Your opinions please. Elderly 70 and over. Paper Bills and Paper Financial Statements | Page 6 | Your stories | Discussion forum

cgouimet said
Let's add bike lanes to the 4xx highways....  

Not good enough! I walk everywhere. Therefore, there should be more sidewalks alongside those highways! Take out another lane of traffic for pedestrians. It's only fair and will be more gooder for the environment.

No one should be moving faster than the pace of a walking man. It would absolutely eliminate every single traffic fatality. Think of the savings in health care. That, in itself, is worth any sacrifice, right?

Getting rid of bike lanes means returning roads to their intended purpose as the most efficient means of communication and to move the most people and goods at the fastest speed possible.

HermanH said
No one should be moving faster than the pace of a walking man. It would absolutely eliminate every single traffic fatality. Think of the savings in health care.  

Here is better idea!

Keep your car and use it to get places BUT keep it in neutral and PUSH it.
That will not only eliminate pollution but people will build atrophied muscles, have meaningful conversation with other pusher and stay healthy forever!
You cannot push it? No problem! Hire lazy teenagers and they will benefit from exercise and cut off screen time.

Now we are getting somewhere [pun] 😉

Keep them rollin' [pun]

Bike lanes are part of the Vision Zero agenda which is a UN agenda, I think it is part of their SDG plan. I refer to it as Zero Vision because most people are unaware of this and so the result is more divide and conquor / car versus bike arguments while the agenda rolls out. Bike lanes are there to slow down traffic and make commuting by car more time consuming, frustrating, difficult and expensive in order to nudge them onto public transport or just stay home and order online.
A road in my area was converted a few years ago from 2 lanes each way to 1 lane each way and bike lane on each side. It used to be a quiet road and speeding was the only issue as it had large distances between traffic lights so radar made alot of money there.
Now it's almost impossible to cross (on foot) anywhere other than at a traffic light and so they have had to install more traffic lights and it is bumper to bumper all the time like a car train so vehicles can't turn left until the amber. This has caused lots of cars to start using local side streets and they run stop signs and so speed bumps have been installed on all the side streets.
The bike lanes are very lightly used as there is a big hill and the bike lanes end abruptly at the south end and cyclists are suddenly in 4 lanes of traffic.

cgouimet said

It could be a shared lane; bikes on one side pedestrians on the other separated by a solid yellow line. We have some of these in Kingston ...

  

Not saying you're wrong but I sure hope you are. We have these in GTA and are known as "multi-use trails" and pedestrians and cyclists share one lane per direction. Imagine a road divided like this with one side for cyclists and the other for vehicles with no yellow line between oncoming traffic

smayer97:

savemoresaveoften said
... why should I help pay for a service I don't use ??

Really? To me this typifies the kind of myopic thinking that makes these conversations either devolve or going into so many tangents; determining what is 'right' for others based on what is 'right' for us, some based on what 'offends' me or I dislike, emotion-based arguments, like climate change alarmism, ... often due to the lack of connecting ALL the dots, or using self-focused or narrow focused lenses.

There is no perfect solution... it is about balance and finding a reasonable solution to fit the situation and times.

I quite agree, smayer97. Imposing our own needs and desires on others is a selfish imposition of conflict on us all. Like not wanting to pay for schools if childless. Or roads if vehicle-less. Or bridges if on a desert. There are net benefits to a constellation of things that don't benefit everyone. I don't have a car, but want people and goods to get around.

As far as TRAFFIC DISCOURAGEMENT: Essentially all of Vancouver's civic politians promote the anti-mobility agenda. We have many "patios" serving the booze industry and eliminating parking; bus stops that take up a full lane so a stopped bus can't pull out of a traffic lane; bike lanes that crate bottlenecks. Whenever anyone complains, the pols (who fund out bicycle lobby generously) say that is in fact their intent.

Vancouver has another special circumstance: we have no metro government. New housing is going into the separate cities of Richmond, Burnaby, New Westminister, White Rock, Langley, North Vancouver, West Vancouver and all the ones up the Fraser Valley. So Vancouver wants to keep people in the city to pay taxes here; all those others don't. So there's a conflict between the city and its suburbs, and almost no revenue-sharing (only for water and some other small utility bills). The suburbs want good mobility, while the city wants to make commuting as difficult as possible to drive up precious property values and taxes (the Holy Grails of civic politics).

I've been pretty active in city meetings about local issues, and I can personally attest that the anti-mobility forces violently, loudly verbally attack anyone who complains about traffic-blocking measures.

Now we have l large number of (still illegal) electric bicycles and bicycles doing gig deliveries, who are financially motivated to ignore or violate traffic laws and common courtesy. There's lots of talk about speed control, but not a word about right-of-way issues that are by far the largest single cause (not contributor) of crashes: failure to stop at stop signs, right-on-red without stopping or yielding, illegal turns, not stopping for red lights...

Once a year, there's a half-hearted attempt to issue traffic tickets to bicyclists. Of course, none of them get paid because the bicycle lobbyists tell the offenders to never carry ID and make up a fake name. AND that's always followed by angry letters to the papers protesting such enforcement because "doesn't the city want to promote cycling?"

No. We want to promote SAFE, RESPONSIBLE cycling. This might require taking offenders without ID back to the station for identification before release; if electric cycles are to be legalized (at the moment they're scofflaws) they should require licensing and insurance. (You can't get e-bike insurance in BC.) Especially for commercial drivers who run up very large mileage and are motivated to cut corners.

P.S.: Vancouver plows bicycle paths of snow BEFORE sidewalks and roads. I am not making this up.

mordko said

Getting paper bank statements via mail is a whim which is completely unnecessary and actually hurts the environment. People are permitted to pander to their whims but there is zero reason why others should be forced to pay.  

I don't think that's even the case anymore. Banks treat switching to estatements like converting a RRSP to a RRIF , you can't go back even for a fee. What kind of way is that to treat a customer ? That's the sound of another digital gate locking behind you.
Even the LCBO realized it's good business sense to offer people a bag after dropping 70% tax on a bottle. Yea they brought back the paper bags. Yet the idea of providing a senior citizen who may have bought the same bank a few houses in his lifetime with 12 sheets of paper/year for his financial records is met with strong opposition from people who really have no skin in the game.

from a pocketbook perspective, arguments are sound, but from an environmental and even social perspective, they are faulty.

Environmental impact might not have been a strong argument on its own merit but in the case of Canada Post we have astronomical costs, terrible service AND environmental impact. What's not to love?

Pitting computers vs driving around with mail is nonsense because people and businesses already have computers, cellphones and ipads and are already getting emails. That's not going away whether CP limps on for a few more years or dies tomorrow. And the energy required is far less anyway as quoted above.

The reason so many agencies are putting plastic straws atop their hit list is that they don't go through recycling machinery well, and cause jam-ups.

Paper bags are the work of the devil. They are not strong enough, soak through and are hard to hold onto. Since long before people began talking about banning them, I have always carried used plastic bags with me so avoid wasting new ones. At least twice a year I've helped some poor citizen gathering their groceries off wet pavement in a rainstorm. Those who shop with cars will not realize the extent of this problem.

Now I use paper-towel overwrap as garbage bags. One manufacturer has switched to paper overwraps. I wonder how that's working out for them? The idea of forcing people to buy expensive heavy-duty bags (which are much more (degradation-resistant) for their trash is nuts.