Spinning our wheels at council…

Any time anyone comes up and says, ‘hey I saw you on council last night,’ I’m amazed.

Truly.

Mostly because if I wasn’t there covering it for the paper, I wouldn’t be sitting at home watching it. But that’s just me and hat’s off to those civic-minded CK’ers who tune in on Monday nights.

At the July 19 meeting, we at the media tables put in our time predictions. The main event starts at 6 p.m., give or take and since there was already a pile of stuff that hadn’t been dealt with at the previous meeting, it wasn’t looking good.

I predicted (and correctly I might add), a 10:30 p.m. finish.

Since it’s an election year most of our local politicians are even more verbose than usual, and I don’t mean that in a good way.

Writing up the stories from the meeting brought me to the realization that not a lot had really gone on, and yet it was still four-and-a-half hours of my life that I’ll never get back!

One of my favourite topics these days – well, other than the Capitol, and that’ s a discussion for a different day – is bike lanes.

Talk about your hot button issues!

It’s always somewhat disheartening for me to be sitting at the meetings and not able to comment on them, not like in the good old days when I covered Oil Springs council, and the reeve would sometimes ask, “What do you think Karen?”

I don’t know about you, but I now cringe whenever I hear the word chevron. I am absolutely mystified by the whole process of painting these chevrons on the road to indicate that cyclists can ride there. Now, if the chevron came with a special force field that protected cyclists from errant drivers, I could see the value. As it is, the chevron is merely an indication that a cyclist may or may not be there. And all these years, I thought that was what the road was for!

In a perfect world, we’d have bicycle lanes on every road to accommodate those who wish to cycle to school or work, and for those who are cycling recreationally. That will be a long time coming, and as some members of council have rightly remarked, it’s going to be (at least) a 20-year process.

In the meantime, we all need to use some common sense here. On narrow, high-traffic roadways, cyclists should ride only with extreme caution. On wider, less-travelled roads, soft-shelled cyclists should ride, but must always remember to be cognizant of the hard-shelled vehicles they are sharing the roads with. As well, on those occasions that they venture onto the sidewalks (and let’s not kid ourselves, it’s going to happen), they should respect the rights and safety of pedestrians.

Thankfully, council voted against installing over 1,000 bicycle lanes which would have been a rather useless expenditure of tax dollars, and even worse, a distraction for drivers and cyclists alike.

K.R.