Moving beyond the war on cars
It looks like the war on the car, that storied struggle of good vs. evil, is back on in Toronto. This week city staff posted an updated cycling plan that includes an ambitious pilot project: bike lanes on a significant stretch of Bloor St. W. No cars were immediately available for comment, but I imagine they won’t sit idle in the face of this renewed attack.
OK, the war on the car is a cynical fabrication, a catchphrase of former mayor Rob Ford to divide residents and muddy our political discourse. And boy did it work, so well in fact that Ford convinced council to remove bike lanes during his tenure. The bold proposal on Bloor is an opportunity for Mayor John Tory and the new council (albeit composed of mostly the same faces) to abandon the war rhetoric and start talking seriously about cycling safety.
A bike lane along the full length of Bloor-Danforth has always been a nobrainer. People on bicycles need an east-west thoroughfare just as much as motorists do, but they’ve never had one. Bloor-Danforth makes sense because there is already a subway running underneath it — for all its shortcomings, Line 2 is almost always a faster alternative to driving across the city. It only makes sense to devote some of the surface route to bikes.
The establishment of such a route is a Holy Grail for cycling advocates, a socalled “backbone” from which we could build out the bike network we’ve been studying for decades. Existing lanes on Harbord and College just don’t cut it — they end abruptly and force commuters onto streets with no designation or protection.
This is only acceptable if you believe bicycles do not belong on the road or, as Ford so eloquently stated years ago, that if cyclists are killed in traffic, “it’s their own fault.”
Opposition to major cycling infrastructure goes well beyond the mayor’s chair, and has for decades. In particular, business owners along Bloor-Danforth have long feared the loss of street parking would harm sales. But research from cycling advocates suggests there is not so much to fear.
A 2014 study by the Toronto Coalition for Active Transportation found that merchants on the Danforth overestimate the number of shoppers who drive to their destinations: “while merchants perceive that 34 per cent drive to get to the Danforth, overall only 19 per cent drive and for those who live or work in the area only 10 per cent drive,” a sum- mary of the study says.
But safety has always been the fundamental argument for creating cycling infrastructure on Bloor-Danforth, and across the city. During 2012, the most recent year for which statistics are available, a Toronto cyclist was involved in a collision every six hours. These stats only capture collisions reported to the police, so we can only guess how much worse the true figures are.
Jared Kolb, who leads Cycle Toronto, the city’s largest membership-based advocacy group, says a lack of safety is the primary reason people will not ride in Toronto. The group’s website lists dozens of businesses along Bloor that support the installation of bike lanes.
“Bloor St. is a parking lot most hours of the day,” Kolb said via email. “You’ve got to be out of your mind to try to drive Bloor St. to access the core. We’ve got to stop using (it) as a place for car storage and instead use it to move people.”
He’s right, but proponents of the Bloor pilot project will still have to contend with the lack of political will at city hall, where ward councillors can upend citywide plans by citing local opposition. At least they no longer have to fight a mayor who obscures the need for safety with talk of a phoney war against rolling cubicles of metal and plastic.
Tory’s cycling proposals as a mayoral candidate were neither bold nor specific. He contrasted himself with Olivia Chow, who campaigned on a comprehensive 200-kilometre cycling network, by promising a “reasonable, achievable, measurable commitment” to bike infrastructure.
The proposal to pilot lanes on Bloor meets all Tory’s criteria, and would be a most visible sign that Toronto’s cyclists deserve to ride in safety. The mayor should move us beyond the divisive rhetoric of his predecessor by standing in support of this crucial project. Desmond Cole is a Toronto-based journalist. His column appears every Thursday.