Abstract Manager

In a city with 16 months of winter, there are often tensions between the planning and design of 5A active transportation networks with winter maintenance. This presentation will share perspectives from both design and maintenance on the challenges of a rapidly expanding network and how internal stakeholders are engaged during the planning and design process. We will share lessons learned from how snow operations have adjusted their processes to manage unique and challenging active transportation facilities and how design decisions have evolved over time to reflect feedback. We will explore lessons learned over time using the design of uni-directional protected bike lanes as a case-study. 

The city’s first uni-directional protected bike lanes are road level, and have narrow, tight turns. This requires specialized equipment, creates icing issues with freeze/thaw cycles, collects gravel that is difficult to sweep and provides limited snow storage. Newer projects try to address previous issues by raising the bike lanes to sidewalk level, widening the bike lanes and buffers to allow for more snow stacking, removing adjacent parking and increasing taper lengths to accommodate standard active pathway equipment. The newest standards include wider pathways and boulevards, continuous crossings and curbing to define the pathways.

The presentation shares feedback about year-round maintenance on these different configurations, explores how design changes have and have not improved operations and identifies next steps for improving knowledge and understanding between design and operations teams.