Good job! I can't imagine riding a bike in those areas..Must not have been easy for you..
you are telling me you did this whole construction tour on your bike!?! here I was thinking about how much work it would have been to do it with a car, yet alone just biking around.. Super, super appreciative. I don't get up to York Region much in the winter months so seeing sites updated like this is great as I can't drive past them myself.
Nice photos! Where did you start your bike trip from?
It definitely wasn't an easy or beautiful ride, and the subway stations were just a small part of my construction tour of York Region. I also covered Richmond Hill, Markham and North Scarborough before taking the subway home when it started to get dark. I biked almost 100 km that day, which is not the longest distance I did this year by a long shot. I don't actually feel too tired the next day to be honest. Originally I was planning to use transit, but there were too many sites to visit therefore the bike was the best option. The TTC works really well for me for Toronto site visits, but YRT is not up to the task to say the least.
Usually I avoid arterial roads when I ride the bike, which is easy to do in most parts of Toronto but not so much in York Region. In the 905 I have to use the sidewalks a lot, but with all the construction along Hwy 7 I couldn't even do that because they keep disappearing. In the
Viva thread, you can see that at one point I was standing in the middle of the road behind the construction cones because there was nowhere else to get away from the traffic. Eventually when even that method failed, I just waited for a break in traffic and then got the hell out of there at high speed using the car lane. To be honest, that wasn't even the worst part. What really drives me nuts is that sheer monotony of the suburban environment. There are no words that can convey how much I detest the suburbs and the car culture that created it. Every damn location I go looks the same. There is no sense of place. All those ugly cookie-cutter houses, strip malls, gas stations and parking lots could be in any city in North America. The huge arterial roads are just a traffic sewer that you drive through at high speed, instead of functioning like a proper street (e.g St Clair) where you can live, work, dine and shop. That combined with all the traffic noise pounding my head all day was enough to give me a headache.
I don't know how so many people could live in such a terrible build form. If I had to name the worst place I saw that day, it would probably be Scarborough Centre and it's surrounding areas, followed closely by Richmond Hill Centre. There is no subway in the world that can salvage that place. But you know what, the bike ride was worth it because a lot of people here love construction sites and progress updates. I will do it again next spring, for you guys.
Ride map:
http://ridewithgps.com/routes/11120355
This is my bicycle.
