Cyclists brave beat-up bike lane

Cycling lanes are just about the best thing that ever happened to bike riders around here, until they start to crumble.

Some drivers still resent them, but the spread of bike lanes in Toronto have added a welcome measure of safety to cycling. Bike riders now have at least a small bit of separation from vehicles.

It’s great, until the cycling lanes start to deteriorate, which is now the case along some of them, including the well-used lane on Wellesley St. E.

Trudo Lemmens emailed to say he often rides along the Wellesley bike lanes and that the one on the north side is “in bad shape, particularly between Parliament and Jarvis (Sts.).”

The situation is worst just west of Parliament, Lemmens said, “where potholes could create a serious accident, if a cyclist hits the potholes . . . which are big enough for a wheel to enter and cause a serious accident.

“It has been like that for months now, and nothing has been done about it. The problem has only increased as serious deformations have appeared more recently.”

We went there and watched as a steady stream of cyclists veered away from the potholes and crumbling pavement and towards the edge of the bike lane to avoid the problem.

It soon became apparent why the bike lane is damaged: there’s a TTC bus stop just west of Parliament, and one of the front wheels of the buses that stop there always settles in the same place.

It’s the same process that creates bus knuckles — with the weight of buses constantly stopping in the same place slowly deteriorating the pavement — which we wrote about last week.

One solution would be to ask bus drivers on the Wellesley route to stop just a few feet on either side of the stop, or to move the bus stop itself.

But that would only transfer the damage to another point and widen the area affected by stopped buses.

It’s a good example of why it’s hard to make everyone happy when so much traffic converges in such a small space. Status: Ross Carnovale, the acting area manager of road operations, emailed to say his staff will make temporary repairs to the sunken area. He added that permanent repairs won’t be done before next spring, noting that a concrete pad is needed to ensure the problem doesn’t recur. What’s broken in your neighbourhood? Wherever you are in Greater Toronto, we want to know. To contact us, go to thestar.com/yourtoronto/the_fixer, call us at 416-869-4823 or email jlakey@thestar.ca.