Bloor Street Viaduct

Lay down a sewer pipe and there are myriad standards dictating dimension, clearance and placement. Lay down a bike lane and sound design precepts are optional, more often recognized in the breach than in the application. How is it that conduits for sh_t are typically subjected to greater planning rigor than conduits for human beings on bicycles?

If you're apt to such musings whenever...oh...pedalling through an officially designated door zone painted up as a bike lane, you're not alone. A few of us were pondering just how that mystery related to the Bloor Viaduct bikeway, a pillar of Toronto's bike network and, conveniently, right in our backyard.

A generation has been conceived, miseducated, and is now tormenting parents with grating music and delinquency since the inception of the Viaduct bike lanes. Yet the bikeway remains stillborn, its hazards, all too familiar to regular cyclists, unresolved.

It can be better. It should be. Why not try to make it so? That was the motivation behind the The Bloor Viaduct Report. I'll skip the specifics, download the report (attached 2.4 MB PDF) and in about the same time it took to read this article you will be familiar with the details.

If you happened to cross the Bloor Street Viaduct on Monday afternoon, you might have noticed David Curtis, his partner Laura and a couple of die-hard activists still givn’er with placards, after 4 solid days of Car Free activity.
Our targets were the many drivers who speed Eastbound, jamming into the right lane to exit down on to the Don Valley Parkway (which looks beautifully resurfaced for next year’s Ride for Heart, by the way!!!).

Perhaps more importantly, we felt a need to target cyclists as well, who are forced to merge across this auto-mania, as their Bike Lane abruptly ends. The dangers were imminent as we watched rider after rider cut into the traffic lane without so much as a hand signal or even a backward glance! Drivers were time and time again “cut off” and forced to slam on their brakes to avoid plowing the cyclist down.