during snowstorms to give cars safe traction (when most bicycles are put away for the season). Ironic, eh? Safety for cars puts bikes at risk until the sweepers get a whack at it.

According to the city, it takes a lot of effort to clean the bike lanes in spring. My question back to the city: “Why not maintain them year-round, so the accumulation is not so tough to remove in the spring?”

February was a nice month to ride, if a bit chilly some mornings. But Gordon, Springfield, and Enterprise were all in terrible condition, and about a third of the cars passing me were coming a little too close for comfort. 

I decided to reach out to the city staff to find out what could be done about the condition of the bike lanes. The staff member who responded told me that Spring Sweep would start soon, and that the bike lanes on the major routes had already been given a “first pass.”

Here are pictures taken at the end of February and the beginning of March, after I had been told that a first pass had been done.

Richter was the first major route to be cleaned. As you can see in the above photo, other major routes were in rough shape. Doing a straw poll of other cyclists resulted in a dismal response: No one felt any attention had been given to the cycling infrastructure. 

Sorry, City of Kelowna, the consensus is that the “first pass” was just in someone’s imagination.

It doesn’t look as though the current sweeping plan works. Cars, by their nature, push gravel and sand to the side into the bike lane. As a result, bikes, by necessity, are pushed into the vehicle lane, where no one wants them to be. 

Either sweep the bike lanes all year round so that Spring Sweep doesn’t require a huge effort to clean the bike lanes, or focus on the worst cases first, where the speed difference between cars and bikes causes the most conflict when forced into the same lane.

It’s easy to start at one corner of the city and then sweep outwards to the edges. This might seem smart, but to help everyone play nicely together, we need to deal with the highest priority corridors first. 

Don’t make cyclists ride into danger!

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Read Landon Bradshaw's previous two columns in Writer's Bloc ~

2 or 4, doesn't matter

Enforcing cyclist behaviour

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.