Cyclists driving us round the bend

On Oct. 21 the Free Press set up a video camera at the new traffic circle at Grosvenor and Waverley in both the morning and the afternoon. For all that time, during all those long hours, it simply showed the traffic in all its confusion come and go, interrupted only occasionally by a journalist's chirpy comments.

Old-timers who happened to tune in might have thought that video had gone back to the days of watching the test pattern on television while waiting for the programming to start, but there was something more at play here. What we were seeing was a controversial city issue -- are traffic circles good or evil, necessary or not? -- playing out in real time, in real life, without any fifth columnists, commentators or combatants telling us which way was round.

In the few hours that it was on, it attracted about 5,000 viewers, which is kind of astonishing and a comment, perhaps, on the possibility that some of us have too much time on our hands, or that not all people at work are as productive as they might be, or that daytime TV is getting really, really bad.

Or is it, perhaps, just that Winnipeggers went to the web because they are still struggling to get their minds around traffic circles, to even understand why they are here at all, at great expense, when the straight roads that we are accustomed to are potted with holes so big that dogs and cats and perhaps even small children routinely vanish into them, never to reappear, at least according to urban legend?

The city's explanation for the roundabouts is that they "calm" traffic. Perhaps one day they will -- roundabouts have been fixtures in Europe for decades and are common elsewhere in North America -- but at the moment they seem to have had the opposite effect, frustrating and infuriating motorists who are used to driving straight through but who are also accustomed to stopping at stop signs strategically placed to prevent them from building up too high a head of steam. Stop signs, one might imagine, have an even greater calming effect on rampaging roadsters than traffic circles.

The second reason given for traffic circles is that they fit in with the city's plan -- if that is not too dignified a word for it -- to accommodate cyclists.

People who ride bicycles don't like stop signs. They -- like most motorists, one supposes -- don't see any reason why they should have to be subject to a traffic ticket if they don't stop when there is no traffic coming, and, in my experience, most of them don't stop. Motorists may salute a sign with a California Stop, slowing and then rolling through, but many cyclists don't even bother to doff their helmets as they sail by.

Winnipeg -- like many other places -- is spending a great deal of money making the city a safer and a better place for bicyclists. It's all part of the global warming, eco-freaky, grab-a-green-thing ethos that we all embrace when it doesn't actually cost us anything in cash or convenience.

Bicycles are embraced as an environmentally friendly "alternative" mode of transportation to the automobile, something that should be celebrated. When I was a kid, bicycles were much more humble things. They were vehicles that we used for playing and getting around.

And they were licensed as vehicles. Every year you had to go down to your local fire hall and buy a bike licence. Every bike had two screw pads behind the seat where the licence could be attached, but only nerds used those. Cool kids stuck their licences between the spokes of one of their wheels, and that did look good when you were cruising.

Bicycles then cost the city nothing -- the ostensible reason for the licence fee was so that police could return stolen bikes to their owners, although I never heard of anyone ever getting a stolen bike back unless he found it himself.

Today, bicycles are costing the city millions for traffic circles and reconstructed roads with bike lanes on them, but bicycles don't need to be licensed. Neither do they need to be insured in case they run over pedestrians on streets where the bike lanes haven't been built yet.

It's time that changed. If cyclists want to use the streets in the same way as motorists, they should pay the same freight in licensing and insurance. Just because it doesn't have a motor doesn't make a bicycle any less of a vehicle of transportation. And that would sort of close the playing circle, if you will. Everyone will be cursing as each new roundabout is installed.

tom.oleson@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 6, 2010 A16