It’s now November, and clocks have reverted from daylight savings time for 2019.
If you are continuing to cycle, you’ll notice that it’s now darker, sooner. Make sure you have working lights to illuminate your way! If you don’t have lights or find that they’re not quite up to snuff, you can view a buy new ones through The Bikeport.
As sunset arrives earlier in the evening at this time of year, it’s important to make sure you have working lights on your bicycle. If you don’t have lights or are thinking of an upgrade, check out the Standard Equipment from The Bikeport.
The EcoAction Challenge encourages people to ride a bike to destinations in their neighbourhood. Shop, dine, errands, commute — all by bike. To be active with your family year-round, meet new friends, become healthier, help reduce traffic congestion and reduce your carbon footprint.
Partnering with Canada Bikes, PCHS, Walk+Roll Peel and City of Brampton, BikeBrampton has been delivering the BikeWrx and Pedalwise programs from the Brampton Bike Hubs, and more recently Caledon Bike Hubs since December 2017.
The Bikeport by Kevin Montgomery helped gather data, Powered by Strava!
A Peel Region 2012 Transportation Study found that more than 900,000 daily commuter trips are taken in the Region with a distance of 7Km or less. 81% of these trips are taken by car; only 9% use active transportation. These short-range car trips consume the equivalent of 9 tanker trucks of gasoline and produce 450,000kg of CO2 emissions each day.
For more information, read about the results on the BikeBrampton website.
If you’ve been looking for a place to get started with learning how to use bicycles as transport, consider participating in Bike The Creek on June 22, 2019.
Bike the Creek is a free event aimed at encouraging people of all ages to discover the joys of cycling. It’s an opportunity to join hundreds of cyclists in a fun family ride through the spectacular valleys, trails and historic landmarks, urban and rural settings of Peel Region.
This year’s event features a route on the Etobicoke Creek Trail under #410 and #407, now paved south to Mount Charles Park, Mississauga. The southernmost loop goes into the Toronto Pearson Airport lands. There will also be a Downtown Brampton Riverwalk pavilion.
Check out the BikeBrampton website for more information and to register for this event.
On Wednesday, January 30, 2019, Brampton Council carried a motion that considered the following:
Council moved that $1.875 Million immediately establish a Project Budget to be utilized to begin implementing an active transportation plan with North-South and East-West cycling routes, with the Council Member appointed to the Cycling Advisory Committee (Councillor Santos), and the Mayor in coordination with city staff, report back to Council by April 1, 2019, on a potential implementation plan.
[callout]Over the next 2 months, The Bikeport and BikeBrampton had several meetings with Councillor Santos and Brampton City Staff. We arrived at amiable recommendations and presented them to the Committee of Council on April 3, 2019. Dayle Laing of BikeBrampton gave the delegation.
[callout] [/callout]Kevin Montgomery followed-up with a presentation regarding “The Value of A Dollar”, which presented information from various sources such as CAA and the Region of Peel, in a model similar to one now being used in Copenhagen and the EU to assess the value of bicycle infrastructure.
[callout] [/callout]
Spring is here!
Whether you ride year-round or are just getting to taking your bike out for the year, here is a small list of things to check as warmer weather and more sunshine approaches.
By law, bicycles need to have a working bell, horn, or gong. If your’s isn’t up to par, check out the selection of bells available through The Bikeport.
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While the sun will start staying out longer, the warmer weather might keep you out riding after sunset. Make sure you have working lights.
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If your ride making noises it shouldn’t or otherwise isn’t working as it should be, reach out to velofix to have them take a look at it!
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30 Days of Biking (a.k.a., 30DOB) is a pledge to ride your bike every day in April — any distance, any destination, in any kind of weather — and share your experiences online with the hashtag #30daysofbiking.
Android devices have a neat feature called Google Fit. Google Fit has teamed up with the World Health Organization to produce two activity goals: Move Minutes and Heart Points.
Move Minutes are basically defined as minutes when you’re being physically active. Heart Points are awarded for every minute of moderate activity like “a brisk walk that’s over 100 steps per minute”. Two Heart Points are awarded for every
People are not active enough. The World Health Organization recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise, or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise, or a combination of both every week.
Sound like a lot? It might be if you have to go out of your way to make time for activity. It’s not so difficult when you integrate bicycles as transport.
Google Fit counts a minute of modest cycling as 1 Heart Point. If a bicycle is used just for commuting for 5 days per week, 30 minutes per day, you would only have to travel for 15 minutes each way to meet the minimum amount of recommended exercise. Using a bicycle for additional transport trips such as shopping and other errands — including going to the gym — is a bonus.
For Valentines Day, show yourself some love. Consider how to integrate a bicycle as transport into your life to earn points for your own heart. The Bikeport offers Cycling Courses that can help with this goal.
The City of Brampton recently published a draft technical paper on parking and loading standards. The document identifies opportunities to improve bicycle parking supply by implementing minimum bicycle parking requirements.
That’s starting to change.
The City of Brampton recently published a draft technical paper on parking and loading standards. In it, the document identifies opportunities to improve bicycle parking supply by implementing minimum bicycle parking requirements.
Read: Draft Technical Paper #9 – Parking and Loading Standards Review
The document recognizes that minimum bicycle parking requirements are not presently included in the City of Brampton Zoning By-law. This has resulted in low or inconsistent availability in bicycle parking supply. More bicycle parking supply can increase the convenience and security of cycling and provide an alternative to automobile parking.
The document further proposes to analyze travel patterns for areas of higher cycling activity and to further promote cycling by providing bicycle parking in lieu of automobile parking.
Check out The Bikeport’s “Bicycles As Transport” YouTube Playlist
On December 5, 2018, Kevin Montgomery delegated to Brampton Committee of Council to talk about The Bikeport and bicycles as an equitable transport choice in the City of Brampton.
[button href=”https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1KyNtclR7ZKilZYDeAit4k6bgr-9IR4QayHbAtMVpa9I/edit?usp=sharing”]Open Slide Deck[/button]
It was a long one: 11 hours! The video below is advanced to where Kevin’s delegation begins and is followed by questions from the Committee of Council.
Below the video is a transcript of Kevin’s delegation.
Good morning everyone.
First, I want to open by saying “congratulations” to everybody here. It was a very exciting election and every one of you have well earned your place here, so, well done all of you.
A little bit about me — I haven’t really had a chance to introduce myself to everyone here. I started The Bikeport a few years ago primarily with the goal to enable people to discover how to integrate using bicycles in their everyday lives. As for myself, I’ve been a Brampton resident all my life, but I’ve been car-free — that is free of car ownership — since 2011. I’m a Certified User Experience Designer and also a Registered CAN-BIKE Instructor. What that allows me to do apart from giving cycling instruction is that I pay particular attention to things like the data accumulation and feedback, and consider how to improve the user experience of using a bicycle, for everyone.
[button href=””]More About The Bikeport[/button]
Throughout the election, there were some common election themes that came up. Missing from this list (in the slide deck) that was discussed recently, of course, is “economic development”. But we heard things like Crime and community safety concerns. We heard issues regarding congestion and road safety, health and healthcare and of course, taxes, car insurance and generally things affecting our home budget and our bottom lines.
Further, with a change in the political landscape, there might be some challenges on the horizon about how do we get funding for larger capital projects in the City of Brampton. So, we need to consider: How do we better use the resources that are available to us.
But, what if I said, there is a cost-effective way to address all of these issues?
With that in mind, I want to introduce the idea of Bicycles As Transport. This is a theme that I’ve been starting to build up a little bit over this year. The idea being: To use bicycles to enable people to connect to their communities.
One of the things that happened during the course of the election was that there was also a neighbourhood audit. One of the beautiful things about active transport, and bicycles in particular: Daily neighbourhood audits if you have enough people using this as a transport tool.
Resolving congestion: You can fit a lot more people on bicycles in the same space as a car. You can get as much as 4-5x more throughput in the same lane-width as a car with people using bicycles.
Improvements to mental and physical health to perhaps reduce some of the burden on our medical services in the City of Brampton. Of course, we know about the issues ongoing through there.
And of course, unless one chooses to take out a separate claim [sic] (policy), there’s no insurance, no gas costs. There’s a far better return on investment for your home budget and of course, for the use of taxes in the City of Brampton.
And, bicycles can be useful transport tools. As you can see here (in the slide), here are some examples. I’ve owned a few cargo bikes now. Here are some pictures of what I get to experience on a day-to-day basis when people are out there using their bicycles. There’s a lot of opportunities. I think there’s definitely an untapped market for supporting using bicycles as transportation.
Ultimately, I think my ask of Council is to challenge yourselves to broaden your scope of how bicycles can be used in the City of Brampton. To think bigger than recreation, but to think of transportation equity in the sense of any conversation that involves parking or addressing traffic concerns. These are also opportunities to make strides toward equitable solutions of other transportation modes and bicycles in particular.
Everyone should be able to get from anywhere, to anywhere, on a bicycle in the City of Brampton, safely and comfortably — or even more so — as taking a car.
[button href=”http://www.brampton.ca/EN/City-Hall/meetings-agendas/Committee%20of%20Council%202010/20181205cwmn.pdf”]See Public Meeting Minutes[/button]