On Cryogenics

According to the Wikipedia article "In physics, cryogenics is the study of the production of very low temperature (below –150 °C, –238 °F or 123 K)". According to Environment Canada the temperature in Toronto today was in fact not cryogenic, a balmy 259K. Except I observed liquefied Helium rolling down the street and up the sides of buildings, which tells us it was no warmer than 4.2K or -269 °C. Okay it was not that cold, but it was cold!

Now I am a firm believer in the importance of layers, I had five layers around my core, four layers around my arms, three around my hands, three on my feet, one on my legs, even my face was covered in what Lesley has charitably described as a bank robber mask, something Louis Garneau calls an Optimum but the rest of us call a balaclava, under the helmet. By the time I got to the office I thought I was going to loose body parts from the cold. Breathing was an agonized process of taking in a mouthful of liquid oxygen. I believe my metabolism was already running at full blast just trying to bring things to a sane temperature prior to assimilation in my lungs, needless to say, hammering meant slow, in this case a steady 15~20km/h.

Under such extreme conditions one might think that maybe caged killing machine operators might exhibit an iota of decency? Alright, enough sarcasm, of course drivers were as oblivious as ever. At one point I was doing my thing, on Queen Street heading West just past Jarvis, making sure to take up the entire right lane when without even looking some person (no I will not say what I think of their staggering lack of competence behind the wheel of a motor vehicle) just... attempted to swerve, at very low speeds into my lane to get around a street car, and almost hit me, until I yelled at them. Before anyone tries to play a devils advocate here, I should add I was not behind the car when he went to switch lanes, I was right beside him, he, or she?, tried to change lanes on top of me! I got the license plate but realized that unless I got a good look at the driver I would not be able to point at them in court with certainty and say"that is the (insert favorite nasty adjective here) who nearly killed me".

Other than the usual lunacy of North American automobile drivers the commute to work and home was, in many respects, wonderful. I lost count of the number of street cars (trams) I passed, but it was more than four on the way in and at least six or seven on the way back, the roads were dry and clear and the potholes were, well they were the other thing, besides the cars, that make cycling less than perfect, but considerably better than any other option out there.

Anyway the City of Toronto, probably as a traffic control measure, put in a bike lane on Eastern Ave. from around Carlaw to Leslie. This bike lane frustrates the morning rush hour drivers and does no good for cyclists, since it is not connected to any other bike lane and only runs for a few hundred meters. So I am going to propose something that makes an awful lot of sense to me. Open up Eastern to cars as it used to be, and add a bike lane to Queen Street. Queen has never been a good through road and with all the street cars, pedestrians and cyclists who already use it... well maybe it is time to acknowledge the facts and move on. But slowing cars on Eastern when nobody even uses that bike lane, and I should know, its only marginally inconvenient for me to use it and even I don't, well it makes the people who plan traffic in Toronto look no wiser than the people who make use of the planners work, namely the drivers.