Category: pedestrians

Random notes for pedestrians

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[Continuing a series I started last year with motorists and other cyclists.]

Please look up before you cross the street. We’re both lucky that I tuned up my brakes last night.

If you’re at the crosswalk and I’m stopped, waiting for you to cross, please don’t pause and try to wave me through; you have the right of way and I’m waiting here until you get across.

There are leash laws in this city, and one of the things they’re designed to prevent is your dog chasing my bike. The world isn’t your dog run and that leash isn’t doing anyone any good dangling around your neck.

This is a bike lane. It’s not a jogging lane, a standing-and-talking lane, a wait-for-cars-before-crossing-the-road lane, or a peer-down-the-street-looking-for-a-bus lane.

If you’re going to step into the bike lane to get around a knot of other pedestrians, at least have the good sense to check for oncoming bikes first.

If you’re walking four abreast on the park path, do the polite thing and move aside for others.

One ding of the bell is a polite notice. Two dings is a request. Three dings is an attempt to be heard through your earbuds. Four dings is exasperation.

Please train your children and dogs not to run at bikes.

Contrary to popular belief, bikes cannot stop on a dime. Not even on a loonie.

Hey kids, you know when I’m coming down the road and you stand aside with your hockey sticks and shout, “Biiiiike….”? I love it.

Just because the lane of cars is stopped doesn’t mean that it’s safe to step into the bike lane.

There’s a perfectly good sidewalk right beside you; why do you have to push your SUV stroller in the wrong direction in the bike lane? And seriously, you’re giving me a dirty look for not giving you a wide enough berth? Get over yourself.

I’m all for kids playing in the street, but playing in the intersection is asking for trouble.

Actually, this is a contra-flow bike lane, I am allowed to ride in this direction on this one-way street, and you should look both ways before stepping onto the road.

When my bike is parked at the local post-and-ring, it is not a footrest, luggage rack, purse stand, personal mirror, cell phone booth, or smoking area.

I’m happy to answer any questions you have about my bike, lock, panniers, trailer, jacket, helmet cover, lights, basket, or anything else you find interesting about my gear, but opening with, “How much did that cost?” is pretty rude.

Thank you for stopping and asking if I was okay after you saw me fall over sideways after stopping at the red light. I also thank you for nodding politely when I muttered something about clipless pedals and for stifling your laughter until I was out of earshot.

Pedestrian infrastructure, suburban style

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 Boldly going where no pedestrian has gone before

I’ve long thought that there must be some provincial regulation requiring municipalities to install pedestrian signals whenever they reconstruct a signalized intersection. I’m all for the idea, but implementations sometimes trend toward the bizarre.

Take, for example, the intersection of Highway 7 and Westney Road in rural Pickering. It’s near the hamlet of Greenwood, with Valley View Public School just down the street and the Pickering Museum a country block away, but I highly doubt that more than a couple of pedestrians grace the intersection on the busiest of days. There are no sidewalks anywhere around here. Yet pedestrian signals and their activation buttons stand guard over each corner of the intersection, just waiting to be pressed by the hapless soul who finds himself lost here. So far so good. But when you look closer, you realize that with no sidewalks and corrugated beam barriers sheltering the buttons at three corners, the only way to activate them is to stand on the road. On the fourth corner, pedestrians have to climb a small weedy hill to press the button:

An inconvenient button

But even better than the activation buttons are the curb cuts, dutifully guiding people in wheelchairs and with baby strollers into the guardrails and onto non-existent sidewalks:

Curb cut to nowhere

Curb cut to nowhere

The whole thing smacks of some bureaucrat following the letter, but not the spirit, of the law.

Old Indian Line: Part 1

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Indian Line looking north from near the CN tracks

Way up in the very northwestern corner of the city, the old Indian Line used to mark the boundary between Etobicoke and Peel Region (Mississauga and Brampton). The road carved its way through farm fields and across a bridge over the Humber River before continuing north past Steeles Avenue. Most of the old road was effectively wiped out by the initial construction and subsequent widening and extending of Highway 427 starting in the late 1960s and continuing through the early 1990s. Other portions of the road fell victim to realignments of Albion Road, Steeles Avenue, and Regional Road 50 heading north out of the city. But as with other abandoned roads in the city, a few stretches of the old roadway still exist. A tour and more pictures follow.

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The right to roam

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A member of one of my mailing lists recently posted a link to a story at the Daily Mail called How children lost the right to roam in four generations. It looks at four generations of a family in Sheffield and examined how far from home children of each generation were able to wander from home unaccompanied. The great-grandfather was allowed to walk six miles to the local fishing hole at the age of eight, while his eight year old great-grandson is now only allowed to roam within a 300-yard radius.

The gradual erosion of kids’ freedom is so universally accepted that it’s not really news. But what makes the Daily Mail article so compelling is the graphic that accompanies the story: it overlays a map with the roaming area of the four eight-year-olds, showing how dramatically children’s worlds have been shrinking.

With that in mind, I’ve taken a Google map satellite image of my old neighbourhood in East York and overlaid my own roaming area as an eight-year-old in the late ’70s. The result is the graphic below.
My roaming limits as an 8-year-old

The farthest from my home that I was allowed to venture alone was a little over 500 metres. But within that 500 metres were two playgrounds, a school yard, a swimming pool, a wading pool, a library, numerous stores, a restaurant, a haunted house (or so we imagined), and most of my friends.

Venturing farther afield or crossing any of the local main streets required being accompanied by an older friend or family member. We moved to Scarborough the next year, where my authorized roaming radius increased to well over a kilometre; my unauthorized radius, previewing the explorer I would eventually become, was larger still. When we moved back to East York three years after that, my catchment area expanded to virtually anywhere the TTC, my bike, and my twelve-year-old feet could take me.

How far were you allowed to wander as an eight-year-old?