Tomorrow City staff will give an update on planning for separated bike lanes on Wellesley. Councillor McConnell (who has been presumably consulting with other councillors along the Wellesley - Harbord route) has sent a proposal to the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee requesting that the planning for Wellesley be extended to St. George, as a sensible place for the first phase of separated bike lanes to end.

Unluckily, she has proposed that there be a separate consultation processes for each section of the proposed separated bike lanes. The lanes would pass through wards 20, 27 and 28, thus there would be three consultation processes if I'm reading her correctly. Adopting this proposal would mean that to finish the separated bike lanes from Parliament to Ossington would require five separated consultation processes! That means one consultation for every kilometre of the 5 kilometre route. That's just crazy.

And if the separated bike lanes weren't approved in each and every ward, we would end up with a patchwork. Imagine travelling along some nice separated bike lanes and then abruptly going back to regular bike lanes or even no bike lanes at all. Then travel a few blocks more and they start up again. You don't have to imagine that hard since that's how Toronto currently pretends to have cycling infrastructure, by only building where politically expedient.

This is why bike lanes have not been completed in this city.

Not only would it provide for an onerous process, it would be expensive, repetitive and it would divide us. You'd think that each ward was a separate country and not actually just a political boundary for a city councillor. Why don't we install border guards while we're at it?

I propose something else: let's just get on with it. We're a city with substandard cycling infrastructure, even for North America. We currently have zero continuous east-west separated bike lanes while cities like New York, Vancouver and Montreal are zooming past us. We have large patches of Toronto with next to no cycling infrastructure, even downtown (just look at our poor Bike Score). I propose that we have one joint ward consultation process. That consultation process was good enough for Sherbourne Street, which involved 2 separate wards so why not on Wellesley?

While I like Councillor McConnell's proposal for pushing on to St. George in this first phase, I am very disappointed in the consultation proposal.

Councillor Vaughan had presented his combination of proposed bike routes in Ward 20 over a year ago. These bike routes would provide some key cycling infrastructure in some under-served neighbourhoods (I've drawn the "previously approved" ones above - can anyone point me to documents where they were approved?). There are more in Vaughan's document (which includes proposed in the bike plan and existing bike lanes). The proposed bike lanes would be 1 km on Dan Leckie, 1.4 km on Bremner, and 1.3 km on Blue Jays Way, for a total of 4 km.

These bike lanes would serve the growing downtown condo crowd, expand the network for BIXI riders, provide some key links for visitors and residents to access the waterfront and link up to already approved separated bike lanes.

The separated bike lanes includes 5 km on Harbord to Wellesley, 3.5 km on Richmond, 2.5 km St. George / Beverley, 1 km on Simcoe, and 3.5 km on Sherbourne. Including Vaughan's "approved" bike lanes above that comes to about 20 km.

I think it's helpful for cyclists to get behind Vaughan's proposals for Ward 20. Other than our disagreement over the need for bike lanes on John, Councillor Vaughan has had good proposals. Portland will link up with future bike lanes on Richmond and/or Adelaide; Peter will link Beverley to Richmond/Adelaide; and extending Simcoe bike lanes will provide better access into downtown while crossing the separated bike lanes (once they're built).

Ron Buliung, a professor of transportation geography at the University of Toronto, elaborated on his interview for a Public Radio International's The World in an article War on the Streets of Toronto: Motorists vs. Cyclists. and the representation of the cycling in Toronto (thanks to TCAT for posting!). Buliung noted to the BBC that Toronto is "not seeing dramatic increases in fatalities or injuries of any kind, or much change in the frequency of injury on our major arterials". What is actually happening is that other North American cities are becoming safer and seeing fewer cyclist injuries and fatalities. Toronto has stalled at an average of about 1100 collisions per year over the last five years.

Perhaps ironically Buliung was involved in a sideswipe collision the day of his interview with the BBC. Thankfully he wasn't injured badly. In his musings below he tries to provide illumination on Toronto's "war on the ..." rhetoric and on the way we tend to fall into a binary discussion of good/bad aspects of transportation in this city. Things are improving in some ways - injuries are static as cycling rates increase, yet not so in other ways: we don't know if "near misses" and "unreported collisions" are rising or not.

“The war on the car”, “The war on public transit”, and now, care of the BBC, “The war on the bike”. This polarizing discourse about transportation in Toronto, launched by Mayor Ford, and sustained by a chorus of local and international media outlets, completely misses the mark. A more sensible conversation is one that acknowledges the multi-modal reality of passenger transport in our city and in cities across the globe. It’s much easier to play one mode against another than to do the tough work of figuring out how to make them work together.

In a busy city such as ours, irrespective of how you travel, the bad news stories are plenty. Congestion is getting worse, cars are crashing into each other, pedestrians, and cyclists. My personal story of cycling in the city includes the stories of friends and students being struck by cars; my partner was “doored” on College Street while pregnant and thrown over her handle bars into the street car tracks; and I was recently side-swiped while en route to a BBC interview to discuss cycling in Toronto (no injury occurred). This personal narrative influences how I think about the perceived and actual risk of cycling in the city.

In the BBC article, my comments regarding a retrospective analysis of reported injuries and fatalities were used as a counterpoint to the reporter’s suggestion that, “Toronto’s streets have turned into some kind of a roller derby”. Here we have, again, a complex process reduced to a simple binary description, i.e., it’s really bad out there/no it’s not. In the days since the BBC interview, I have spent a few hours observing the activity at one of our busiest intersections (in terms of bicycle traffic), College and Bathurst (also the site of the interview). During that time, I observed a young girl, escorted by an adult, trying to cross the street on her bike. She fell off her bike, lost a shoe in the streetcar tracks, and had to be picked up and carried the rest of the way; we are a long way from 8-80 indeed.

When I add my personal observations from around the city, to my cycling experience (about 11 years here), I can tell you that my perception of risk has increased over time. I can’t recall the last time I rode my bike in mixed traffic without incident, usually a near miss here or there. One could conclude that as I’ve aged I’ve also become more risk averse. Most of my experience bicycle commuting has occurred during the peak periods (rush hours) in the a.m. and p.m., at a time of day when the streets are awash with every kind of vehicle imaginable. The data tell us that most car-bike collisions are occurring at those times, particularly during the afternoon rush (City of Toronto, 2003). It may indeed be a bit of a “roller derby” during the peak hours. In other words, in my view, the roller derby exists, but not everywhere – and not all the time.

So, what of the good news? Data from the 2001 and 2006 census suggest that bike commuting to work is on the rise. While the city-wide bike to work mode share rests at 1.7%, we have neighbourhoods where the mode share is as high as 17%. Reported injuries and fatalities were lower in 2006 (during the peak) than in 2001. More recent data suggests little change in injury or fatality between 2006 and 2011 (City of Toronto, 2011). In other words, if we assume that the number of cycle commuters continues to increase, while frequency of injury remains relatively stable, then one could conclude that something is going right. One problem with this type of analysis is that the near misses, and unreported collisions are excluded. My near misses and unreported collision not only affect my perception of risk, they also fit into the broader story about the objective risk of injury associated with cycling in the city.

I would like to think that things are getting better, but I’m not completely sure yet. We are talking about preventable injury and death. It is not a good thing that, on average, close to 1000 cyclists are injured annually. Afterall each event carries with it several direct and indirect, and at times, enormous social and economic costs. These costs trickle across scales, from the individual to the employer and to the broader community.

The profile of cycling in Toronto has clearly increased through time; we have very passionate public advocacy groups (Toronto Cyclists Union, TCAT), and let’s not forget about our city hall staffers who are working to see the bike plan implemented. Although it might appear as though things have stalled (another claim from the BBC piece), there is more cycling infrastructure in the city today than there was in 2001. As of March 20, 2012 roughly 76% of the planned off-road capacity had been built, along with 56% of the planned signed routes, and 22% of the planned bike lanes (although these are the toughest sell of all) (City of Toronto, 2012). There will always be more to do, but that’s not the same as saying that nothing has been done! The best way to get people to consider switching to cycling is by building these supportive infrastructures, and – one of the best ways to reduce injury risk is to get more people cycling (i.e., safety in numbers).

While the currently available infrastructures might not all represent the grade and/or barrier separated ideal, they are a critical piece of the civic discourse on the role of the bicycle in the city – the painted line, the sharrow, the signed route, represent – if you will, a re-branding of our streets, a clear label telling all road users that the bicycle has a place in our city.

The relationship between the bicycle and Toronto is almost as old as the city itself. In the City of Toronto Archives I found a photograph of a bicycle storage facility located at the Toronto Lithograph Company, dated 1898 (that’s right, the idea of bike storage at work is more than a century old!). In addition, the conversation about bike lanes in the city has been dated to around 1896 (City of Toronto, 2001). The bicycle has been part of Toronto’s transport system for more than a century, it has survived the modernist auto-centric experiments with transport and city form of the past, and it will survive Mayor Ford."

Ron Buliung
Associate Professor, University of Toronto
Research Associate, University of Toronto Cities Centre

References:
BBC News (2012) Cyclists accuse Toronto mayor Ford of ‘war on bikes’. Available from: http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17914504 [Accessed May 7 2012]
City of Toronto (2001) City of Toronto Bike Plan: Shifting Gears. Available from: http://www.toronto.ca/cycling/bikeplan/index.htm [Accessed May 7 2012]
City of Toronto (2003) Bicycle/Motor-Vehicle Collision Study. Available from: http://www.toronto.ca/transportation/publications/bicycle_...... [Accessed May 7 2012]
City of Toronto (2011) 2011 Cyclist Collision Summary Leaflet. Available from: http://www.toronto.ca/transportation/index.htm#data [Accessed May 7 2012]
City of Toronto (2012) Bikeway Network Project Status. Available from: http://www.toronto.ca/cycling/network/network-project-stat... [Accessed May 7 2012].

It appears as if work on the separated bike lanes on Wellesley and Harbord has been slow and it's unclear if the City will meet its timeline. Transportation Services has been working on the initial phase of Wellesley but they haven't gotten far enough in either project to meet the target dates.

City Staff was directed last year, June 2011, by the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee (PWIC) to "proceed with the detailed design and consultation process for developing separated bicycle lanes on Wellesley Street with the goal of implementing them in 2012".

City staff was also directed by PWIC to start working on Harbord - Hoskin and Beverley to report in May this year:

City Council direct the Acting General Manager, Transportation Services, to commence the design phase for separated bike lanes on Harbord - Hoskin and Beverley that includes community and stakeholder consultation and consideration of the availability of parking on local side streets, with a report back to the May 2012 meeting of the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee.

This year, at the April 18, 2012 PWIC meeting, PWIC requested an update on Wellesley. We will get the official update at the May meeting. I spoke with Christina Bouchard of Transportation Services who told me that they have been doing "counts, parking surveys and traffic analysis along Wellesley, and have met with the Councillor" but that they haven't prepared any public consultation meetings as of yet. Given this pace it appears that the probability of constructing the separated Wellesley Street bike lanes in 2012 is remote.

Hopefully City Staff has advanced the design work for physically separated bicycle lanes on Harbord, Hoskins and Beverley Streets as they were directed a year ago. I haven't received any information on the progress, but given the pace of Wellesley it's likely that these streets will be even later. Anyone interested should monitor the agenda of PWIC for its May 16, 2012 meeting.

The Ward groups of wards 19, 20, 27 and 28 have become concerned regarding the slow pace and have sent a letter to PWIC (pdf) to suggest a number of improvements to the process. The letter strongly supports the separated bike lanes on Wellesley, Harbord-Hoskins and Bevereley. In addition it supports the improvements suggested by Councillor Vaughan for Ward 20. It also suggests that City Council expand the scope of planning for Wellesley to include the bikeway from Ossington to Parliament.

Evergreen Brick Works will be hosting their inaugural charity bike ride “Ride the Ravines” on Sunday, June 17, in support of accessible cycling in the GTA. Riders of all levels are welcome! Register today!

Ride the Ravines will take riders through Toronto's ravine network, residential streets, a major road, the lakeshore boardwalk, and a few parks. The route begins and ends at Evergreen Brick Works, and is 25km in total (with the option of a shorter 12km route as well). This will be a fun mass ride weaving through parts of the City you've never seen.

After the ride, cyclists and community members will come together for our after-party at Evergreen Brick Works – a vibrant, fun-filled event featuring live musical acts, delicious food, and an opportunity to mingle with sponsors, retailers, and community partners (including ING Direct, Cycle Toronto and yours truly, I Bike TO).

Hope to see you there!

Poster is below in case you would like to print it off.

OpenFile has a young and bike-friendly group of journalists writing and researching for it. It has just produced a pretty cool map of traffic "accidents" called OpenRoad where people can choose start and end points of a journey to see the number of crashes along the way that were reported to the police. (I'm going to stick to calling them crashes since we don't know if they were actually accidents or if they could have been prevented). The Globe and Mail created a similar map not too long ago, using the same / similar data. I wrote up my criticisms of that map and most of the same criticisms stand for OpenRoad. OpenFile, in this initiative, is misleading the public more than they're helping. They've failed to provide context for the numbers and the whole project implies that they are helping people find the most dangerous intersections.

OpenFile is aware of the problem with the data and notes that "A route with more accidents isn't necessarily more dangerous for each individual on it." Popular cycling routes will inevitably have more crashes than routes where no cyclists venture. Their map is unable to tell us why an intersection has lots or few crashes. Is it because it gets used a lot by cyclists? Or does it have bad sightlines, heavy traffic, or lots of potholes? We have no idea based on their map.

It begs the question of the usefulness of the map at all if we can't even use it to help us make decisions on our routes.

With the one hand OpenFile explained the limitations of the OpenRoad map, but with the other hand they were exploiting it for headlines like "MONTREAL'S MOST DANGEROUS INTERSECTION FOR CYCLISTS" and a tamer headline "Vancouver’s intersection with the most bicycle-vehicle collisions", which still contained the statement "It will come as no surprise that Main Street at East 2nd Avenue, a hub of both bikes and cars, is the most dangerous cycling intersection in Vancouver with 10 accidents reported to police between 2007 and 2010".

No, that's not how it works.

The media now seems to be more interested in playing with cool new tools rather than consult with experts - in this case bike safety researchers - in order to understand how we can actually measure "safety" and "danger".

We don't have good cycling counts in Toronto. The best we have is the Downtown Cordon Count from 2010 but it will serve the purpose for my argument. Let's compare College and Dundas. The report counted the number of cyclists passing a cordon over the day and the western boundary was Spadina. Using the OpenRoad map I selected a route on College from Bathurst to Beverley and the same from Dundas. I then can make a rough comparison of crashes to the cyclist counts on these two streets.

There are 3 times as many cyclists on College as Dundas, but only 2 times as many crashes. (I am making what I think is a safe assumption that cycling traffic on College tends to always be about 3 times as high as Dundas). From the viewpoint of an individual cyclist which street would you think would mean less risk of a crash? Going by the OpenRoad map and headlines I would venture that OpenFile would proclaim Dundas as the safer street and College as more dangerous. College has twice as many crashes after all. But as soon as we take into account how many cyclists are actually travelling on these two streets College starts to look a lot better than Dundas.

Ideally in such investigative journalism it would be nice to have a map like this, which maps the pedestrian collisions with a denominator of pedestrian traffic. But we can't get that. So what is the point of OpenRoad?

OpenFile and the Globe and Mail have, at best, just provided yet another fun-looking but pointless widget, and, at worst, helped to persuade people to choose cycling routes that are actually more dangerous than their tool would tell them. Anyone up for biking on Steeles? It has a heck of a lot fewer crashes than College Street.

A new report released by the Toronto's chief medical officer shows how cycling and walking are both good for our health and save it's money. The report, “Road to Health: Improving Walking and Cycling in Toronto,” also demonstrates how reducing motor vehicle speeds reduces the number of people being killed annually, recommending that Toronto lower speed limits to 30 on residential streets and 40 on arterials. The latter will prove to have a hard time getting traction in Toronto, despite the fact that many Toronto residential neighbourhoods already have 30 zones with traffic calming measures (though many also do not). And despite the fact that other cities have proven how successful it can be on making other cities more liveable, literally.

Studies are quite clear that deaths and serious injuries increase dramatically with higher speeds. There is a “greatly increased probability of death or serious injury when hit by a vehicle travelling 50 km/h compared with 40 km/h.” One of the studies found that 85 per cent of people struck at 50 km/h are likely to die, versus only 25 per cent at 40 km/hour.

Toronto politicians aren't ready to push for this and a majority of drivers are bound to think the proposal goes too far, except when it comes to their own neighbourhood. Currently the City requires communities to individually apply for lower speed limits, asking traffic engineers who feel their job is to keep cars going fast for exemptions to the rule. The rule is that they first need to get speed humps and they can only get those if traffic engineers measure that the average speed on the street is above the posted limit. The City has made it exceptionally difficult for neighbourhoods to get safe streets. This proposal would flip out around by saying we should be going slower everywhere except for those roads where we make an exception. From the Star:

Dylan Reid, former co-chair of the city’s pedestrian committee, argued that residents have already demonstrated that they prefer slower speeds on local streets.

“Most of Toronto’s residential areas are designed to slow cars down, and people want them slow. . . . I think this is frankly just catching up to reality in a lot of ways,” Reid said.

“Where there is a wide road that is suited for a faster speed, it’s easy to simply post that speed where appropriate. But it doesn’t make any sense for the default speed to be 50 km/h.”

If I may make a bold claim, Torontonians want lower speed limits where they and their children live but not where the drive. They deserve safe streets, they feel, but elsewhere speed should trump safety. Cycling and walking advocates (and maybe a campaign like 20 is Plenty for Us can take advantage of this dichotomy and start helping local communities to fight city hall for the right to safety where they live. We now have an official report to back it up. Just don't rely on councillors to take the lead since our love for speed is ingrained.

The report has another proposal that has been overlooked but that could prove to be powerful. It recommends the City to set targets for reducing injuries and deaths. Imagine getting a yearly report that showed how we missed our goal to reduce deaths. It would bring media attention to the fact that city inaction has a direct result on more people dying. What politician would want to get behind that story? New York City is doing something similar with their Pedestrian Safety Study and Action Plan, where the city is now required to produce a report to show what, if anything, they've done to reduce pedestrian injuries and deaths. Building political traction can be difficult, but this would help keep politicians' feet to the fire.

Even if the City might not yet be ready to do something rational to save lives by lowering speed limits, the report has a number of strategic measures that it recommends to improve Torontonians' health by getting us walking and cycling more and doing it with less risk of injury or death. And already the press coverage of the controversial recommendation for lower speed limits will help jolt people out of their complacency. At least we now can't deny the trade-off: if you want to go faster you know you're risking greater injury and death.

On the day of the Complete Streets Forum in Toronto and just after the Toronto Cyclists Union said they would take their request for an Environmental Assessment on the Jarvis bike lane removal to the province, I was thinking about an outdated urban traffic planning - popular in the 1950s - that is favoured by some people on City Council. Contrary to our Mayor, Minnan-Wong sees an important place for cyclists and pedestrians, while still emphasising a central place for motorists. While Councillor Minnan-Wong seems to be seriously considering how to balance different needs, I don't believe he or anyone else can successfully balance the insatiable needs of of the car against the needs of the community. We only need to look at our current suburbs to see how giving over our neighbourhoods to "optimize" car travel has failed to reduce congestion. It would be hard to find people anywhere in Toronto that are willing to give over yet more space to automobiles in their own community.

Councillor Minnan-Wong is concerned that downtown Toronto is becoming too unfriendly for motorists, particularly in a time when public transit is so poor that many people are still "forced" to commute by car. Minnan-Wong stands by his stance on Jarvis, that it should primarily be seen as a route for motorists and not as a complete street that also takes into account the people who live on it or who travel by other means. Instead, other routes like Sherbourne should be optimized for means like bicycle.

Do we need more transit? Yes. Do we need more bike paths? Yes. Would it be better if more people could walk to work or take transit? Yes.

But in the real world, biking from Malvern or Rexdale to King and Bay works well in theory but a little worse in practice. And a lot worse in the months of November through to March. Given the city's lack of progress at installing bike lanes, it is no surprise that many suburban cyclists make different choices about how to get around.

A mobility plan includes measures to expand the use of transit and bicycles, and – critically – practical means to substitute public for private methods of transport over time. Until the supply of transit is adequate (and we're a long way from there) or until our downtown is bike-friendly, the city has a duty to enable its citizens to enjoy the benefits of mobility, including trips taken by car.

There is some nuance to this view and has some logic to it. We can't make driving more difficult while failing to make it easier to take transit or bike. This would only serve to anger motorists. But there are a few problems with Minnan-Wong's argument.

One, it doesn't help that the TTC commission voted to reduce bus service in the suburbs and that Minnan-Wong voted with the majority. It would be easier to take his argument if he was also working hard to improve transit.

Two, Torontonians are frustrated by congestion, though far from being a downtown problem, traffic congestion has been getting much worse in the suburbs while remaining stable into and out of downtown over the last two decades (from 1985 to 2006). The question we should be asking ourselves is, why is traffic in the suburbs - with its wide and plentiful roads - getting worse while downtown traffic is not? Instead of trying to fix downtown congestion, we should look at what the suburbs can learn from downtown?

Three, re-installing the fifth lane on Jarvis will provide next to no benefit for anyone. The street will be less safe for all people and frustrated drivers will still be frustrated even with up to 2 minutes saved in travel time. The staff had measured times post fifth lane removal of between 2 to 5 minutes longer during rush hour. However, this delay was likely reduced because of the installation of a dedicated left turn signal at Gerard and Jarvis. So it's not clear if motorists will save any time.

One would think that an extra lane would help more. But there are bottlenecks at the top and bottom of Jarvis, which means we can only squeeze as much capacity as there is at the bottleneck since that is where motorists are forced to merge again into fewer lanes.

And even if there weren't bottlenecks on Jarvis, it would not be able to escape the principle of "induced demand". Induced demand means that the more supply you provide the more people who will find more reasons to make trips. And then soon the supply is all taken up and we're back to similar congestion levels as before.

Four, shaving off 2 minutes of someone's commute time while making someone else's commute (or neighbourhood) more dangerous is a lousy trade-off. All over Toronto there exist neighbourhoods who have fought to install speed humps and lower speed limits on their streets. Jarvis may be a main arterial but people still live on it or travel on it by foot or bike. How do we weigh and prioritize what we value here? Don't we usually prioritize safety over convenience?

We can see models in Europe for how to create communities that better balance the competing needs of cars versus the rest of the community, but these communities relegate cars to a small part of their overall transportation mixture. By pushing for expanding the space dedicated to cars we soon run into problems. It is no longer the 1950s; there is no cheap land in much of Toronto on which to build more roads. Squeezing a couple minutes here or there is not going to solve congestion. It's probably not even a worthwhile goal for Toronto. Congestion is the price we pay for being a successful city. After all, as David Mirvish said, "If we get slowed down, that’s part of the price of living in a city. Plan ahead."