GRINDING GEARS
With a battle ahead over the Bloor St. bicycle lanes, Toronto is in a critical transition period,
Happy June and happy bike month.
June is perhaps the best summer month, Toronto at zenith, when everything is new and fresh, not worn out by heat, humidity and smog as the flora and fauna (including us) seem to be in coming months.
It’s a good month to get on a bike, too, and across this great Golden Horseshoe, “hundreds of community events including rides, races, tours, festivals and more” are celebrating Bike Month from Toronto to Hamilton and beyond. A celebration is a nice change because this form of transportation is cause for a fight so often. In Toronto, the Bloor St. bike lanes are up for city council review this fall, so another fight may be on the horizon.
The “Golden Horseshoe” has a nice, if aspirational, ring to it. It hearkens back to a simpler time of horse and rider, perhaps even a buggy or wagon attached to that horse.
These were the kinds of transportation our roads were initially created for. Pedestrians too, of course: They’ve been around since the beginning. Other modes of transportation were added to our roads over time: streetcars, bicycles and, most recently, cars.
For a spell, our roads were adapted for car use at the expense of all other modes, but now we are adapting the roads again, this time for people, no matter if they’re travelling by car, bike, streetcar or foot. Constant tweaking and reinvention is the story of our roads.
The Bloor lane has been a most welcome addition to Toronto’s streets. This short pilot project that runs from Shaw St. to Avenue Rd. was the culmination of years of effort by a coalition of advocates.
Survey results released earlier this week show that 75 per cent of people who live in the area either agree or strongly agree that they make Bloor safer for cyclists and that trade-offs, such as increased traffic and loss of some parking, are “acceptable.”
One-hundred-and-forty businesses along Bloor were also surveyed and 44 per cent thought the trade-offs were acceptable, with 52 per cent saying they were unacceptable. Retail has traditionally been skittish of bike lanes in the best of times and as we endure a “retail apocalypse” caused, in part, by a massive shift to online shopping, watch for bike lanes becoming an increased scapegoat.
Only 57 per cent of drivers surveyed found the Bloor lanes unacceptable, not bad in a city where it’s been in the political and personal interests of some to frame the redesign of roads for cyclist safety as a “war” between bikes and cars.
This period of transition is at a critical stage right now. The bike lanes in most of the Horseshoe are disconnected and piecemeal: The network of cycle paths is far from complete.
Imagine what automobile routes would be like if the asphalt stopped and started here and there, and drivers were forced to take unpaved roads, dirt trails or long detours.
That’s just how it was in the recent past. In Toronto’s pre- and postwar eras, the creation of the automobile road network we know today was a concerted and considerable effort. The archives have many photos of the expansion of roads such as Eglinton in Scarborough from farm lanes to increasingly substantial avenues. Change came fast and a network was created.
The same should happen for the cycle network.
Urban Planner Gil Meslin recently shared a map of Toronto he created on Twitter with the Bloor bike lane highlighted and the extensive cycle superhighways of London, celebrated by mayors such as Boris Johnson and Sadiq Khan alike, superimposed on our city at the same scale. The Bloor lane is a wee stub, while London’s cycle superhighways stretched from Long Branch to Yonge and Steeles, and from Weston to Scarborough’s Golden Mile.
What that shows is that in Toronto, measuring the use of bike lanes while the network is still in piecemeal form would be like checking on the GTA’s automotive connectedness based on how the roads were in 1952. Even the multi-use trails in the Humber and Don Valleys and along the waterfront today are not continuous and routinely toss cyclists out into car traffic.
A half-decade ago, the removal of the Jarvis St. and Birchmount Rd. bike lanes gave Toronto the international reputation as being one of the few cities in the world removing, rather than adding, bike lanes. The same could happen with Bloor.
Rational thinking isn’t part of this debate (like a lot of our transit discussions), but emotion is. Here are some facts that won’t matter in this debate: Cyclists pay taxes too; bikes are light and cause less damage to the roads, requiring less tax money to fix and fewer construction delays; more cyclists on the road means fewer cars, which should make drivers happy, but one minus one does not equal zero here.
Instead, a slight increase in travel time for cars and the loss of some parking due to bike lanes will be highly emotional sticking points.
Safety is also emotional, though. Councillor Joe Cressy of Ward 20 Trinity-Spadina says survey results reveal 85 per cent of cyclists feel safe on Bloor today compared to three per cent in 2015.
When Bloor comes to council this fall, watch for who supports the pilot project and those who don’t. Some Toronto councillors like to talk about “Vision Zero,” a plan to reduce road fatalities and serious injuries to zero, but often vote to undermine that effort.
Toronto was shaken by the awful death of a 5-year-old boy a on Lake Shore Blvd. a few weeks ago.
Making this city safer to prevent this ongoing carnage will need lots of vocal support.
Check www.bikemonth.ca for event listings. Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef
Making this city safer to prevent this ongoing carnage will need lots of vocal support