As I’ve posted about a couple of times now, the last leg of my ride to work has been a big mess for nearly a year now, going through various states of disarray and sometimes daily changing paths for people riding bicycles or walking.
The street in its entirety is far from being done, however, the streetcar, sidewalk and cycle-track portion of the road will be opening for public use this coming Tuesday!
I couldn’t be more excited, as this has been probably the most challenging section of road that I ride on in the entire city, between bumpy, uneven, potholed roads with old streetcar tracks exposed, mixes of paving materials, and huge bumps, people on bicycle and on foot mixing in narrow and curvy sections with blind corners, and the path changing from week to week as they move construction around. But as of next week, I’ll instead be riding on a nice, smooth, straight separated cycle track!
I’ll try to get some video, or at least some good photos of it to post here next week. Until then, happy Autumn!
Edit: Here are some more instructive photos about what’s going on here, even though the facility isn’t open quite yet.
You can see below the layout of the road, with the sidewalk over on the left, and a two-way cycle track between that and the road. You can see further up that the sidewalk crosses the cycle track (and there’s a little zebra crosswalk marking), where there will be a streetcar stop. I’m not exactly sure whey they couldn’t keep the same alignment all the way along, perhaps that will become clear once we can actually go the whole length of the path.
In the following photo, you can kind of see how the middle section where the streetcar tracks, sidewalk and cycle track are lifts up from the current road surface as it goes around the corner.
