I am an avid Toronto cyclist…

I am an avid Toronto cyclist who uses cycling both as recreation and daily transportation. I usually stop cycling once snow and Ice begin to cover our roads.However I frequently ride through rain, wind and extreme heat.In the course speaking with many people about cycling, I've found among friends, relatives and acquaintances that many of them would also cycle for transportation if they could feel safe on the roads and if the elements would be less of a factor.In other words, if cars were less of a threat and wind, cold, rain and snow did not bother them. I realize that a road devoid of automobiles and a terrific calm, sunny day do not seem like a realistic proposition for the MTO to provide but I'd like to propose a solution which addresses all of these impediments to cycling at a minimal cost and additionally benefits Toronto's transportation and civic infrastructure. The solution is truly simple and has been right under our noses since the invention of the automobile. We need to think like the first real estate developers who envisioned the skyscraper. Put yourself in that early position. You own land and you want to make the most of it financially. What do you do? You build upwards. You stack the real estate and in so doing you increase it's value exponentially. That is what Toronto needs to do with it's roads.The city owns the roads and the airspace above them and yet they remain single story systems-ground level only. How valuable is that space? Plenty I'd say. Okay, so ideally we need a separate roadway devoid of automobiles protected from the elements to get more people cycling. Why not use the airspace above the roads for cycling roadway? It's no crazier than a park above our rail yards (as an aside that's not crazy either). And there is an inexpensive, simple way to do this which is far less costly than tunnelling more and more subways. It is easy if we make use of off the shelf components. What we need to do is suspend large pipes above the roadway and modify them to accommodate cycling and other light vehicles. Cyclists are quite light compared to cars, so are electric bicycles. They are also small. The structural system need to do this is by architectural standards quite minimal. A flat platform would be placed inside the BIKE PIPE (let's call it that for now) , which the cyclists would ride upon. Pylons would support the Bike Pipe above the roadway and it would be linked to the upper stories of buildings that wished a link. The system would be cheap, modular and effective for alternative transportation.It would reduce gridlock and subway congestion.Power, cable, telephone and other infrastructure elements could be integrated into the BIKE PIPE. It would also provide a safe quick way for emergency services to bypass gridlock in emergency and patrol the city at minimal cost. Amenities such as rest stations, publlc restrooms and site seeing opportunities could also be built into such a system. Think of the appeal that bridges have to the public.As a former UfoT architectural student, I know what Toronto's architectural and engineering community could do with this idea. It can be made to be elegant and beautiful on a world scale and to be an enduring tourist attraction. And all at an off the shelf cost. Please feel to contact me if you would like any further explanation of the concept,

[Original Comment ID: 197041]