anti-social media guru

Now that I've calmed down a little about today's decision on removing the bike lanes on Jarvis, maybe there is a bit of room to make everyone traveling along Jarvis happier. I regularly ride and drive along Jarvis, so while my perspective is still biased (I much prefer to be safer on the bike than faster in the car), I think I've got a fairly balanced view.

1. Driving is more efficient when there's more room horizontally (three lanes are better than two)
2. In a car waiting behind left-turning traffic is annoying
3. Bikes need a lot of space - in the five-lane Jarvis configuration the lanes are very narrow, which makes it impossible for a car to split a lane with a cyclist
4. The five-lane causes more confusion that good. I don't know how many times I've been legally driving in the centre lane, only to be approached head-on by someone confused or waiting to make a left turn

If you forget about opening up the centre lane completely to traffic and work on something a little closer to what you'd see on Davenport (the intersection at Bathurst is a prime example of how this would work), then I think you'll get the best of all worlds.

• Cyclists will have a protected lane when the speed differential is highest, and therefore the most vulnerable
• Drivers will have a turn lane, and will always have two open lanes approaching intersections
• We can all share the space approaching and going through the intersections. I mean come on. It shouldn't be hard.

Here are some diagrams showing the differences between a five-lane, four-lane with bike path, and four-lane with sharrows through intersections with full turn lanes. All of them have the same number of cars and cyclists in the same positions. They're all making the same turns and trying to get through the same way.

The five-lane configuration:

There's one happy car here. Maybe closer to two, but the guy in the dark red car is a little bit annoyed because the car in the curb lane had to move into his lane a bit to avoid the cyclist. The northbound guys are both anoyed, one because of the cyclist and the other because of the left-turning car.

The four-lane with bike lane configuration:

Cyclists are doing really well and are fully protected. Great. But there are still two really annoyed cars stuck behind the left-turning cars. I understand this well because that's usally me making the left, and it does make me uncomfortable knowing that I'm forcing people behind me to wait.

The four-lane with bike lane, turn lane, and sharrows configuration:

I know this might not apply to rush-hour, since I'm pretty sure at most intersections you can't make a left turn anyway. But the option would be available to allow for left turns, and that'll change traffic patterns all over the place. So obviously I understand that I haven't just drawn up a few lines thinking that I've solved the problem.

That said, what I've done still isn't any different than a room full of politicians getting together and drawing and erasing their own lines. I don't understand how any decisions like this can be decided that way without proper consultation and planning. Maybe that should be what changes in all of this.

Since the end of last year when I was told I have a touch of tibialis posterior syndrome (basically a glorified form of tendinitis involving the tendon connecting the back of your shin to the bottom of your foot), I've been completely off running, and only able to handle very small amounts of cycling at a time.

I could spend hours explaining exactly why (if you've read my training blog you'll know I'm not exaggerating), but I believe that trying this midsole position will take much of the pressure off my tendon, which might actually allow me to start cycling again, and if I'm very lucky I can resume a regular training schedule. [fingers crossed]

For more info on the midsole cleat position, check out some of the archives on Joe Friel's blog (author of the Triathlete's Training Bible and the most vocal proponent of a midsole cleat). His latest midsole cleat post is about how it can improve running performance off the bike, and it also contains links to his previous articles.

This guide is based on Joe's how to post, which uses a very similar shoe to mine.

Step one: Mark a line down the centre of the shoe. I used the hole in the top with the indentation in the bottom

Step two: Measure the halfway point in the sole and...

Step three: Make a perpendicular line.

Step four: Drill the holes. This shows the mounting plate in it's position, which I used as a template to drill the holes (I'm not sure where they came from, but I had a few in my bag of parts).

Step five: Dremel out a square in the inside of the soles to give a spot for the mounting plate to be recessed into.

Step six: position the mounting plate.

Step seven: Screw a couple random bolts into it.

Step eight: Laugh at the pain from sticking your foot into the end of a randomly long bolt.

Step nine: Grab some appropriate-length machine bolts from Home Depot. Interestingly this non-metric size is a direct match, not only with thread pitch and length, but they're tapered exactly the same as the originals.

Step ten: Install new machine bolts

Step eleven: Consider dremelling a deeper recess for the plate, and possibly reinforce with epoxy if appears that any structural integrity is lost.

Step twelve: Admire your work. Oh yeah, and test it when you get home tonight. [fingers crossed again]