Bad Traffic Planning at Work: Following Rail Tracks When Biking or Walking

CN, one of Canada's major rail companies, has found it necessary to start cracking down on people trespassing on their property due to safety concerns. This bothers me a fair bit, because there are railroad tracks running through areas close to where I live, and the streets dead end at the tracks often enough. Just crossing the tracks on foot is included in the list of things considered trespass. One of the people commenting mentioned that in some urban areas people bike or walk along the tracks because it's considered safer than the street, which is arguable because it's a lot harder to stop a train than a car, but at least there are fewer people honking at you and yelling at you as they nearly ram you with their cars. This does amount to a sort of discrimination by default, because tracks don't run through the more affluent neighbourhoods the way they do through poorer residential areas. Poor people are also more likely to bike or walk out of necessity than those more well off. This is one of the reasons I get upset when people complain about the cost of installing bike paths, sidewalks where there were none and better traffic signals to accommodate pedestrians and cyclists. No one flinches when a new section of freeway is built, and that's undoubtedly much more expensive and counter-productive when it comes to improving traffic flow (more roads just mean more driving).

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