Waterloo region's cities look to community to plan for growth in bike lanes and trails

A new study out of the University of Waterloo says that some municipalities are creating cycling infrastructure based on data from Statistics Canada, which looks only at people who commute to work, subsequently leaving other riders — particularly women and those from underrepresented groups — under served.

Rebecca Mayers, a postdoctoral candidate in the school of planning at UW, says without enough information about trips taken by older adults, service workers, people living with a disability or those unstably housed, it can underestimate the value of cycling in society.

"If all cycling trips were taken seriously, including those that do not end at work, fall outside of regular business hours, take place through alleys or recreational trails instead of streets, decision-makers would have more information to inform and justify cycling plans," Mayers said in a release about her study, which was published in the journal of Leisure Sciences.

But the cities in Waterloo region say they go beyond the Statistics Canada data when making decisions about bike lanes and other infrastructure.

Darren Kropf, the active transportation and development manager at the City of Kitchener, told CBC News the census data is certainly a data set that they look at and they consider, but they don't stop there.

"We do have other data sources that we consider to give us a more broader and holistic look at how people get around," he said.

"So for example, when we developed our cycling and trails master plan, we did survey residents and we found that the community reported that one in five cycling trips were related to commuting," he added.

"There's definitely a much broader use case for cycling than simply commuting. Other top reasons that we're giving were for shopping, for accessing services, for fun and for exercise, so we would include all of those in our planning." 

Kropf said that they also look at things like population growth density targets and data around climate.  

"We know that carbon emissions from the transportation sector are the largest in our region," Kropf said. "So we would also be looking at numbers like that to justify cycling investment and into infrastructure."

Kropf explained that bicycle infrastructure includes things like protected bike lanes, multi-use trails and neighbourhood bikeways that are accessible to riders regardless of their skill level or age.

The city's cycling and trails master plan was done back in 2020 and is expected to be used as a blueprint until about 2030.

"We don't base [the master plan] on how many people are cycling now because typically, there's a very small subset of population that's willing to bike on high speed, high traffic roads," Kropf said.

"Rather we want to look at things like how many destinations are there along a desired route that people might want to bike to? What's the connectivity in the street and trail network?"

He said the city also looks at things like land use and both current and future projected growth in our official plan.

"We consider all of those different factors to come up with some heat maps of where we see the greatest cycling potential," he said.

Bike infrastructure in other regional cities

The City of Cambridge said they use the same census data mentioned in the University of Waterloo study to come up with their master plan, but have 21 other references too.

"Census data was referred to through the [cycling master plan], but it was not the sole determining factor and many other sources were used including public consultation," city spokesperson Teresa Chiavaroli said in an emailed statement.  

Shirley Luu, with the City of Waterloo, said in an emailed statement that currently they have 37 km of multi-use lanes, 20 km of separated lanes and 122 km of non-separated road lanes and they're looking to grow more.

"Work undertaken through the recent transportation master plan update identified the need to make major connections between residential neighbourhoods and key destinations around the city, including LRT and transit, employment, schools and post secondary institutions as well as for recreational and leisure needs such as trails, parks, shopping, restaurants and sporting venues," Luu said. 

"An extensive public and stakeholder engagement process contributed significantly to the study and its recommendations."