Bike plan

A decision will be made at Public Works and Infrastructure Committee this week about whether to approve Transportation staff's recommendation regarding Richmond/Adelaide separated bike lanes. The bike lanes have been in the official Bike Plan for the last ten years, but there are some obstacles. Instead of doing a pilot project sooner, staff is recommending we go straight to the required EA and install them in 2013:

City Council authorize the General Manager of Transportation Services to initiate a Municipal Class Environmental Assessment study for separated bicycle lanes within the Richmond-Adelaide corridor, between Bathurst Street and Sherbourne Street, which could include consideration of a pilot project to install and evaluate separated bicycle lanes on the preferred alignment during the course of the study.

For those who wish to make a deputation regarding the project, please contact Ms. Candy Davidovits of the Citys Clerks Division at pwic@toronto.ca or at (416) 392-8032 by 4:30 p.m. on November 2, 2011. For more details on submitting comments or requesting to speak, see the City web page: Have Your Say! (www.toronto.ca/legdocs/tmmis/have-your-say.htm)

Given all the construction on Richmond and Adelaide it seems likely that PWIC will approve this report to delay and do an EA. One noted improvement they could make to the EA is to extend the study area to connect to the Eastern Avenue bike lanes. Why have separated bike lanes on only part of Richmond/Adelaide?

The Chief Coroner of Ontario, Dr. Andrew McCallum, announced this morning that his office would be investigating cycling deaths over the last four years to determine ways to prevent them, reports the Star and CBC (read the announcement). Ten to twenty cyclists die every year in Ontario as a result of injuries on Ontario streets. A coalition of cycling and senior groups - Toronto Cyclists Union, Advocacy for Respect for Cyclists and the United Senior Citizens of Ontario - wrote to the coroner requesting the inquest, and an opinion piece was written in the Star in August by lawyers Albert Koehl and Patrick Brown, along with former president of the United Senior Citizens of Ontario, Marie Smith, explaining why they wanted the inquest.

A similar review of 38 cycling deaths in the city of Toronto over an 11-year period was completed in 1998. That review led to a number of cycling initiatives in the city, including the Bike Plan, the city-wide network of cycling lanes, and the establishment of the cycling advisory committee, which was disbanded earlier this year.

Let’s say you were a member of the Ford team, and you were tasked with suppressing cycling and rolling back existing cycling infrastructure. How best to accomplish this?
Try this:

• First, get some authority. PWIC chair would be a nice whip hand to have.
• Get some credibility – learn to cycle, and become the poster child for the newly converted.
• Join the local advocacy group and wave your new Cycling Union membership card every chance you get.
• Scrap the existing official cycling plan. Work with the Union to come up with a new plan and get their endorsement.
• Request a Status Report from city staff on cycling infrastructure. Use this as a mechanism to introduce your changes.
• Announce that the new administration is going to spend twice as much on cycling infrastructure as the old one. Wave your membership card, get good press, get the Union to claim some success.
• Blow some of the new spend on rolling back existing infrastructure, arguing that it is not supported by the local communities, or was poorly planned by the previous administration, or is not widely used. Ignore anything in the Status Report that does not support the these statements.
• At the same time, announce plans for new infrastructure spending to distract the press and give the Union something to cling to. Offer to trade upgraded infrastructure in one location for eliminated infrastructure in another. Then amend the direction-to-staff motion so that there is no enforceable link between the two.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news – and in fact, I’m not; NOW Magazine scooped me on this by hours – but if you think we won a one-year reprieve on Jarvis demolition and a straight swap for separated bike lanes on Sherbourne, better think again.

Read the amended agenda item PW5.1 carefully and without the rose-coloured glasses. Check motion 10c by Denzil Minnan-Wong, amending Kristin Wong-Tam’s motion to delay the Jarvis “reconversion-to-superhighway” until the separated bike lanes on Sherbourne are completed. Note particularly the following:

• deleting the words "only after" and replacing them with "and co-ordinate", and
• adding to the end the words "and staff be directed to take all steps required to revert Jarvis Street to its pre-existing operation such that implementation can be achieved as soon as possible…

The Bikeway Network Report for 2011 came out yesterday. Overall it's a big letdown, though I'm happy to see that Sherbourne, Bloor Viaduct and Wellesley are proposed to get protected bike lanes. The Chair of Public Works was calling for something more ambitious, at least for the downtown, but the staff seem to prefer to cautiously "assess" and "study" Richmond and Adelaide instead of even proposing to removing any car traffic lanes or parking, safely stating that the Mayor will only support bike lanes that don't "impede" traffic. The report will also be asking the committee to make a decision on the Scarborough bike lanes on Pharmacy and Birchmount, which have been shown to have little negative effect on car traffic.

The bike union made this statement:

This report was released today and the Toronto Cyclists Union, representing over 1,100 members, is disappointed with the lack of progress in the report. It is not bold enough to address the needs of hundreds of thousands of Torontonians who ride bicycles. In fact, several of the recommendations outlined in the report set the City back on cycling progress. While other cities are moving forward at a great pace to improve conditions for cyclists as part of an overall transportation plan, Torontonians who ride bicycles are being left behind.

Read more to find out what we're facing, but please send out an email to the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee to support the Bike Union's recommendations for improving it (see below for details).

Hi Rocco, Rocco and Himy, where are the others? Oh, there you are Joe, in the back.: Photo: Toronto Cyclists Union

Eight mayoral candidates accompanied the bike union on a downtown bike ride on Monday (oops, stale news!). Three of the main candidates didn't go for the ride: Smitherman hoped to arrange a one on one ride; Thomson was probably planning her exit strategy; and Ford was afraid to look like a big hypocrite (he was probably also thinking about lurking nearby with his SUV, the "road shark", ready to pounce). According to the bike union, the half hour ride gave the candidates a full experience of downtown cycling:

...allowed candidates to experience almost the full range of scenarios faced on a daily urban commute by bicycle. The ride took candidates on arterials with bike lanes, without bike lanes, on roads with construction, roads scarred by utility cuts, on minor arterials, and on side streets, though because of time constraints, candidates did not experience the less welcoming suburban cycling environment where traffic speeds are higher and few if any cycling facilities currently exist.

Pantalone, because he never learning to ride, got a nice rickshaw ride by his assistant Mike Smith. (Rickshaw looks like it was provided by Streets are for People).

The Orange team won the ThinkBike with their excellent ideas for improving Sherbourne street and its bike lanes from the lake up to Bloor.

ThinkBike was a two day workshop where visiting Dutch planners participated in the playful planning contest of local planners and citizens (the group will travel on to Chicago next). The interesting results were presented at El Mocambo last Tuesday to a much larger crowd than you'd expect for a planning exercise. It certainly helped that the cycling crowd has diversified; more people are interested in how the streets can be made safer; and the City staff are doing a much better job of reaching out to the general public. We all learned a few things (and not just some "Englutch").

The Blue Team presented an equally impressive proposal on improving the bikeway network in the downtown core and some excellent ideas of what should be included in an updated Bike Plan (which needs some reworking given the political threats to cycling in Toronto).

More thought went into Sherbourne street than Rob Ford's team put into running the entire city

Proposed design for a Sherbourne intersection

Allow bikes on the road and even make it safer and easier for them on the road? As one of the main frontrunners for the mayor's seat, Sarah Thomson had first bucked the trend of playing it safe by proposing road tolls to pay for public transit, and now she's come out with a real bike plan, cheekily called "Bike City". This is a breath of fresh air. Rossi, Ford and copy-cat Smitherman have taken to pretending that commuter cyclists don't exist and hope that they'll shut up if they build a handful of trails that haven't already been built. In a time when people like Ford like to shit on the things that work, like streetcars and bike lanes, this is a welcome change to the rhetoric of the "war on cars":

We've all heard the terms "War on the Car" and "War on Bikes". I am tired of those terms being used to cover politicians' inabilities to come up with and implement a viable plan for shared road use.

Cars, motorcycles, cyclists, and pedestrians all use the same roads. Toronto needs to have a plan to make the roads safe and useable for anyone who has a right to use them.

Bike City is a reasonable proposal to lay the foundation for a strong cycling community in Toronto. I envision a Toronto where even a complete novice can pick up a bike and ride safely and easily from their front door to their place of work.