west side alternatives to Harbord

I just emailed the City to complain about their snowplowing being mostly for cars, as bike lanes should not be where snow gets plowed in to.
Last night Harbord eastbound was looking rougher in that Harbord Village area with the sharrows, but there are Bigger problems on eastbound College/Dundas over the bridge east of Sorarsen, where there's no bike lane, just snow. Also eastbound College on Sat. west of Beverly was entirely filled in and useless. There are also some consistent issues with the City promoting indented parking bays, and then failing to clear them out in winter, and so the cars park out entirely into the bike lane. This may be a problem along College west of Spadina, haven't checked.
I emailed Councillor Minnan-Wong, bbrenner@toronto.ca, a couple of other councillors, rburlie@toronto.ca, and degan@toronto.ca and another bike-friendly lawyer. I didn't send in any of the pics that I've taken, that's another process/time, but the City must do better for bikes when they put in bike lanes. They are 1.5M in most places so that 1/3 of them can be filled in with snow.
And to be fair, sometimes the City does a great job of plowing them out and making them good, and it doesn't take much - like the TTC plowing out their stops, or a driveway, or a delivery truck driving through a snowbank - to mess them up.
Taking the lane isn't something we always feel comfortable in doing right? And there aren't too many other routes that could be used for bikes in that dominant east-west travel demand.

Harbord seemed better yesterday afternoon/early evening. There were some bad filled-in spots though: some caution is required. Many of the other streets mentioned in the frist comment were better, or seemed somewhat better - maybe it's salt and the sun vs. the City.

However, the Dundas bridge remains terribly demonstrative of what's percieved by many as the Ford attitude to cyclists: get lost or get killed. The eastbound lane remains filled from Sorauren, and the westbound is not quite so filled, but still bad, including a city sign in the afternoon.

It was bad all over the city on Wednesday. Plowing of the bike lanes is highly variable. On the plus side, the west side railpath was plowed yesterday! They didn't do that last year.

Some notes on commuting in snow:

http://jnyyz.wordpress.com/2011/01/15/commuting-in-snow/

This is the response I received on the bike lanes on the Lakeshore being plowed inadequately.

David , as promised, I am responding to both this email and the email sent by you to the Councillor Grimes on Friday, January 7th.

We did are routine salting and ploughing during the snowfalls on Thursday and Saturday. Further to these standard operations, dedicated ploughing/slushing was done over the bike lanes you discussed in your emails using our Depot slushers both during the early hours on Friday morning and on Saturday afternoon following our ploughing operations.Yesterday morning I checked with our GPS on the ploughs unit doing the work on the bike paths and indeed we have documented records that the work was indeed done. However please appreciate that all large ploughs doing such work in the City run on "shoe supports" which hold the plough blades slightly off the pavement for Safety reasons to avoid hitting all the catch basins, manhole covers, bridge expansion joints etc. This is very different from any ploughing you may have see on Regional Roads and 400 series highways , where rubber blades actually run on the pavements. As mentioned the blades with shoes will typically leave about 1 cm of snow over the pavements they pass over and more in any rutted areas of the pavement. Further, since these bike lanes are now marked there is much less traffic running on these areas of pavement. Salt that we typically place on the roads is depend on traffic to mix the snow with the salt to form a brine which acts to melt the remainder of the snow on the pavement. Without such traffic this is a much slower and less effective process. One final issue concern with most of the bike lane(lakeshore excluded) is that TTC busses sometimes drive the along the curbs where the snow has been ploughed during our cleanup and the busses splash snow and slush back out over the roadway. Perhaps Mr Egan can renew some dialogue with the TTC to discourage/limit this practise.

Transportation Service will be monitoring these bike lanes in our District throughout the winter and will discuss these issue to see if better ways of doing this operation in the future. As a minimum I have requested our Depot Supervisors to salt the bike lanes during the ploughing operation to provide another salt application to the bike lanes to improve upon the melting process.

Please fell free to phone me at 416 394 8349 to discuss these issues at any time.

Regards
William Mason, Senior Engineer
Operations, Etobicoke York District

William J. Mason, P.Eng.
Senior Engineer
Technical Operations
Transportation Services
Etobicoke York District
416-394-8349
bmason@toronto.ca

Queen West, once you're past the construction at Ossington, isn't bad, and King is okay until Portland, then get better a bit east of Spadina.

Dundas West, of course, is worse than ever due to multiple layers of poor quality patches and zero enforcement of rush hour parking bans.

At least the street-car routes seem to get plowed well, and get some automobile traffic in the right lane. Watch for cabs and white vans, and avoid getting too close to the curb..