Thursday, June 10, 2010

Mt Royal's Chemin Remembrance redesign: road cyclists screwed?

The redesign of the road over Mt Royal (Chemin Remembrance) from a 4 lane divided roadway into a two-lane side for cars and the other side will be converted to some kind of path or road for bikes and assorted pedestrian-powered activities will mean a lot of changes for the cycling public.

Many of these changes are good, but we wonder about one thing.

We wonder if cyclists will be obliged (i.e. forced) to use this new bike path only, and lose our right to use the auto-road. Because the law in Quebec says that if there is a bike path beside a road, the cyclist is obliged to use the bike path.

Meaning that those of us who are road cyclists cannot use the car road. Even though we travel at car speeds.

We also wonder if the road will be built with car street-style lanes with no paved shoulders (because the road at the present time has exactly zero inches of shoulder, paved or otherwise). We need paved shoulders on the auto-road so road cyclists, we mean cyclists who travel at road speeds, and not at the slower Mt Royal mixed-use road speed (20 km/h legal max on the similar olmstead road) will be able to pursue our habit of riding the road over Mont Royal.

We have seen no blueprints of the road reconstruction, but we wish we could. The construction is happening right now, so if cyclists don't ask some questions soon, we may have our access to this road stolen from us.

(Rainy days remove our optimism about the notion that gov't always gets it right)

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