[mfenniak]

> Cycling in Toronto is a life-threatening activity, and Calgary has something like 150km of paved urban pathway.

Calgary has over 1000km of paved urban pathway. I'm the creator of a small webapp called yycpathways.ca where you can sync your Strava up to a map of Calgary pathways. As you bike/run/etc the pathways, it will "Pac-Man" away the path and just show you places you haven't been before. Two people have completely covered all the pathways using my app.

But if you leave it to actually go somewhere, cycling is still a life-threatening activity.

[pycal]

i was going from memory and trying not to exaggerate!

another factoid about the paths is the city clears them before roadways after a snowfall!

love the app!

[goda90]

Someone should tell Not Just Bikes about Calgary. He has had a lot to say about Canada's winter bike infrastructure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU

[jonahrd]

He has a video about Calgary on his channel :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8F5hXqS-Ac

[yostrovs]

While in the video he compares the infrastructure provided in a Norway town compared to similar ones in Finland and Canada, he doesn't touch on the underlying financial situations in the three countries. In summary, Norway is loaded while Canada and Finland are not. And that's because Norway has drilled hundreds of billions of dollars of liquid oil over many years that Finland and Canada do not have.

[djkivi]

Alberta has a lot of oil, and even created a fund, the Heritage Fund, in the 1970s to save some of the wealth from drilling oil.

Unfortunately Alberta has mismanaged that fund so it is now far smaller than Norway's.

https://thenarwhal.ca/norway-s-oil-savings-just-hit-1-trilli...

[yostrovs]

Norwegian oil is vastly cheaper to extract and deliver to willing customers than Canadian oil sands.

[Scoundreller]

Canada has that, along with low population density. Ok, about 6 times the population and only 2.5x the oil production, but other resources too (we can actually grow stuff even).

We just prefer the colony model of letting the profits go to anyone but the local government.

[yostrovs]

Norwegian oil is vastly cheaper to extract and deliver to willing customers than Canadian oil sands. Canadian oil requires prices to be close to $100 a barrel to break even.

[Scoundreller]

It requires a lot of energy to extract, but when you’re the extractor of that energy in the first place, your costs ride up and down as your selling price does.

To date, no oil sands operation has shutdown.

[ape4]

Toronto built a bunch of protected bike lanes during the pandemic: Yonge, University, Bloor, Bayview

[bparsons]

The cycling network there is pitiful for city that size.

[abdullahkhalids]

There have been a number of times when I was cycling in Calgary on roads where there was no bike path but not doing anything dangerous, and people slowed down their trucks (because that is what everyone drives in Calgary) to shout at me to stop cycling or get off the road.

[jlarocco]

That's a great app idea!

A while back I wanted to create something similar that'd help me ride every path and side streeet here in Boulder, CO, but it never went anywhere. I especially like the Pac-man idea for unexplored paths!

Any plan to extend it outside of Calgary?

[sixstringtheory]

Brilliant app idea. Any plans to expand to new places, or open source?