Saturday, May 10, 2014

Got some snow flakes

It's been a colder week and we got even some snow flakes from the sky. I think it flaked on three days. But as the temperature is above freezing (maybe a few degrees minus Celsius at night on a night or two), the few flakes disappeared immediately.

And there's a new interesting construction going on near one of my regular routes. They're building a new underpass. It's about 350 meters east of another underpass and maybe 200 meters west of a traffic light controlled intersection. It's the brown splot crossing the yellow road in the middle of the map.
It seems like a good place to build an underpass, as it is on a top of a hill. This underpass gives new routes that will not have as much uphill. Or at least not as steep uphill.

Makes me wonder if there will be more changes to the bikeway network in the future. Are they going to try and move the bike traffic away from the traffic light controlled intersection (yellow, pink and white streets intersecting north west from the last A in Alppila)?

With the underpass it would seem that most of the traffic from south would be to/from the south-west part of the map, coming from the railway underpass just a little SW from the first A of Alppila, and Alppila it self.

From the north it would seem that most users will be from Koskela and Niittyaro. Most of the trough traffic coming from Isko will continue south trough the traffic lights and the pink street.

One possible improvement could be to continue the bikeway north from the new underpass trough the letter Y in Niittyaro to the ski/jogging path (green lines on the map) and connect to the underpass going under the big green road. That would create a direct route towards the university and the supermarkets to the north.

In other news, apparently there was some winter cycling campaign going on. The participants commuted by bike a few days a week trough the winter, rode about 35000 km instead of using car/bus, and nine out of ten are going to try it again next winter.

And there's planning going on for the city centre. With the Big Dig finished, some streets will be closed for cars. Now the designers are asking cyclists to upload their gps tracks from the rides in the centre, so they could better design the routes around and trough the downtown area. And they want to know where you park your bike.