Damn memory, RIP Souris Swinging Bridge

As is usually the case, I had some brilliant ideas for posts - when I was nowhere near a computer to even get them started. Thinking that they were so great how could I possibly forget them, I of course, promptly forgot them.

So instead, lest you think I've dropped out of the blogosphere, I will do a (rare) short little post. I was away from Winnipeg for the last week, and I'm always a little sad to be away for Canada Day, never mind all the fantastic weather that I missed. I'm a stereotypical freezing cold female - it's next to impossible for it to be too warm for me. That being said, I don't do manual labour for a living, so that's probably part of it... My travel blog will hopefully be updated soon - a little snippit of my visit to Sweden and Denmark.

While I was gone The Wolseley Project seems to have remained intact, although there are weeds amongst the flowers like crazy. I've checked the various news archives and it doesn't appear as though there were any major incidents (well, major enough to make any sort of news story) in and around my place so that's good; perhaps it was too warm for the criminals in my neighbourhood.

The cities I visited on my trip reminded me why unfortunately Winnipeg will never truly have a huge cycling network. Both Malmö and Copenhagen have dedicated bike lanes all over the city, with their own traffic lights and all.  Bike parking was plentiful and since apparently over half of the people in those cities commute by bicycle, car traffic was nothing like what you would expect for a large city. They also don't average getting colder than -2, which probably helps as well. I know there are die-hard cyclists who go all year long here in Winnipeg, but the majority of folks are unlikely to give up their command start to bike to work in -25.  Which means that in order to have a greener transportation plan we need rapid bus transit for winter, with heated bus shelters, or at the very least, more actual clean bus shelters and then a system for bikes in summer. Now, I know that diamond lanes are for buses and cyclists, but I don't imagine that cyclists like choking back on diesel fumes or trying to pass a bus by going into one of the busier lanes of traffic!

Image from Flickr

 On a completely unrelated note, I was sad to hear this morning that the Souris Swinging Bridge has been sacrificed in the flooding. I thankfully have visited it before so it's not something that I will miss out on but I sure hope they will rebuild it when the water levels come down.