Highway Traffic Act Roulette #1

Section 173 of the Ontario Highway Traffic Act declares:

No person shall race or drive furiously any horse or other animal on a highway.

Good to see that the province is finally clamping down on street racing.

By-law roulette #2

Section 349-23 (PDF) of the Toronto Municipal Code declares that:

No person keeping pigeons shall permit the pigeons to stray, perch, roost or rest upon lands, premises or buildings of any person or upon any public place in the City, except on the property of the person keeping the pigeons.

So all we have to do is figure out who owns all the pigeons in the city and ask him to confine his birds to his own property? We should be rid of them any day now.

By-law roulette #1

Section 480-3(A) (PDF) of the Toronto Municipal Code states that:

No person shall sell personal property at a garage sale other than personal property that has actually been used on, about, or in connection with the residential premises or, in the case of a joint garage sale held with a neighbour, the residential premises of the neighbour.

People sometimes accuse local politicians of poking their noses a little too far into residents’ private business, and with some justification. A by-law that declares residents must have used everything that they’re selling in a garage sale would seem to confirm the stereotype. This one rule alone eliminates most Saturday morning front yard staples: candles, exercise machines, and gaudy tchotchkes.

Silly cycling restrictions: Don’t ride down the hill

The City’s web page for E.T. Seton Park claims that, “cyclists can enter E. T. Seton Park from [...] Don Mills Road behind the Ontario Science Centre.” If only this were true. Oh sure, there’s a roadway from Don Mills Road down to the park, but there are no bikes allowed on this hill:

You can drive a car here, or a truck, or even a bus — it’s the roadway to the Science Centre’s main receiving area and employee parking lot, with an entrance to E.T. Seton Park at the bottom. But don’t you dare think about cycling or skating into the park. Even the official park sign a little further up the hill omits cyclists from the list of welcome visitors:

How silly. This must be what happens when you let lawyers get involved in a matter as simple as entering a park. While I’ve seen a few people walking their bikes up this hill, I’ve never seen anyone walk their bikes down. It’s not even a particularly steep descent, as roads into the Valley go.

This is not a new restriction. I remember the cycling prohibition on this hill from at least the early 90s. It’s from a different era, when cyclists were regarded as fragile nuisances to be inconvenienced and shunned at every turn. While this view is still held in some corners, much of the world has moved on. Few are the hills that still carry warnings for cyclists to dismount lest they travel too fast and lose control of their bikes, endangering themselves and offending the tender sensibilities of any nearby drivers.