A unanimous vote at last night’s city council session is a big victory for Windsor cyclists. Councilor Alan Halberstadt, who also sits on the city’s bicycling committee, brought forward the opportunity to have the city named a “bicycle friendly community”, according to a program out of the U.S. by the League of American Bicyclists. Council voted in favour of pursuing the designation.
The program, which is being introduced in Ontario by Eleanor McMahon and the Share The Road Cycling Coalition, asks community leaders to answer a series of questions. Based on the responses, the community is rated and given a gold, silver or bronze designation. The highest rated city in the States right now is Madison, WI, which sees their bike lanes snow-plowed before the streets!
It’ll be interesting to see what the result is for Windsor. McMahon believes we’ll be happily surprised with the final tally, while some members of the cycling community think our rating will be mediocre at best. Whatever the outcome, it’ll be the perfect benchmark for us to lead off from. We’ll be able to compare our infrastructure with that of other municipalities, and hopefully we can draw some inspiration from the highly rated cities in the U.S.
You can read more about council’s decision to go forth with this designation here.
And you can read the survey that will be answered by the city here.
We still have so far to go though and are so behind in so many ways. Maybe once all this construction ends next year the dust will settle and we can see what we’re left with. I still see so few cyclists using the bike lanes. Yesterday while driving I almost ran into a cyclist flying down the sidewalk at a intersection on the wrong side of the road going the wrong way. Yet there was a bike path on that road. There was so little talk at the bike conference earlier this year too.
It still just seems like a lot of talk without much action. Maybe some new leadership with the coming elections will help truly bring cycling in Windsor into the spotlight.
I agree that we are definitely behind, but this will also give us a benchmark of where we are, and what we can do to improve. It will report back to the city with specific suggestions as to how to get a better ranking in the future.
I also hope that some new faces in council can help too.
Sad to hear today how the Mayor says he will give more funding for cycling if he’s voted for another term, meanwhile bicycle funding has reach a all time low under his current term. Nice try at trying to impress with his broken promise today.