We know that not every best practice around the world works for Winnipeg, but occasionally something comes along that you can't ignore. 

I would feel amiss if I were to not report back about something important I saw while in California recently. Maybe it was the similar endless-suburban landscape in some places, maybe it was the flat topography, maybe it came from being in a flood plain or maybe it was the similarly hot weather, but I think it could work here. 

Certainly Davis, California offers some unique and valuable lessons. Bike underpasses is one of them.

I was in Sacramento to share a project at the US Safe Routes to School conference. I luckily signed myself up for a guided bike infrastructure tour of nearby Davis. I turned my camera on. While biking around, it occurred to me that the humble little bicycle underpasses made a really really really big difference. More importantly, I had seen the same arrangement in Oulu, Finland in the snow. 

Oulu is known as the bike capital of Finland. Davis is known as the bike capital of the US. Both a replete with these tunnels. Coincidence? The mode share numbers suggest that there is something going on anyway. 

It could happen here. Use your imagination. The clay and the drainage issue is something we can handle if we want to. There are lots of candidate locations. Think Maple Street. Think Bishop. Think Northeast Pioneers Greenway. Think all the crossing that currently say "dismount" and just about everything we build new from now on (at least until cars disappear).

To help you remember the parallel, see this little set of 3 photos for comparison. 

To give an idea of just how many of these there are and where they are located, I subsequently put together a map of each of the above-mentioned places highlighting the bike underpasses in red:

I found more than 140 of them in Oulu (pop.c.200,000). There are likely more. I couldn't look at the map any more.  You can see how they create a critical porosity in the bike network. Apparently, there are more than a dozen in Davis (pop.65,000), although I gave up on mapping them all. You can see clearly how useful they are. In Winnipeg, there are only 2 that I am aware of that come close to qualifying. Note that neither of them are really wide, airy or bright enough to meet best practices, but I mapped them for comparison's sake anyway. In all cases, I tried to map only the ones that are AT-specific. For comparison's sake, I tried not to count the ones that simply run alongside a road with a bridge over both.

Conclusion:

Winnipeg + more bike underpasses = bike capital of Canada . . . . ???