TCAC

For those who hold that the terms "great expectations" and "TCAC" (Toronto Cycling Advisory Committee) have long since proven themselves mutually exclusive, the rumblings and ramblings emanating from Committee Room 2 of City Hall last Monday may give cause to reconsider. The regular bureaucratic tedium -- accountants' conventions are Roman orgies by contrast -- belied the significance and scope of the schemes underway. There is truly cause for (cautious?) excitement.

As a member of the newly-formed Toronto Cycling Advisory Committee, I will be attending a meeting next week with Antonio Medeiros, a project manager at Waterfront Toronto. He is working on the design for the Martin Goodman Trail at Ontario Place that will run along the south side of Lakeshore Drive directly south of Exhibition Place.

The Waterfront Toronto team is at the beginning stages of the design work and are hoping for some cyclist feedback and thoughts about the project. In particular, the design team is concerned with safely accommodating multiple trail users, as well as creating safe and easy-to-navigate intersections where vehicular traffic must intersect. Please read the following description of the project, as it stands now, and post your comments. This project is already approved and will be completed quickly, with or without cyclists’ input. The more ideas I can bring to the table at this time, the better. Thanks for contributing!

Councillor Adrian HeapsWhile a somewhat bitter pill to swallow after the recent esophagus-clenching budget crisis at City Hall, the repeated assurances of Councillor Adrian Heaps, in his inaugural meeting as Chair of the Cycling Advisory Committee, seemed enough to relax the throats of most committee members, as they voted 5-3 to defer their next meeting until after the fast-approaching 2008 budgetary decisions. Well, have faith we must. A fairly major investment of faith, given that Heaps had not addressed the cycling community since proclaiming “Bike Week” to a distant queue of pancake-ready commuters in Nathan Phillip’s Square last Spring.