Author: Val Dodge

Chester Hill bike lane makes another giant leap

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Chester Hill bike lane, now with extra stencilly goodness.

It’s been three months since any progress has been made on the semi-completed bike lane on Chester Hill Road between Broadview and Cambridge Avenues. Just when I was beginning to give up hope that work would ever resume on this project that started way back in November, the lane was finally painted with two diamond and bicycle stencils today. Some work remains to be done—the temporary stop sign at Cambridge needs to be replaced by a permanent sign, and the signs prohibiting turns onto Chester Hill from Broadview must be updated to allow cyclists to make the turn—but once again I have some hope that the lane will be finished before the end of time.

To recap the work done so far:

Late November: A 70 metre line of yellow paint goes down marking the lane. Two bike lane signs are attached to poles, but one of them remains covered by black plastic.

Mid-April: The second sign is uncovered and a temporary stop sign is erected at the Cambridge Avenue end of the lane, held up by three sandbags.

July: Two stencils are painted to mark the lane.

Surely there’s a joke in there somewhere.

At just 70 metres long, this is probably the city’s shortest bike lane. At close to eight months and counting since work started, it’s taking an unbelievably long time to slap down some paint and post some signs. Back in April, I wrote that the early spring progress on this lane was a good sign because the cynic in me had expected completion of the lane to “languish well into the summer.” Um…

The loud pipes of a what?

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I am the loud pipes of a Harley…

The great thing about what is euphemistically called pre-need funeral planning is that you not only get to pick what goes on your headstone, but you get to admire it yourself. I can only assume that’s the explanation behind this seemingly pre-need headstone in Ashburn‘s Burns Cemetery. The inscribed poem is so familiar that the second rhyming couplet almost slips past without notice:

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am the loud pipes of a Harley, Chevy or Ford,
Or an Elvis song played in three chords.

I like it.

Precision

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In memory of Jane Linton who died April 13, 1875 aged 74 years, 4 days

This marker is in Bethel Cemetery in Pickering.

If you walk through any cemetery that’s been in operation for more than a hundred years, you’ll soon notice two things. The first is the sheer number of children that used to die before they were old enough to crawl and how many families had two, three, or more children that didn’t live to their tenth birthdays.

The second is an unusual obsession with precision exhibited on many markers. I can understand marking a dead child’s age as three weeks or 22 days, but many of the markers for older people also include precise counts of months and days. It always seems a little odd to see a grandmother’s age tallied up in the same manner as a toddler’s.

A lot of people shy away from cemeteries, but I always find them fascinating. Taking a stroll through an old cemetery is like walking through a highly-condensed social history of a region. As you progress from older graves to newer ones, the names change, occupations shift, family relationships become clear, and tributes to achievements both major and minor abound.

Dumbing it down

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No dumbing

It looks like someone in rural northeastern Pickering has had enough of idiots treating this vacant lot like their own private dumb and has chosen to combat the problem by posting this notice at the entrance. And who can blame the poor owner? No one wants to visit their plot of land only to discover that they’ve been dumbed on again. Do you have any idea how much it costs to clean up after that kind of stupidity?

Abandoned DVP on-ramp

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Old DVP on-ramp from York Mills Road

Driving down the DVP a couple of weeks ago, I noticed an old roadway cutting through the brush just north of York Mills Road. I had a pretty good idea of what it was, but a quick look at Google Maps confirmed my suspicion: it was an abandoned on-ramp to the southbound Don Valley Parkway from westbound York Mills Road. The current DVP ramps at York Mills were reconfigured during construction to the overpass beginning in 2005. The northwestern loop of the cloverleaf was removed entirely. Or was it?

Old DVP on-ramp from York Mills Road

I went back by bike last weekend (the same ride where I blew out a tire) to investigate and was quite surprised by what I found. Not only was virtually the entire ramp still intact, but there had been no attempt to restrict access to it. I was expecting to see the traditional Toronto chain-link fence surrounding the road, but all I had to do was ride up a little hill before I was greeted by the remnants of the ramp in all its glory. I’m not saying that there should be a fence, just that I was expecting one. Toronto officialdom is so paranoid about putting fences and warning signs around everything more challenging than a sidewalk that I never imagined for a second that it wouldn’t be all locked up.

Old DVP on-ramp from York Mills RoadAlthough the subsequent landscaping at York Mills Road put the ramp’s remnants out of sight, the bulk of the road still sits behind the embankment, where it’s being slowly consumed by encroaching weeds. The posts that held up corrugated beam safety barriers around the perimeter of the ramp were cut down to the ground and a stone-lined drainage ditch has been dug across the roadway, but the ramp is otherwise intact to within a few metres of the highway.

Although you’re never farther than 100 metres from either York Mills or the DVP, the curving tree-lined ramp quickly isolates you from both. Even with the sound of traffic in the background, it’s surprisingly relaxing.

Old DVP on-ramp from York Mills RoadThe current Google Maps image of the area, probably taken in 2005 or 2006, clearly shows an excavator perched at the very bottom of the ramp, presumably preparing to rip up the 50 metres or so of the roadway that was removed.

At some point, the now-unused land here will probably be sold off for—what else?—condos, and another little piece of Toronto infrastructure will disappear completely. In the meantime, this hidden corner of the city is being rezoned by the local flora.

A version of this post originally appeared on Torontoist.

The importance of regular maintenance

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Tires are frequently a forgotten aspect of bicycle maintenance and this is what happens when you don’t check them regularly:

First you wear a little hole in your tread: The result of a tire blowout

Then your usually indestructible Mr. Tuffy tire liner wears through: Wear a hole right through Mr. Tuffy

Then your tube blows out while you’re speeding down Don Mills Road:

Bicycle tube blowout

And finally, you call your better half to come and rescue you from the 2-hour walk home.

I can’t complain, though; I knew the tire was nearing the end of its useful life but ignored the now-obvious warnings through a couple of rides. Since 2003, this set of tires had seen about 12,000 km on concrete, asphalt, sand, rocks, dirt, mud, grass, loose gravel, snow, ice, slush, and pretty much every other surface you could encounter in southern Ontario and I’d been planning since the spring to replace them anyway. As usual, I just needed that extra little push to actually get the work done.

Silly cycling restrictions: How slow can you go?

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How slow can you go?

If you look closely at the advisory signs when you enter Mount Pleasant Cemetery, you may notice something peculiar: a reasonable speed limit of 30 km/h for cars and just 10 km/h for bicycles. Not only that, but while drivers are helpfully advised to lock their unattended cars, cyclists are warned—twice!—that their speed limit is “strictly enforced,” and that it is to “ensure the safety and respect of those visiting the cemetery.” Apparently, a bike at 15 km/h is more disturbing and dangerous than a car travelling twice that speed.

What makes this a silly restriction is not so much the different speed limits or the extra warnings for cyclists, but the ludicrously slow speed cyclists are supposed to maintain. I did try riding at 10km/h through the cemetery one day; it’s a very difficult speed to maintain. I was passed by several non-Roger-Bannister-like joggers who were bouncing along at, by rough estimate, about 12 km/h. My more typical leisurely pace through these paths is around 20 km/h.

As for being strictly enforced, none of the cemetery employees I encounter (including security) on my daily commutes ever do more than wave and smile as I fly recklessly past them at twice the limit. Either no one knows how slow 10 km/h really is or they think it’s as silly as I do.

Still, cyclists have it better than inline skaters; they’re not allowed in the cemetery at all.

I see faces #8

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Houses literally looking out over the Gardiner

These houses quite literally look over the Gardiner Expressway from near The Queensway and Windermere. Just try to get a picture of them without being in a moving vehicle.

I rode my bike into this development a few weeks ago to get a picture and was surprised to find that only the houses that back onto the Gardiner have this particular arrangement of windows and rooflines; other similar houses that back into the interior of the development or onto The Queensway lack both the proper eye placement and distinctive eyebrows. These faces are mostly hidden from the view of passersby on Lake Shore Boulevard or the Martin Goodman Trail; you have to be on the Gardiner or a GO or VIA train to get the proper effect. When I first noticed these houses a couple of years ago, I was uncertain about whether the eye pattern was intentional or not, but now I’m fairly sure that it was a deliberate design choice.

I took this picture during last weekend’s Ride for Heart. One completely false rumour has it that I signed up for the 75 km course solely because the route took me to just the right spot on the Gardiner to pull over and snap off a couple of quick shots.

The leading edge of bad slogans

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Etobicoke’s municipal slogan

Ah, Etobicoke. The Leading Edge of Metro. Or the ass end of Mississauga, depending how you look at it. This may have been the lamest slogan of the former Metro municipalities, with the probable exception of my own East York’s proud and perplexing, “Canada’s Only Borough.” “Yay! We’re Canada’s only, uh, what? What’s a borough? I suppose it doesn’t really matter, as long as we’re the only one. That means we’re the best! Yay!”

For some reason, this sign still stands along the bike path near Albion Road, ten years after Etobicoke was folded into the Megacity. I recently saw a picture of this same sign (about halfway down this page) taken last year. A fairly fresh tag shown on last year’s picture is a mostly-erased blue smudge on this year’s. Not only does this sign yet exist, but someone seems to be maintaining it. How efficient.
Who comes up with these slogans anway? And what are the worst municipal slogans currently in use in the GTA and environs? Vaughan’s “The City Above Toronto”? Richmond Hill’s “A Little North, a Little Nicer” eclipses that, and Markham’s peculiar “The Mark of Excellence” is worse yet. They’re all losers in their own way, but surely the prize for worst of all must go to Burlington’s oddly passive “Stand By.”