Imagine a traffic signal that is aware you’re arriving on a bike and decides to adjust its timing to give you a green light without needing to stop. It doesn’t happen every time, but when it does, it’s quite special!

It might seem like nit picking, but what we call a street for bicycles is important, even more so if we can reflect that name in the signage and pavement markings, and maybe even convey the priorities a little better than a simple sharrow.

Continuous sidewalks and bike paths are relatively new in Canada, but there’s growing interest. Let’s take continuous sidewalks and bike paths across local streets from emerging practice to standard practice in Canada.

To date we’ve been doing them wrong in North America, or at least in the wrong places. Woonerf’s are most often found on residential local streets rather than commercial main streets in the Netherlands.