cycling infrastructure

Photo: Herb. Bells on Bloor 2011, popular as ever, even though City Council voted to stop the Environmental Assessment

Cycling and politics were a hot item in 2011, from the vote to remove Jarvis Bike Lanes, the vote to install protected bike lanes, the launch of Bixi, and the politicians who took cheap shots by trying to make cyclists into urban terrors. Here's a recap of 2011's top 11 blog posts, ranked by the number of comments. It's not the only way to rank blog posts, but the easiest to come by.

1. Separated bike lane proposal and battle heating up
   Bixi bikes are on the streets and the fight continues to get separated bike lanes approved for downtown. Some lefty councillors oppose, some support.
2. Few bike lanes: the cause of most sidewalk cycling
   A pedestrian dies after colliding with a cyclist in North York. There is a strong call to crack down on cyclists yet the pedestrian's family say he was an avid cyclist and understood how bad cycling infrastructure is in the burbs. And where are the critics when a pedestrian is killed by a motorist?
3. Public Works committee votes to take out Jarvis bike lanes: total -8 km bike lanes this year
   The vote to take out the Jarvis bike lanes made international news. What big city in this era votes to take out bike lanes?

In the wake of the death of Jenna Morrison because of a large truck on a dangerous stretch of Toronto road and the road rage incident where a male driver assaulted a woman with his car just because she was in front of him making a legal left turn, I'd like to reprint a op ed article by Heather McDonald responding to the decision by an all-male Public Works Committee to remove the Jarvis bike lanes, ignoring the voice of the vulnerable. Cycling infrastrucure, Heather points out, is a women's issue.

Every day on my way home from work, my last bit of the journey involves making a left hand turn onto my quiet street. I take a deep breath, check my shoulder, signal, and brace myself for my most loathed part of my trip. On several occasions, as I extended my arm and safely merged into the lane, I’ve been shouted at by a passing car driver. Twice I’ve been called the “C word”—just for turning the way they teach in a CanBike course. I come home near tears and lament to my partner how awful it feels to be treated so poorly just for using my bike for transportation. It’s downright insulting.

More insulting: we’re being shoved out from having a role in making the decisions that affect us.

Why kill the Jarvis bike lanes and at the same time claim to be building a bikeway network?

Everyone with half a brain and who was honest enough to the traffic experts knows that Jarvis works with bike lanes. Car traffic volumes were the same before and after. Logically, putting back the fifth lane wouldn't change car traffic volumes either. With bottlenecks at the top and bottom of Jarvis, it doesn't matter how many lanes you install in between, only so many cars can squeeze through the pinch point during any period of time.

We also know that the number of vehicles entering downtown hasn't changed in the last 20 years - there is no traffic congestion problem downtown.

We also know that the original Jarvis Street Environmental Assessment always called for a reduction to four car lanes, whether it be for increased sidewalks or bike lanes. At the City Council meeting a number of councillors brought up the ghost of the EA as an argument for removing the bike lanes, yet they were all to willing to ignore it as Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong called for the re-installation of the fifth car lane.

We know that the city is in a budget crisis and yet a councillor's pet project would cost $200,000 that would have no significant positive impact for anyone. We also had a pretty good idea that most motorists who use Jarvis aren't even actually anti-bike lane, even on Jarvis. So why did the Jarvis bike lanes die?

The answer is Politics, claims Marcus Gee. And politics follows a different logic:

The Jarvis lanes were a red flag to motorists from the start. Jarvis is one of the few broad streets taking car commuters in and out of downtown. Removing the roadway’s reversing fifth lane to make room for bikes added minutes to that painful commute. Suburban councillors with car-commuting residents denounced the bike lanes. They were doomed from the moment Mayor Rob Ford took office on a pledge to end the “war on the car.”

Jarvis had to be sacrificed if the mayor and hostile councillors were ever going to back bike lanes elsewhere. It was an unspoken tradeoff: You can have your lost traffic lane on Jarvis back if we can take away space on other, less vital roads for bike lanes.

That will strike cycling zealots as the worst kind of appeasement. In their world, cycling is so virtuous and car commuting so ruinous that making any kind of concession amounts to surrender. They are vowing to fight on to save the Jarvis lanes during the 18-month reprieve they won for the lanes at Wednesday’s council meeting.

[Update: It was brought to my attention that these cyclist and pedestrian counts took place in October. Why did the City use October numbers instead of dates more representative of good cycling and walking weather? The Bicycle Cordon Count the City did last year were specifically conducted in September because it is an optimal time to count cyclists. People are back from vacation and it is still good weather for cycling. October is getting late and is not representative of peak demand.]

[Update #2: I also noticed that this 2% is suspiciously similar to the average bike mode share for the entire City of Toronto, which includes the suburbs, and seems to be lower than the average bike mode share for downtown. In a census map of the bike mode share across Toronto, for the area that includes John Street north of Queen, the bike mode share is between 4% and 10% and south of Queen is between 1 and 4%.]

In this second post of three on John Street and its importance for the protected bike lane network proposed by Councillor Minnan-Wong and the Bike Union, I look at some number fudging (see first post). Dave Meslin points out some interesting fudging in the report presented for improving John Street streetscape. Is it a reflection of laziness or did someone attempt to make it seem like the cycling mode share on John Street is smaller than it actually is? Take a look at these two images. In the first is a diagram from the John Street Report, showing the percentage of mode share over the day:

In the report along the top they say "Walking trips currently make up about 60% of the total trips along John St. corridor on average and cycling and vehicular trips make up 2% and 40% respectively." That makes sense, but then the vertical graph the percentages of pedestrian and car trips fluctuate throughout the day whereas cycling stays at 2%. Why did they continue to use the average mode share for cycling but used more timely numbers for the other two?

Take a look at the following image of the actual bike counts at King and John. The numbers fluctuate greatly, but even if the bike counts were the same at midnight and at noon (very unlikely), it still wouldn't produce a 2% mode share at all times of day since pedestrian and car counts would fluctuate.

As Dave Meslin stated on Facebook:

These are the numbers presented by the "John Corridor Environmental Assessment Study". Why do these numbers show 2% for cyclists all day, when we know that cyclist numbers fluctuate and go as high as 120 per hour? If 100 cyclists represents only 2%, that would mean that there are 1,800 pedestrians per hour and over 3,000 cars? On John Street?

The second public meeting for the project will be taking place Thursday, June 16, 2011, 6:30 - 8:30 p.m. Room 309, Metro Hall, 55 John Street. Please come out to comment on John Street and ask how proper planning can take place without proper numbers and reporting.

We commend Councillor Vaughan for this city beautification project. We just believe that there is room for cyclists in the project and can be accommodated so we can have a complete bikeway network.

It's a bit endearing to see a councillor be willing to look silly to support a proposal for the media. Perhaps cycling is now enough of a wedge issue that even a councillor that thought the Jarvis bike lanes were a "war on the car" is willing to play his political cards in support of an ambitious bike proposal. Cyclist and journalist Catherine Porter went on a Bixi ride with Councillor Minnan-Wong to check out the proposed protected bike lane network. As they biked around, with Minnan-Wong very shaky on his Bixi, they explored the proposed network. Porter tried to plumb the reasons for this strange alignment of a right-wing politician and cycling infrastructure.

The newest champion for cyclists in Toronto only learned how to ride a bike two years ago, on the quiet, leafy streets of his Don Mills neighbourhood. He had never “ever, ever” cycled downtown until this week — which means he had never “ever, ever” pedalled the five major streets he hopes will soon include physically separated bike lanes.

“Yeah, I’m nervous,” he told me after pulling out a Bixi bike from the station across from City Hall, which, incidentally, was smashed by a careening sedan three days after it went up. “There are a lot of cars.”

It’s a weird time to be a cyclist in Toronto.

I came across this diagram from the well-produced NYC DOT bike guide. It describes how cyclists can perform a "left hook turn" or "indirect left". Cycling education in Canada (like here and here), however, encourages cyclists to make "vehicular-style" left turns, which means to make left turns like motorists do. If they are uncomfortable with such left turns they can make a turn like a pedestrian, a "pedestrian left turn", by walking their bike on the crosswalk. This is encouraged as well with the new bike boxes on Harbord Street, as pointed out by James points out.

Vehicular-style left turn diagram:

Tino caught early glimpses of the BixiTO bikes yesterday, waiting for the official launch this morning.

The bikes are turning heads and people are trying to figure out how it works. Will it be popular enough to grow, let alone be sustainable? That's yet to be seen, but every city with Bixi so far has been successful and growing; Toronto is bike-friendly enough that it will likely be successful here as well.

Later today myself, Jonathan Goldsbie, and Gian Carlo Crivello, CEO of Public Bike System Company, will be hosted by the Star's Corey Mintz at his house (as part of his column, Fed, by Corey Mintz. It promises to be a tasty lunch and discussion.

This video, made by David Hembrow, a British citizen in The Netherlands, shows the growing chasm between the critiques of "vehicular cyclists" and the reality of cycling infrastructure, particularly when we can see the best in the world. Many of their critiques are only relevant to the poor bike paths built in certain locales such as California in the 1970s. And the relevant critiques such as the risk of intersections have been addressed in different ways to create the safest cycling cities in the world.

A video that I got via TCAT from markenlei goes into greater detail on how the Dutch have dealt with intersection conflicts to improve the safety of cyclists.

The criticism against separated bike infrastructure is becoming increasingly muted, though there are still pockets in the UK and North America. Increasingly, however, planners are adopting Dutch and Danish practices and installing much better infrastructure in Portland, NYC, San Francisco, Vancouver, Montreal and elsewhere.