Blogs

It was a bit of a shocker to find out that Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam is getting cold feet on separated bike lanes for Sherbourne, thus potentially putting Toronto's first opportunity for better separation into jeopardy. It has come to my attention that Councillor Wong-Tam has filed a request for Sherbourne's separated bike lanes to be installed only in the North as a pilot for study and further community consultation.

It appears as if the Councillor is trying to stall the project with claims of "needs more community consultation" despite the fact that it has already gone through a completely open process with the community. Most of the residents and businesses who provided comments had said that they supported the bike lanes. There is such a thing as studying a thing to death.

By requesting it only be installed on the North end of Sherbourne, it appears Councillor Wong-Tam, is willing to give up on the improvements for the lower part which were to be coordinated with road repaving. Has Councillor Wong-Tam consulted with Councillor Pam McConnell whose ward covers the other half of Sherbourne? Given that Councillor McConnell supported the separated bike lanes I'd say she hasn't.

In the Winter issue of Dandyhorse, she was asked "How do you feel about having the first separated bike lane in Toronto installed in your ward?"

At the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee meeting yesterday, the John Street Corridor Improvements Environmental Assessment Study was approved despite the number of people in the cycling community who voiced their displeasure of being ignored. It was a plan that was pushed by commercial interests along John, as well as by Councillor Vaughan, but provided very little for cyclists who comprise up to 1/3 of the traffic along the street.

But surprisingly, there may be a consolation prize for cyclists. A reputable source at the PWIC meeting heard Councillors Minnan-Wong describe how Councillor Vaughan was willing to support separated bike lanes on Beverley, Peter, and Simcoe (and presumably Richmond or Adelaide to connect these streets) if he the John Street report was approved. Since a John Street without bike facilities was approved, I presume that Vaughan is now committed to improving this alternative route, and that Minnan-Wong wanted to make sure this commitment was recorded in the public record.

[Update: PWIC accepted the Front Street EA Report with an amendment: "The Public Works and Infrastructure Committee requested the Downtown Design Review Panel to meet with the Acting General Manager, Transportation Services, the Director, Community Planning, Toronto and East York District, and the Chair of the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee to review the report on the Front Street West Reconfiguration - Environmental Assessment Study and provide comments to be forwarded to the March 5, 2012, meeting of City Council."

PWIC basically recognized there were some strong concerns about the lack of cycling infrastructure. Hopefully something improved can be figured out in time for the City Council meeting.]

Union Station is the busiest transportation hub in the country. For some time it's been known that something needed to be improved for the stream of people walking in and out of the station across Front Street. Today there is a meeting of the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee to look at the Front Street Environmental Assessment Report. It looks like a big improvement for pedestrians and as someone who occasionally uses Union, I will appreciate that cars will have more deference to me walking across. I continue to be flummoxed why cyclists' safety is being sacrificed to get there while motor vehicles will still get plenty of room. I ask the planners to imagine an 8 year old or an 80 year old on a bike navigate this section of Front.

Union Station would constitute a ”mobility hub” under Metrolinx’s mobility hub guidelines, which calls for "Balanced Access to and from Transit Stations":

• Create safe and direct pedestrian and cycling routes to rapid transit stations from major destinations and regional cycling and pedestrian networks.
• Provide secure and plentiful bicycle parking at station entrances with additional cycling amenities at high volume locations.
• Provide clearly marked and protected access for pedestrians and cyclists at station areas to minimize conflicts, particularly at passenger pick-up and drop-offs (PPUDO), bus facilities, and parking access points.

Despite the repeated requests by people for more BIXI stations, there doesn't seem to be a lot of political movement in expanding BIXI Toronto right now. While BIXI Toronto is expected to be financially self-sustaining, it does need access to funds to expand. In answer to that yours truly, in conjunction with the Toronto Cyclists Union and The Urban Country, have launched a web tool for collecting your BIXI Toronto "wishlist" stations. wewantmorebixi.to allows you to add your suggested Bixi station locations to a map. You can also vote on existing suggestions made by other people.

We will keep BIXI Toronto informed of the popular spots as well as use the results as part of the Bike Union's campaign to increase the number of BIXI stations up from 1000 currently. There are no firm plans as far as we know for any major expansion, but hope springs eternal. And we do hope that we can make a dent into the car-centric mind of City Council which has so far been mostly unable to see how supporting cycling infrastructure saves us bundles of money in the long run. There is no more road capacity; we'll have to increasing rely on bikes, transit and walking if we want to move around.

The proposal for the "pedestrianization" of the John Street "Cultural Corridor" remake has been finalized and will be voted on by the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee meeting this Thursday Feb 16 and then on to City Council. There are no bike lanes in the proposal despite John Street being a quite popular connection for cyclists to and from downtown. It seems to me that some kind of bike lanes - out of pain or decorative bricks could have been an easily accommodated while still allowing for a much improve pedestrian realm.

The John Street plan looks quite nice. I look forward to seeing it completed. It's laudable that a downtown street will be made more livable by making motor vehicles less dominant. It's an important demonstration of moving away from fetishizing the private automobile, and towards a built environment friendlier to active transportation. But along the way the plan has devalued the role of cycling in creating a vibrant city.

The lack of cycling infrastructure is disappointing. There were a number of attendees to the open house who made requests for cycling infrastructure, but the planners decided they couldn't add any bike lanes because the street was recognized by City Council as a "pedestrian priority route" and claimed that bike lanes would interfere with their main goal:

For those out there who are interested in learning and working on their bike in a community environment, you might consider attending CBN's annual membership meeting coming up next week Monday. It's not too late!

The Community Bicycle Network would like to announce our Annual General Meeting. It will
be held on Monday February 13th, 2012 at 6:30 pm. The meeting will be held in the CBN shop at 761 Queen St. W. All CBN members are invited to attend and vote on the next board of directors. CBN will be open from 4:30-6:30 pm on February 13th for anyone interested in joining to purchase a membership. The suggested donation is $5.

CBN has a lot of important planning to do in 2012. Our lease is up in December and we'll be
looking for a new space. We continue to expand our workshop programs (teaching bike mechanic skills as well as safe cycling) and divert hundreds of bikes and bike parts from landfill. There will be spaces on the board opening up, and lots of other volunteer opportunities such as outreach at community events, updating the website and other media, designing a t-shirt, stripping bike donations and much, much more.

We are requesting that you share this press release with your community contacts including
posting it on your website, calendar, list serve, bulletin board etc. Please consider attending yourself or recommending it to someone you know. If there are any questions please contact
board@communitybicyclenetwork.org.

Thank you,

In this Globe and Mail produced interactive map of cyclists collisions from 1986 to 2010 there is a sea of pins representing reported collisions by cyclists and colour-coded for injury severity. It's a thing of beauty and nice to zoom in and out. But that soon gets old once you realize that there is little else that we can currently conclude from it. Can we tell if my route or neighbourhood is safer than another? Can we tell if cycling in Toronto has gotten safer over time? Not really. We are missing a key denominator - bike traffic. Not surprising since the City has only begun to collect this data in a more systematic manner. At the very least, the authors could try to explore some of the other interesting data in the dataset that they've hosted.

That doesn't seem to stop them from trying to reach some broad conclusions without all the information.

They claim: "Toronto falling behind pack in averting bicycle collisions, data reveals". Well, the data doesn't reveal that since you haven't compared the number of cyclists and bike trips over time and between cities. What are the cycling populations in each city? Have the number of bike trips grown or not?

City Transportation staff are developing a trails report and asking the public to review the proposed trail connections for Toronto before the report is submitted to Public Works and Infrastructure Committee. The open house will be in North York, 40 Orchard View Blvd (1 block north of Eglinton and west of Yonge), Monday February 6, 2012, 5:30 to 7:30pm) or comment via Facebook.

Our new mayor made the bike trails the primary focus of bicycle infrastructure. It's exciting that we might have more bike trails in our City! But let's not give the mayor too much credit. The vast majority of these connections were identified in the 2001 Bike Plan. What the mayor did was make these trails a priority over the rest of the bikeway network. In fact, the mayor has supposedly scrapped the Bike Plan because he claims that the roads are no place for bikes (or streetcars for that matter).