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I have biked through it four times now, for science. Drivers and cyclists are in each other’s way, where instructions are clear they’re dangerous, and during school-time rush hours in the fall it’s going to be much worse.

Going north, in the general direction of Tunney’s Pasture, is pretty well fine. That’s a straightfoward route with good sightlines and there’s a short but fairly steep downhill stretch just before the highway underpass that helps a cyclist zip along with motor traffic.

Coun. Jeff Leiper got city council to approve a speed-limit reduction on that stretch of Holland, from 50 km/h to 30 km/h, and temporary signs are up. The city knows full well that drivers will drive as fast as they feel safe driving, no matter what the signs say, and the limit-lowering didn’t come with any promise of enforcement or anything, so it’s just for show.

Southbound is the disaster. The same hill that’s great going the other way is a devil to climb on a bike, either in a low gear or standing on the pedals. There’s a set of traffic lights at the bottom, meaning cyclists will sometimes start from zero. I managed about 15 km/h. On a road built for 60, that feels very slow. Holland Avenue is a wide north-south artery with buses and traffic lights and all the other markers of a road you drive pretty fast on, and it’s fully understandable that a driver who just has to push the accelerator slightly harder to take the hill at full speed would feel impatient.

The city urges cyclists to ride in front of those impatient drivers. New signs say bikes and cars should go up that hill in single file — get out there and take the lane! “Sharrows” are sprinkled all over the road.

Besides telling everyone generally to share the space, sharrows are supposed to be placed deliberately — “Sharrows are intended to indicate to both motorists and cyclists the appropriate line of travel for cyclists,” the official manual for Ontario road designers says. Follow the sharrows on southbound Holland Avenue and you’ll be veering all over: middle, right, left, right again.

(What little evidence there is on sharrows is that they make streets more dangerous rather than less, because they change cyclists’ behaviour but not drivers’. A sharrow is a traffic engineer’s notice of surrender.)

The CBC sent brave reporter Marc-André Cossette to bike through it. Not one but two drivers, including one at the wheel of a Canada Post van, got so ticked at him for doing exactly what he was supposed to do that they veered into the oncoming traffic lane to pass. The video is horrifying, and it’s shot on the easy part of the southbound ride before the hill.