Quick Elgin Street thread. Remember this short cycletrack between Isabella and Queen Elizabeth Drive presented at the last public consultation? Well, turns out they're not building it!

They're putting in this instead! A floating lane bike lane between traffic headed to the Pretoria bridge and traffic heading to the slip lane on QED. It looks a lot like what was there before—and what the original plan was—except with the addition of green thermoplast.

I don't have a preference for either option, though putting in *both* would've been better than either/or—people could choose for the higher-stress direct route, or the lower stress, off-street route.

Of course, neither of these solutions are safe or good. What should've been done is this: eliminate the slip lane, make a physically-separated cycletrack go along the curb into a protected intersection at QED. Unfortunately, the intersection was outside the project scope.

(The City of Ottawa has some serious problems with their project scoping.)

As it is, this option is still pretty dangerous. A brand-new floating lane in Ottawa! There are many conflict points between drivers switching lanes through the bike lane. These conflict points should be reduced, since there's no longer a choice to eliminate them.

It's strange that the design changed like this after the final consultation, with no other communication. The Elgin consultation has been poor and misleading since day one. But it's almost finished: all that's left for cyclists is the installation of the sharrows.